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May. 26, 2020 , 12:45 PM
Japan yesterday declared at least a temporary victory in its battle with COVID-19, and it triumphed by following its own playbook.
It drove down the number of daily new cases to near target levels of 0.5 per 100,000 people with voluntary and not very restrictive social distancing and without large-scale testing. Instead, the country focused on finding clusters of infections and attacking the underlying causes, which often proved to be overcrowded gathering spots such as gyms and nightclubs.
“With this unique Japanese approach, we were able to control this [infection] trend in just 1.5 months; I think this has shown the power of the Japanese model,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared at a press conference yesterday evening announcing the lifting of the state of emergency.
Japan yesterday declared at least a temporary victory in its battle with COVID-19, and it triumphed by following its own playbook.
It drove down the number of daily new cases to near target levels of 0.5 per 100,000 people with voluntary and not very restrictive social distancing and without large-scale testing. Instead, the country focused on finding clusters of infections and attacking the underlying causes, which often proved to be overcrowded gathering spots such as gyms and nightclubs.
“With this unique Japanese approach, we were able to control this [infection] trend in just 1.5 months; I think this has shown the power of the Japanese model,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared at a press conference yesterday evening announcing the lifting of the state of emergency.