WHY HAS JAPAN RECENTLY BEEN LEADING THE WORLD IN COVID CASES?

From Worldometer, COVID-19 cases this past week (in parentheses, cases in the last 7 days/million population):

World 3,626,189 (453)

#1 Japan 1,029,587 (8198)

#2 S. Korea 455,268 (8869)

#3 France 396,007 (6038)

#4 Brazil 299,204 (1389)

#5 USA 294,280 (879)

#6 Germany 221,956 (2646)

#7 Italy 130,145 2160)

#8 Taiwan 106,827 (4472)

#9 Hong Kong 206,806 (14,045)

#10 Australia 103,147 (3957)

I can generalize in various ways.

Sure, China did start the pandemic, but the two epicenters quickly became Europe and USA.
Countries of the Orient and Oceania fared well for the first two years.
Today, the leading COVID centers are Europe, the USA, the Orient and Oceania.

Early on, pundits remarked that countries like Japan did not get badly infected because they wore masks and culture provided a higher responsibility factor, plus, perhaps, some variation of the coronavirus must have reasonably recently somehow infected the general population (cold or flu, probably), leaving many immune to COVID-19.

Well, from late spring of this year, these previously unaffected nations began to be overcome, possibly because the more contagious Omicron sub variant had susceptible customers.

Fortunately enough, most were vaccinated, so the mortality rate of these recently impacted areas significantly dropped.
The mortality rate for the first year was around 1.0%. Note that the seasonal flu is around 0.1%.
This COVID mortality rate has now dropped below 0.5%, and in some countries below that of the flu. South Korea, for example, is down to 0.07%.
In short, those countries of the Orient and Oceania are hurting today in new cases, but not being terribly hurt by too many deaths.
Mind you, people are dying, and Japan this year will lower its life expectancy this year for a second straight year.

In general, many of these countries in the Asian/Pacific region somewhat reflect the plight of Japan. The question, though, is why has Japan, week after week, usually had the MOST NUMBER OF NEW CASES? Every so often the USA is #1, but most of the time it is Japan. And Japan has a population 126 million, 38% that of the USA with 335 million.

Japan was #1 for ten straight weeks during the so-called seventh wave this past summer, and #1 for 13 of the past 18 weeks from late July to mid-November.
That article was written at the end of November, and into past the middle December, Japan remains at the top.
As the numbers at the top show, for the past week, Japan had more than double the number of cases than #2 South Korea and 3.5 times that of #5 USA.

The Japan Times reported that Japan reports the highest number of cases because it is a diligent country, and officially reports the facts. Other nations have largely abandoned tests and many long ago mis-reported by huge factors.

While the U.S. health reportage can be largely believed, the fact of the matter is that most tests are now taken at home, and an asymptomatic patient doesn't bother to tell its doctor or the local health authorities. If China's 90% asymptomatic rate can be believed (and there is no reason why it shouldn't), perhaps U.S. cases might well be ten times higher.

Finally, another look at the above numbers shows that those countries that led the world in COVID deaths at the beginning are still there, even after vaccines. So it's not only a matter of why Japan has so many cases. Why are countries of Europe and the U.S. also too continuing to be impacted by this coronavirus?

Between 9300 and 28,000 Americans have died from the flu since October. I count less than 20,000 deaths from COVID during this same period. Maybe we'd better reconsider what is important and get on with our lives.

Oh well, I'm posting this from the ANA Lounge at Narita Airport in Tokyo, An hour to our flight back to Honolulu. Here are some photos I took today from Singapore to Japan.

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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