It's no secret: Japan's government has been internationally lampooned for its action, or lack thereof, against the COVID-19 pandemic. The central government was slow to respond, with testing treated as a non-obligatory step for everyone in the virus's early days. At the peak of panic, the government was heavily criticized by people inside and outside of the country, both by its own nationals and expats.
When the outbreak fully exploded, the prime minister sent out a pair of cloth face masks for every household. He appears on TV every now and then with one that is too small for his face - and they are the exact ones he sent out. they are so small that few of his own party members can be seen wearing the same things. Even worse, a large number of them were recalled due to how dirty they were when they were received.
But what about on a daily basis? What's the daily treatment of this whole thing?
A lot of it seems sensible. Japan is a country that wears masks as a fashion, so that wasn't much of a change. Hand sanitizers were placed everywhere, and even before the arrival of the virus, it was already commonly used. Stores, as mentioned before, have placed markers on the floor to signify where their customers are to wait to accommodate social distancing.
Yet there are, as you can see in the title of this article, baffling solutions. Enter the virus blocker. These are little perforated pouches of chemicals carried on a lanyard worn around the neck. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of them myself, but I've seen these in a few places and they are supposed to deodorize and cleanse the air around you when you wear them.
Except they do their job too well and cleanse you of your health. The active chemical in the product is chlorine dioxide, and is known to be toxic. Still, it's a solution used by less-than-reputable companies and ignorant consumers.
Still another solution is the face shield. Every time I see these, I think to myself, why? There seems to be little protection to be offered from these things, especially if the user is already wearing a mask underneath. Do they expect the customer to sneeze directly to their face? Is the shield supposed to stop the user from emitting the contagion out of their eyeballs? Even if both of those ideas were the key factors in the decision to wear these face shields, I would think that the nature of micro-aerosols would simply go around the shield in a vacuum, let alone an active environment with lots of turbulent air. Of course, I haven't done any flow calculations or anything, but at a first glance they seem really ineffective.
The other thing that I see being done is opening the window for ventilation. This one, while being strange to me, actually seems to be a recommended thing around the world, If you think about it, it makes sense as new air will come in and old air will come out. On a train, however, it seems useless. Trains are still heavily populated and crowded. With an emergency declaration easing off, they're going to be even more so. The chances of standing next to an infected person is incredibly high, especially in Tokyo.
But, despite how baffling these solutions are, they definitely seem to be working. Tokyo's rate of new infections seems to be disappearing. Somehow, Japan has managed to put the world's words to shame with their almost miraculous result as South Korea battles with a resurgence of cases. Maybe Japan's weird strategy is the answer.
Of course, there could still be that second wave everyone's talking about. So only time will tell what will happen in Japan.