Basic understand of disease spread and hygiene is lacking here. Changing into slippers when entering a building and wearing decorative masks are all about appearances, and that’s what’s most important in Japan. It’s even more evident with that sham of a quarantine on the cruise ship before letting infected people off.
People also rarely touch each other. No hugging, no kissing, no handshaking. All of this is important at times like this. Riding the subways here and in Tokyo recently, I notice that no one is holding a strap or pole any more.
I had to visit a few clinics until I finally managed to get one to give me a test. Even then, I had to argue with them to do more than test only chlamydia and at least include gonorrhea. Syphilis and HIV weren’t included with any degree of persuasion, since they said only certain foreigners from certain countries have it, so there’s no chance of having that. That’s in the midst of a syphilis outbreak in a country that offers unprotected services with prostitutes. It seems like a pattern of fundamental misunderstanding among doctors.
I also once had pinkeye and went to an ophthalmologist. The doctor was calling people in one by one during allergy season and examining people in an open office setting so it was possible to see them be person before you being examined. The doctor wore no gloves. The doctor didn’t wash his hands before seeing me. After touching my eyes, he said he’d get me some eye drops, told me I was good to go, and immediately called the next person over.
I’ve also frequently been prescribed kanpou/traditional Chinese medicine and had to go to another clinic to get real medicine.
These are my experiences with medical understanding here. There’s a big problem with blaming “foreigners”, but the only people I’ve seen washing their hands with soap have been... foreign tourists.
Also, I have had doctors just look at me, feel my throat and look into my eyes then give me the all clear at a physical. Like, how do you know I'm even okay just taking a glance?
Kanpou is something I have tried with limited success. I think it works on a placebo effect rather than actually curing you.
From my experiences in a bit less than a dozen countries in the US, Europe and East Asia, that unfortunately seems to be a worldwide standard. Unless you're showing very obvious symptoms, it's on you to proactively request tests/medecine.
This is why I'm bullish on AI doctors, free from the negative incentives of an overbooked practitioner's schedule.
I regularly see all of the unhygienic behaviors you have described in public in Europe and in the US as well.
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"For colds, most individuals become contagious about a day before cold symptoms develop and remain contagious for about five to seven days." / "If you have the flu, you'll be contagious one day before developing symptoms and up to five to seven days after becoming ill."
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One cold would take up all your sick days. By following your recommendation, someone falling sick more than once a year would have to quit their job.
In most EU countries you are not allowed to work and your employer will get into trouble if he lets you work when you've got a sick cert. Your employer obviously also has to pay you and is not allowed to fire you for getting sick[1].
If this outbreak causes the US to update its workers protections for the 21st century, at least something good will come out of it.
[1]: in some countries you can receive a reduction in pay after being sick for X months in a row, usually to ~60%.
So you "might" have the cold or coronavirus - do you go to the ER (costs hundreds even with insurance) and lose out on your pay? (Not to mention you'll likely have your hours cut as "punishment"). Or do you tough it out and keep making money that you need to pay for your rent?
It's not just the poor--some of this really just is our (crazy) culture.
Doesn't this fall to the government to create some kind of aid? At the very least, the gov could offer a tax break for wages paid sick workers.
Because pooling risk results in more robust social systems.
The business owner can take the risk of losing a worker for a week much better than a worker can take the risk of not getting paid.
Because it aligns incentives properly.
If you don't get paid for not working while sick, and you need the money, you'll show up to work, and get other employees and customers sick. If the business has to pick up the tab for sick days, though, they are now incentivised to keep sick workers at home - lest they infect others.
I'd much rather have robust systems, with good public health incentives, then I am to see business owners pocket a few percentage points of profits.
> I'd much rather have robust systems, with good public health incentives, then I am to see business owners pocket a few percentage points of profits.
For many small business owners, it can be the difference between paying yourself that week or not.
If you're in a service related industry - do you want staff coming to work if they are (or recently) suffering from digestive illnesses? How would an outbreak of people getting sick after being at your facility look? It could potentially result in very very bad publicity - to the point of destroying your business.
If you're running a smaller business / facility - do you want an employee coming in and spreading the illness to your other workers in the early stages of being sick (and then later taking time off)? This could result in your business lacking sufficient staff to open if you can't use labor hire staff.
The reason why it might be good for businesses to provide an incentive (like sick pay) not to work when sick is that it reduces the risk of negative outcomes to the business.
Is it really such burden to the business owner to see to the well-being of their employees?
> At the very least, the gov could offer a tax break for wages paid sick workers.
I like this idea, tbqh.
Up to how much? I can't imagine wages paid are 100% deductible. Otherwise nothing's stopping people from starting businesses and paying wages to friends to reduce tax burdens...
(Those are the fairly standard tests for all business deductions, only the third is at all specific to wages.)
There's no way to "make money" by incurring additional expenses and deducting them. If you have $100 in deductible business expenses and your marginal rate is 35%, you are paying $100 in expenses and getting back $35 on your taxes, so you're still out of pocket $65.
Paying family/friends wages counts as a business expense to the company and taxable revenue to the employee. The business can also incur additional overheads for having employees like payroll taxes, super, etc.
How do you transmit the flu to others without symptoms like sneezing/running nose?
We don't yet conclusively know what vectors this virus can use to spread.
As I understand it, the bar is really low on that. If you're coughing or sneezing, you should wear a mask. It doesn't matter if you otherwise feel fine. I don't think it's necessary to stay at home simply because you're sneezing, and I doubt it's a valid excuse to skip work or school.
Nobody is going to staff up to make more masks because everyone knows that you will make lots of money for a couple months and then the demand will crash afterwards when Coronavirus has passed.
How can both parts of this statement be true?
No, these masks are not bio-safety level 4, but they're probably better than nothing. At worst they prevent a portion of your sneeze and cough ejecta from landing on surfaces around you.
It's the aerosolized smaller droplets that travel far and end up infecting others in your vicinity.
Depending on the day my guess was that 40-70% of people were wearing masks - more on public transit.
I assume that you mostly were at the Airport or public transit/other huge venues - otherwise I cannot really explain our different experiences.
makes no sense to me.
And, it's sad to even have to mention this, but as an added bonus for the dystopia we seem to be headed into, they also hinder mass surveillance. Apparently there are/were attempts to ban masks during the unrest in Hong Kong.
I recall this video [1] where people say they like how masks keep their faces warm, and they can feel free to sing to a song in public without feeling embarrassed. :)
What?? How do you figure that?
Stopped completely? No. Reduced enough to be a useful measure in some circumstances? Yes.
If I were going out and genuinely worried about inhaling something, I'd skip surgical masks and N95 disposables and just wear a sealed half mask using P100 filters. They're way more comfortable than either of the disposables, and provide much better filtration. Since they use exhaust valves, they may not provide much protection to others from your own potential pathogens, although I would expect some droplet suppression simply from the redirection of any exhalation through a small valve.
(i.e. a fire in the bathroom creates a vacuum which prevents the door from opening outward. maybe that’s idiotic)
1. Inward opening is probably less inclined to disperse bathroom air into the hallway outside.
2. You're probably less likely to smack someone with a door opening into a hallway. (Or course, someone entering might do it to someone exiting a bathroom but most people are probably at least somewhat trained to exercise caution under those circumstances.)
3. If anything, I'd think fire code would favor door opening out given that's the general rule.
Most public bathrooms have automatic taps now that I see.
New word to me and I have a pretty good vocab, so
If you touch the soap and the tap, that will surely transfer germs to your hands that the person before you left there?
Soap and water definitely work to reduce infections, even when using a shared sink. Look up what happened in the 19th century when people finally figured this out and started hand washing regularly, infectious disease transmission in settings like hospitals dropped dramatically.
Why is that a problem? My expectation is that what matters is:
1. Air that you inhale comes through the mask filter. It's not necesarily the case that inhaling and exhaling have symmetric effects. When you exhale, you increase air pressure inside the mask, which pushes it away from your face and opens the seals around the edge. When you inhale, I expect it would seal tighter. You can exhale while wearing a swimming mask and bubbles go everywhere. That doesn't mean the mask isn't otherwise water tight.
2. Aerosol particles from infected people coughing and sneezing get caught by the mask and don't go into your airways.
3. You don't touch your face with your hands.
The masks are more for stopping behavioral habits for non-infected people like touching your mouth and nose but then you could touch your eyes too...
The masks are more for the infected people who could sneeze and spread the virus particles much further than if blocked by the mask.
But virus particles aren't floating around in the air infecting people, it's spread mostly through respiratory droplets. Not saying that a surgical mask will protect you, but it's not because the virus is too small.
The virus spreads in much larger drops of fluid.
The problem of 3-ply masks is that 10-25% of the air you inhale leak from the side/nose, bypassing the filter. n95 mask "fixes" the problem by tight(er) fitting, not by additional filtering layers.
I keep hearing this but don't understand. What exactly needs training?
See https://www.bu.edu/ehs/files/2014/08/N95-Respirators-Trainin...
#1 is not true at all unless you get a proper mask, with a filter, and use it properly. Most people are walking around with a mask they got off the shelf at Walmart that is acting about as effectively as a halloween costume.
N95+ masks are expensive. Currently $20 per mask on Amazon.
They're not that expensive. That's price gouging, and I'd be worried about them being counterfeit. I have no way of evaluating their effectiveness at home.
Even if the masks were capable of filtering out the virus, the above wouldn't matter. If the virus hits your eyes or tear ducts you've got it. This is why wearing a mask protects others but not yourself.
Of course, don't get me wrong.. they do work to a degree if fitted properly with the right grade of filtet, but the problem that people are putting too much faith in these things, especially the ones you buy from the combinis..
That's been my experience in the US, but in Japan? While briefly living there, I was shocked when my 22 year old neighbor stayed home because of a common cold.
I have never had a job where I felt comfortable and able to take a sick day because I had "just" a cold, but since I've had an office job where working from home was allowed, I would also not feel comfortable coming into the office sick.
Even then you need to make sure the mask fits. In hospitals, they do tests to find the right fit for nurses and doctors to check airflow.
They can be a good tool in certain situations, but random people placing a bunch of faith in them over other solutions is probably not helping.
You don't want to be in the same building as a sick person, let alone anywhere near them in a smaller space like an office or restroom.
There's no containing it at this point, the best you could do is slow it down until there's a vaccine.
To give this reply a little perspective, I'm from Taiwan and currently live in Vancouver.
It is very disingenuous to conclude what's happening in Japan is because of (the mask, and sick leave) culture. It is what makes me nervous about North America's preparedness. I'm assuming you are from NA since US CDC keeps telling the public that masks aren't effective. IMO they're just saying that to not cause a panic of people grabbing masks. Plus, they have a point. Most North Americans just aren't used to wearing one, so might make the wearers touch their faces even more. This is not true in a lot of Asian countries.
The general public in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are all very accustomed to people wearing masks in public places, especially on mass transit systems. The density is just night and day compared to most of North America except maybe New York. Some wear it to stop the spread of disease, other comments have mentioned being a substitute for make-up, or also common: as a face shield when riding bicycles or scooters in the winter (much like a ski mask). Anyways, the point is that it is extremely common place. If you've worn it a couple of times you won't keep touching it.
> One of the problems is that they put too much confidence in face masks.
The mask is just the first line of defense. No one thinks masks are the be-all and end-all solution. After the outbreak in Iran, I'm seeing more and more Middle Easterners wear masks on the street. I'll bet you money when it starts spreading locally in North American communities you are going to see more people wear masks no matter their skin color or 'culture' (if they can get any). Check out the Italians wearing masks. [1]
> Most of these masks are just toys and not air tight at all.
Plenty of others corrected you on this so I won't go into it much. Basically, it's to block droplets (from leaving you and attached to other people and places like handles on buses etc.) It's not filtration. It also acts as a barrier if you are in close contact to someone who is sick.
> Also, there is a culture of not staying home when you're sick.
This annoys me the most. Us working in the technology sector have generous sick day policies, or even better remote work policies. But most people don't. There are plenty of people of all ages and colors and backgrounds that cough openly during my morning commute. This culture HAS to change but it's definitely not limited just Asia, let alone Japan.
1. https://www.gazettenet.com/Italy-rushes-to-contain-Europe-s-...
It works and is part of the whole solution. A clear downside is caretakers/food delivery can get infected, but it is much harder to spread.
The data shows that isolation is helping [1], China minus the outside world shows diminishing new cases in China.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/
Corona is closer the flu/common-cold in terms of transmission.
Quarantining patients is too late. The viral point is the 14-21 day incubation period where patients aren't showing symptoms yet very able to spread the disease, which is the whole reason why it's so scary and affecting the world markets.
If Wuhan removed home isolation and everyone was allowed to go back to the old way of life, the virus would spread again.
I'm not sure how you can argue against home isolation. I haven't been convinced of what you claim; that it isn't helping.
Most of these masks are just toys and not air tight at all. One experiment you can do with the mask is go outside in cold weather, so that you can see the steam when you breathe. You will notice that when you breathe, most of air is actually escaping through the edges of the mask and around the nose.
Also, there is a culture of not staying home when you're sick. It's normal to continue going to work with a cold / other infection, or school or shop. Sick leave is frowned upon. Just put on a mask and you're all sweet, right? That has to change.