From near disaster to success story: how Japan has tackled coronavirus | World news | The Guardian

Experts have pointed to universal healthcare, low obesity rates and expertise in treating pneumonia. More fanciful theories have gained traction – the consumption of foods, such as natto, that boost the immune system and, according to an unscientific experiment conducted by a TV network, the relatively low number of airborne droplets generated by spoken Japanese.

Japan, like the US, got off to a bad start with handling the coronavirus, but by all accounts they seem to have pivoted effectively and they’ve handled the crisis better than it looked like they would at the start.

Again, looking at the numbers tells a very different story from what I’ve experienced from my US-centric viewpoint. Japan currently has 898 reported deaths from the virus in a population of 128 million people. That’s about 7 per million people have died.

Looking at just my home state of Illinois, there have been 5,368 deaths among our population of 12,67 million people. That’s 423 people lost per million.