The Japanese govt (kinda) documents its crimes

A new report put together by Japan’s Coronavirus Response Experts Committee was recently published on the Japanese cabinet’s website that almost reads like an admittance of guilt. Luckily for this lazy old Guy, most of the juicy bits are already written in English.

First, pages 3-10 show data for cumulative fully vaccinated people and boosters plotted against daily reported Covid cases, deaths, and hospitalised patients for 15 different countries. For example, here are the graphs for Australia and Canada. As you can see, the boosters were so powerful they even overcame the Southern Hemisphere winter.

And here are the graphs for Japan.

And why don’t we take a closer look at the middle graph?

But remember, correlation = coincidence.

If that weren’t enough, pages 22 and 23 show estimates for excess suicides in Japan during the pandemic.

And in case you thought all those red dots well above the baseline weren’t bad enough, here’s the breakdown of excess suicides by age.

And for comparison, here are the Covid deaths by age group in Japan (source).

Looking at those numbers and considering how inflated the Covid deaths are, the response to Covid appears to have led to a greater loss of quality adjusted life years than Covid itself.

A supporter of the Covid measures may say that the socioeconomic consequences were worth it to stop people dying from Covid, but there’s no evidence even the strongest measures stopped a single runny nose.

To put it as nicely as possible, Japan’s Covid response probably wouldn’t pass a basic cost/benefit analysis since there’s been no actual benefit.