Good morning

I trust you have a good morning. I had the weekend off. I should have mentioned it at the beginning. Sorry about that. Over the weekend, was there anything happening? It sounded not at least on the radio. The news cycle is still dominated by the Afghan evacuation; also this time of year, so, hurricanes and typhoons, then the Covid-19.

I want to talk about Covid situation in Tokyo and some other places. It seems they cannot create a meaningful impact on the situation, whether it is the Tokyo government or the Japanese government. It went under an intensive control on 12th July this year with the national government declaring the emergency. By the way, there are differences, I believe between 非常事態宣言 and 緊急事態宣言. The government officials attempted to differentiate their current State of ... whatever suitable it is from the State of Emergency. The rationale is translation. In English when you say State of Emergency, it usually is coupled  with a large expansion of executive power, be it a local council, State, or National or Federal government. They can exercise executive power without necessarily going through the legislative body or scrutinised by the judicial body. I presume in many languages that is the meaning of the State of Emergency. That isn't the case in Japan under the current declaration, and hence the officials want to differentiate it using other words. The Japanese executive power does not assume that sweeping power. They still have to go through the legislature and be scrutinised by the judiciary. It's very interesting to see the translations of news papers even published by the Japanese News Agency do not capture this difference in their English version. That comes to my next point, which is there isn't really a professional translation or high quality translation in Japan.  But that is another topic of its own.

Anyhow, the Declaration has been ineffective in curbing the transmission. The newly confirmed cases have dramatically increased since the Declaration. They may have to look into the contents of it. What I mean by that is area of restriction and premises of transmission paths. They are assuming if people don't eat and drink together it should come down. It didn't work, did it?  I have seen some people take off their masks on the train. And we are talking about the Japanese trains, ladies and gentlemen.  Packed is what it is. You have another man's face right in front of your face, quite literally. There is no restriction on the number of passengers or no policing at train stations or on trains. When you look at the high number of cases, they are all in prefectures with major Shinkansen stations. Hop on, get off, spread it, hop back on and back to Tokyo. Now the infection is too wide and it is locally transmitting. 

It probably has come to the point where they have to decide that contracting the virus is not the focus but hospitalisation is and take measures accordingly. Although inadvertently they may have effectively done so. There are about 100,000 patients staying home because they are not admitted to a hospital. We shall call it hospitalisation from home, shan't we?  They cannot increase the rate of telecommuting but they have dramatically increased, like tenfold each week, the number of patient forced to stay home. They have to get their priority straight. It is an airborne virus causing predominantly respiratory problems and some brain damages. Infectious disease specialists can run preventative measures with that.

Anyway, have a good morning and week.