Japan Has Never Had Anything Close to a COVID Lockdown and Now Its COVID Crisis is Almost Over With New Cases Dropping to Less Than 100 a Day

Japan didn’t follow the rest of the world and certainly never followed the WHO’s recommendations related to COVID.

Japanese Vice President Says WHO Should Be Renamed the CHO or the “Chinese Health Organization” (VIDEO)

Most of the coverage we provided during Japan’s bungled turn hosting the Olympics this summer dealt with the nation’s spiraling COVID infection rates and lagging mass vaccination efforts. But while they limited the in-person attendance of the actual games, the lockdowns and restrictions the government imposed were fairly mild. People were still allowed to go out to bars and restaurants, albeit with modest capacity limits and the streets were far from empty. The Associated Press described the measures as a series of “relatively toothless states of emergency.” That makes this week’s news all the more puzzling to some medical professionals. The COVID crisis across Japan, and particularly in Tokyo, has all but evaporated. In less than two months, Tokyo has gone from reporting more than 6,000 new cases per day to fewer than 100 this week. And not even the government can explain why.

Almost overnight, Japan has become a stunning, and somewhat mysterious, coronavirus success story. Daily new COVID-19 cases have plummeted from a mid-August peak of nearly 6,000 in Tokyo, with caseloads in the densely populated capital now routinely below 100, an 11-month low.

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The bars are packed, the trains are crowded, and the mood is celebratory, despite a general bafflement over what, exactly, is behind the sharp drop.

Japan, unlike other places in Europe and Asia, has never had anything close to a lockdown, just a series of relatively toothless states of emergency.

This may not be as much of a “mystery” as the Japanese Health Ministry is making it out to be. Part of the decline is no doubt attributable to the country’s accelerated vaccination push. While it started off very slowly, they’ve now surged to the point where 70% of the population has received the shots. Others point to the fact that the Japanese were very accustomed to wearing face masks in public even before the pandemic began.

Another factor is that the people remaining in Japan who have not taken the vaccine have possibly already had the China coronavirus.

Whatever the reason, by not shutting down their economy, Japan is now stepping out of this period in world history with less impact to its people and economy than most other nations, including the US.