Why is Japan still a coronavirus outlier?

A lot of the rust belt was blue when Democrats focused their messaging heavily on workers protections.

People in the rust belt only have a few strong political priorities:

1. Their communities have watched their quality of living decline gradually over 40+ years now as industry and manufacturing in the US have become less competitive. They want jobs in their community, specifically ones they envision their community as capable of doing. Many of them take advantage of government benefits, and whether or not they are personally able to work or have a job, they know their community was better off when they had jobs.

2. Their population skews older and has more traditional ideas about social issues, but the rust belt is not the bible belt. Church attendance across the rust belt is very average compared to other states. Most aren't looking to push their beliefs on anyone else, but they don't see progressive social policies as something they personally want or need.

3. After long periods of decline, they don't trust promises. Many of them have grown poorer after every national election in their lifetime, as they've watched the rest of the country become more prosperous. For those growing up, success is measured by whether or not you 'made it out'. When someone promises them prosperity, they learned it's not for them, it's for everyone else.

4. While they don't trust politicians, they also don't trust businesses. They've had a front row seat view of what it means for businesses to chew people up and spit them out. They were heavily pro-union.... when they or their parents had jobs. Now many are questioning themselves, did unions help us or cause our jobs to disappear?

These people aren't policy experts or economists. They're working-class people with working-class educations and working-class expectations for themselves.

Whether or not Democratic platform policies would actually help them, the rest of the image of the Democratic platform rubs them the wrong way so much that it doesn't matter. Many of them voted blue for years, only to now feel like the party has passed them by and now only cares about the social and economic needs of people living on the coasts.

Iodine. The Japaese have a high iodine content in their diet. I'm taking 10x the US RDA. Some have suggested this is the reason for lower breast cancer rates there (no time to cover all that here and now).

I read about Iodine years ago, and followed some doctors suggestions that it can help asthma. My asthma is effectively gone and my last PFT showed my lungs function better than average for my age. I haven't touched an inhaler in years.

Since we are dealing with a respiratory virus, I figure anything that helps the lungs is probably a good thing.

For some fun reading you might want to read about the relationship of iodine and: cancer, lungs, mitochondria, apoptosis, breast cancer, asthma, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and any number of thyroid problems.

If you think Iodine is only good for the thyroid gland, I suggest reading about the sodium-iodine-symporter and which tissues have it.

Anyway, I had already thought about this when it seemed Japan's death rate from covid-19 was lower.

To date, have you observed any other countries and governments undertesting? And if so, was it for reasons other than the Olympics?

That gives you a baseline of disincentives to report.

Now extend: - what would the cost (financial, reputational, etc) be to Japan the government if the Olympics do not go ahead? - might there be other disincentives for Japan to undertest relative to its neighbours?

Also recall, in some cases a little bit of disincentive mixed with poor planning/incompetence leads to a lot of unplanned underreporting :)

The trick in all cases is to look for a metric that governments have not thought to obscure/or cannot control that strongly signal the thing you’re trying to verify.