Sunday, April 26, 2020

Have reopen America experts considered Hokkaido, Japan?


As I pondered yesterday President Trump seems to think he's an expert on everything, the first half of a TIME report got my attention. The second half, not included below,  tells how Japanese island Hokkaido became infected by Chinese tourists and how Japanese citizens had to be asked, and begged, to social distance and stay home, because Japan's Constitution, influenced by U.S. Military oversight after World War II, contains strict protection of civil liberties to ward off a return to Fascism.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

https://time.com/5826918/hokkaido-coronavirus-lockdown/
This Japanese Island Lifted Its Coronavirus Lockdown Too Soon and Became a Warning to the World
Hokkaido Governor Naomichi Suzuki (R) declares a state of emergency during a meeting on the new COVID-19 coronavirus in Hokkaido prefecture on Feb. 28, 2020.


Hokkaido Governor Naomichi Suzuki (R) declares a state of emergency during a meeting on the new COVID-19 coronavirus in Hokkaido prefecture on Feb. 28, 2020.


STR/Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images





April 24, 2020 6:27 AM EDT
Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido offers a grim lesson in the next phase of the battle against COVID-19. It acted quickly and contained an early outbreak of the coronavirus with a 3-week lockdown. But, when the governor lifted restrictions, a second wave of infections hit even harder. Twenty-six days later, the island was forced back into lockdown. 

A doctor who helped coordinate the government response says he wishes they’d done things differently. “Now I regret it, we should not have lifted the first state of emergency,” Dr. Kiyoshi Nagase, chairman of the Hokkaido Medical Association, tells TIME.

Hokkaido’s story is a sobering reality check for leaders across the world as they consider easing coronavirus lockdowns: Experts say restrictions were lifted too quickly and too soon because of pressure from local businesses, coupled with a false sense of security in its declining infection rate,
“Hokkaido shows, for example, that what’s happening in the U.S. with individual governors opening up is very dangerous; of course you can’t close interstate traffic but you need to put controls in place,” says Kazuto Suzuki, Vice Dean of International Politics at Hokkaido University. “That’s what we now know: Even if you control the first wave, you can’t relax.”

The Japanese prefecture known for its rugged mountain beauty and long history of farming and fishing, was the first area of Japan to see a major coronavirus outbreak. It’s very different from Japan’s main island, Honshu, with its frenetic sprawling cities. And its response to COVID-19 has also been very different. Hokkaido’s leaders acted early and decisively, even as the national government was criticized for moving too slowly to stop the spread elsewhere. Japan still has relatively few confirmed COVID-19 cases compared to other countries—12,400—but the numbers have more than doubled in the last two weeks, alarming international health officials.


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