Cornfed wrote: ↑February 4th, 2021, 11:57 am
Here it seems to have calmed down. Apparently masks are required on airline flights and some other public transport
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How about where you are?
New Zealand is a small isolated located place with about 5 million people and never had such a serious number of infections, now there are only a few and I guess it will be soon zero.
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In Japan today, life as usual. You will not notice much about covid-19. Very calm, no panick shopping etc. We never had forced restrictions in general - the government has no power to do this, except in places like public schools, hospitals, or international travel etc.
All Japanese people have national health insurance, therefore medical bills are not a problem like in USA - Japanese people in case of covid-19 it seems they contact soon doctors for advice and treatment, by far not so many deaths reported compared to Europe and America.
About masks, they were always used in case of flu/cold, not a big deal in Japan, I would say, 95+ percent are using them within buildings like supermarkets, department stores, offices etc. many do so even outdoors, but nobody will tell you anything if you do not use a mask...
No resistance by employees and customers known against masks...
There are mainly only polite recommendations around from everywhere like TV-stations to do this or that or to avoid to do this or that. Most citizens and companies comply anyway, but there are no fines if you do not.
During New Year celebrations however huge crowds of Japanese people ignored just any advice and as result plenty of people ended up 1 week later in hospitals in the larger cities, but now already 45000 people recovered and were discharged. Still out of 126 million people about 27.000 are infected and isolated, most of them in the larger cities, there are very few cases reported - sometimes zero - in villages and rural areas and on smaller islands.
There is no vaccine in Japan available yet, but it will be for free likely from May 2021 on - if you refuse, no problem at all, up to you.
It is recommended now to go for seasonal flu and pneumonia vaccination, against a small fee.
Covid-19 in Japan is not considered to be a hoax and if you are already infected with pneumonia/seasonal flu and catch additionally covid-19, you might become really very sick, might be life-threatening for people older than 60 years.