Flashback to Japan's first state of emergency: The one time an honest expert was asked for an opinion
Flashback to Japan's first state of emergency: The one time an honest expert was asked for an opinion
And he was never asked again.
Since tomorrow is the second anniversary of Japan’s first state of emergency declaration (SoE 1), I thought I’d write about the one and only time a major Japanese politician asked a serious expert for an opinion.
In Japan and elsewhere, politicians claim to have based their pandemic responses on the opinions of experts, who by some happy coincidence almost always seem to recommend that the politicians take action and give themselves more powers.
One exception was in June 2020 when the government of Osaka Prefecture asked Professor Takashi Nakano of Osaka University to provide a statistical analysis of the effect of SoE 1.
He used data on PRC positive cases to plot Osaka’s K rate: the ratio of the number of newly confirmed cases in a week to the total number of cases [1]. Basically, the steeper the line, the faster the decline in cases. Red and blue denote the periods before and after the SoE could take effect. Any effect would be expected to be seen from a steepening of the line’s trajectory.
He also used symptom onset data to plot Osaka’s Rd (i.e., the day-on-day growth rate) by estimated infection date. Rd above/below 1.0 indicates the daily number of infections is increasing/decreasing. The insert shows Osaka’s epidemic curve using the same data. The data clearly show infections declining from late March, i.e., over a week before SoE 1 was declared on 7th April.
Prof Nakano’s findings are summed up in a 20-second exchange with Osaka Governor Hirofumi Yoshimura broadcast on Kansai regional news and viewable on YouTube.
Cheer up, Hirofumi. It’s not as if you pointlessly shut much of the economy down again a year later. Oh, I forgot: that’s exactly what you did.
Unsurprisingly, Prof Nakano was never asked back. On the other hand, Prof Hiroshi Nishiura, who predicted 850,000 people would need ventilators and 420,000 of them would die if no action was taken in spring 2020, was asked for his more, er, imaginative analyses numerous times afterward.
Clearly, Covid experts are like Covid vaccine manufactures: they only get to profit if they can give you their goods multiple times.
[1] Prof Nakano calculated K rates for other countries in Nakano T, Ikeda Y
Novel Indicator to Ascertain the Status and Trend of COVID-19 Spread: Modeling Study
J Med Internet Res 2020;22(11):e20144