There are four simple reasons Japan has the lowest death rate from coronavirus per capita of OECD nations. Mask-wearing is one of them. Vaccine mandates isn’t.
Japan’s COVID death rate is the lowest among the world’s wealthiest nations, with health experts pointing to extensive vaccination and an already healthy population as the core factors behind its success.
Even during the state of emergency declared around the Tokyo Olympics last year, the onus was on businesses to comply with safety measures, not on police to enforce them.That soft approach has had remarkable results. Japan’s COVID deaths per capita is 246 per million people, the lowest out of the 38 members of the OECD, according to. It’s all the more significant given Japan has the highest proportion of elderly people - typically some of the most vulnerable to coronavirus - in the world.
While every nation has its own standard for identifying Covid deaths, Japan’s low rate of fatalities shows its strategy works, said Takao Ohmagari, head of the disease control and prevention centre at the National Center for Global Health and Medicine. That includes wearing masks. They were embraced during the early days of the pandemic and the practice remains almost universal even as the government relaxed its recommendation to wear one outdoors. Mask use in Japan has typically held above 90 per cent, a threshold other G7 countries have only occasionally neared, according to Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation data.
The relatively light nature of restrictions also meant that Japan didn’t face the extensive disruption to daily life of a harsh lockdown, deployed in countries from Italy to China and Australia at various times. That may have helped people comply with restrictions for longer and saw the nation avert the kind of social unrest seen overseas.
“Thanks to the protection Japanese people gained through vaccination and natural infection, I don’t expect Japan’s hospitalisation or deaths to increase dramatically any time soon,” said Kenji Shibuya, an epidemiologist at the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research.A core pillar supporting the low death rate was the underlying good health of Japan’s population. The country has the longest life expectancy in the world, and was one of only six OECD members not to see a reduction in 2020.
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