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Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

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191–200 of 219 posts

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#191

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't think this sentiment is so wise as its popularity would lead you to believe. I have no reason to believe that most bad things that people do happen entirely by accident. Further, I suspect that the first line of defense for anyone who's been caught doing something naughty is to play dumb, and I see no reason to make it easier to get away with murder, so to speak.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#192
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom is responsible for updating all of Los Angeles' numbers. It's literally "someone sent an email with updated new numbers, put them on the government website/in the database". There's no "making sense of the data" phase, just copy, paste, and hope whoever delivered those numbers did it correctly. She described the situation "all hands on deck, extra shifts, and losing staff to sickness daily"; the last thing the…

There's nothing wrong with that - in a peculiar situation, wherein there is no 'standard web site' something ad-hoc is perfectly reasonable. In the 'old days,' it would be a public number board or chalkboard, but it would be accurate. This is what a lot of ladies in the military or in operational centers would have done. And definitely nothing wrong with hand-tweaked HTML. I wish sites were basic enough and HTML clea…

[deleted]

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#194
post #84

At the end of the day, hiding exponential growth of this is impossible. That's what really bugs me about those who love to point fingers at how this or that country is counting things wrong (often revealing their biases in the process). Maybe every country has a random constant factor between actual cases and reported cases. But it doesn't matter - if it goes exponential, we'll know.

Yes, obviously once it goes exponential, exponentials are hard to hide. The point is to stop it before it goes exponential. That's why people were discussing, say, Iran or NYC testing problems and lack of social distancing, rather than saying "well, at the end of the day, hiding exponential growth is impossible, so who cares"...

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#196
post #187
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for you, people have been using neutral language to start daily flame-wars and getting away with it.

It's easy to make grand claims like that. Where are the links? It's not ok for anyone to start flamewars on HN, and lord knows I spend enough of my life telling people so. If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.co…

Oh, I meant it half in jest. I definitely don't want your job ;)

For e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703219

Commenter labels a legitimate company as "skeezy", uses needlessly insulting language to polarize discussion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22703881

Commenter uses the usual government trope to polarize discussion.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#197
post #86
post #23

The team behind https://covid19japan.com fights with this nonsense every day. We're open ears to improvements, and are playing with ways to possibly automate bits. Our GitHub: https://github.com/reustle/covid19japan/

This is fantastic, terrific way to visualize this information. It's interesting that Hokkaido is red for infections but the growth rate is really slow. Are the distant prefectures less likely to follow guidelines from Tokyo and reporting more honestly?

>It's interesting that Hokkaido is red for infections but the growth rate is really slow.

Hokkaido is about the size of South Carolina and approximate population of 6 million people. ~2.5M of which live in Sapporo. Most of the island is more rural with many tourist destinations. It's a popular destination for Chinese tourists in winter.

>Are the distant prefectures less likely to follow guidelines from Tokyo

Tokyo was seen as mostly following Hokkaido governor's lead early on. Hokkaido was the first to close schools, etc.

>and reporting more honestly?

Could HN dwellers stop implying Japan is handling this dishonestly? That is extremely rude coming from the nation whose CDC was angry to accept 14 infected citizens from the only ally nation that would accept their US Diamond Princess cruise ship and provide care for passengers.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#198
post #197
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fantastic, terrific way to visualize this information. It's interesting that Hokkaido is red for infections but the growth rate is really slow. Are the distant prefectures less likely to follow guidelines from Tokyo and reporting more honestly?

>It's interesting that Hokkaido is red for infections but the growth rate is really slow. Hokkaido is about the size of South Carolina and approximate population of 6 million people. ~2.5M of which live in Sapporo. Most of the island is more rural with many tourist destinations. It's a popular destination for Chinese tourists in winter. >Are the distant prefectures less likely to follow guidelines from Tokyo Tokyo wa…

> Could HN dwellers stop implying Japan is handling this dishonestly?

They are. The incredible rate of test refusal here is keeping the numbers very low.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#199

Knowing Japan, I bet some poor freshly graduated but elite sod in the health ministry was, out of the blue, told by his boss "here's a bunch of reports from different prefectures. Make a report out of them." So he goes off and try to make sense of the data, which is why you see those magic and unexplained equations in the report. The kicker is the most complex computer thing he ever did in his life was that Word pres…

I've opened Japanese documents from, AFAIR, at least the Ministry of Immigration, the Ministry of Health/Labour/Welfare and the Ministry of Justice. They all had the similar properties: manual HTML in the best case, PDF in the worst case. Tables very often with hierarchical data. Lack of overall coherence. It's so similar between Ministries that I have to wonder if it's not just the result of some Japanese governmental directive, or the result of their Education system.

Re: Problems with Japan's Covid-19 reports

#200
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's interesting that Hokkaido is red for infections but the growth rate is really slow. Hokkaido is about the size of South Carolina and approximate population of 6 million people. ~2.5M of which live in Sapporo. Most of the island is more rural with many tourist destinations. It's a popular destination for Chinese tourists in winter. >Are the distant prefectures less likely to follow guidelines from Tokyo Tokyo wa…

> Could HN dwellers stop implying Japan is handling this dishonestly? They are. The incredible rate of test refusal here is keeping the numbers very low.

"Test refusal" is a very bad metric. Almost no countries are testing anyone who suspects they might be infected. A lot of European countries actually have more restrictive guidelines than Japan - Norway won't even test people arriving from COVID-19 hotspots if they only exhibit minor symptoms.

In Japan 6-7% of the tests come back positive. This is not at all indicative of too little testing.

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