@ClaireBerlinski
In the West people are used to praising Japan’s response to Covid-19. After all, Japan has had a relatively low death rate (certainly compared to Europe & the US). And it has achieved this without only voluntary measures (the Japanese government does not have

the power to force any business to close and even when it imposes a state of emergency, observing it is purely voluntary - you cannot be punished for not wearing a mask or refusing to close your restaurant. In spite of this, the measures are obeyed due to strong social pressure).

Japan also has performed very few tests, a lot fewer than, for example, Poland, which is hardly a leader in thus area. And it still hadn’t started vaccination.
But people will say, well it’s natural, after all they have only had 5084 deaths out of 126 million people. Japan is

135th in terms of deaths per population size, although 86 in number of cases (364,000). For example, Hungary (with its less than 10 million inhabitants) has almost the same number of inhabitants but more than double the number of deaths. So what explains this? Japan’s excellent

medical service? Well, let me tell you what my wife told me today: Japan is running out of hospital beds. How come, with such a small number of infections and so many hospitals. Apparently Japanese private hospitals are refusing to accept any covid patients and the authorities

have no means of making them do so. And actually, and this is an old cultural tradition (which is one reason why after the war the government powers to impose drastic actions in case of epidemics were severely restricted by the Constitution), people who have had covid can face

ostracism & discrimination even after they recover. To understand this phenomenon, see, for example https://ciomal.org/en/unsettling-history-leprosy-japan/ ).
In any case, what looks excellent from outside may not look so at all from within. The Japanese public is strongly dissatisfied with the way the

government dealt with the pandemic although the government actually simply followed the advice of the medical establishment.
Some have argued that the low infection & death rate in the country has nothing to do with the government but is explained by the generally excellent state

of health of the Japanese population, in spite of its high average age. In particular, the Japanese have excellent levels of vitamin D (probably due to a lot of sunshine and fish rich diet) and one of the longest life expectancy in the world.

So people who think that they there

is an obvious “common sense” solution to the pandemic should think again. Even the idea of “following the succesful examples” may not actually work. Let me mention here two experts who I think have been proved consistently right on this. One is @BallouxFrancois who became almost

unique on Twitter when he wrote that he did not know what was the “correct way” to deal with the pandemic: there were on,y choices between different evils. Essentially the same thing was said at the beginning by one of Russia’s leading virologists & oncologists Peter Chumakov

(who the first to clone the P53 tumour protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53  ) who said that there was best no universal approach

and every country should find its own based on its geography, demographics, culture and the capabilities of its health care system.