Why is Nobody Talking About Japan?

Almost every newspaper article and news bulletin on TV and radio is replete with updates on how the governments of countries around the world are handling the Coronavirus crisis. We know, for example, that Germany instigated a very active testing regime from the onset of the pandemic, S. Korea applied a highly successful track and trace program, while Sweden has largely ignored huge swathes of the social distancing orthodoxies adopted by the UK and USA, whose economies remain in virtual lockdown.

But I have yet to read a single story on Japan's response to the pandemic (other than this one published about a month ago in the Japan Times).

On any reasonable measure Japan is an outlier, with an infection rate that is orders of magnitude below that of every other major industrialized economy. This country of 126 million people has so far reported a mere 15,000 cases and only 541 deaths. This compares with 186,000 cases and 28,000 deaths in the UK, a country with population less than half that of Japan's.

Despite the infectiousness of the virus, a March 9 report by a government-appointed panel said that about 80 percent of the cases identified in Japan didn’t pass on the infection. 

What on earth is going on? Why aren't scientists crawling all over this data to discover how Japan has dodged the bullet that should have resulted in a death toll in the tens of thousands?

I can think of some possible explanations. The first is that no-one trusts the data coming out of Japan (but we are too polite to say so in public). That's a bit of a stretch, to say the least. And even if Japan is under-reporting cases by a factor of 10, it would still be doing much, much better than almost everyone else, in terms of cases per million population.

A more political explanation is that governments don't like the message alluded to in my earlier article on the subject (see https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/does-japan-hold-key-corona-virus-containment-jonathan-kinlay/). In the UK, platoons of politicians have been dispatched to popular TV news shows to parrot the line that face masks aren't of much value to the general public, because they are ineffective, might encourage complacency, or (incredibly) could even increase the risk of infection (since people are too stupid to use them properly).

But I can think of a more plausible explanation for the governments' resistance to the self-evident, scientific fact that face masks reduce the risk of spreading the disease through coughing and sneezing. Their concern, I would suggest, stems from the lack of preparedness for this pandemic. There are simply no stockpiles of masks, or even the means of production, in sufficient quantities. It doesn't help politicians to point out also that Japan has has about 13 hospital beds per 1,000 people, the highest among G7 nations and more than triple the rate for Italy, the U.S., U.K. and Canada, according to World Bank data. Rather than admit to this, the strategy appears to be to try to bluff it out, presumably in the hope that non-one will notice when stockpiles are belatedly assembled and mask wearing in public made mandatory, at some point down the road when this episode is behind us.

In a crisis situation in which governments around the world are busily virtue-signaling their intention to be "guided by science", is it not astonishing that what is probably the single most important data point is roundly ignored, much less analyzed and evaluated, by those who profess their adherence to scientific doctrine?