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Monday, April 27, 2020

This Japanese island lifted its coronavirus lockdown too soon and became a warning to the world

Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido offers a grim lesson in the next phase of the battle against COVID-19. It acted quickly and contained an early outbreak of the coronavirus with a 3-week lockdown. But, when the governor lifted restrictions, a second wave of infections hit even harder. Twenty-six days later, the island was forced back into lockdown.

A doctor who helped coordinate the government response says he wishes they’d done things differently. “Now I regret it, we should not have lifted the first state of emergency,” Dr. Kiyoshi Nagase, chairman of the Hokkaido Medical Association, tells TIME.

Hokkaido’s story is a sobering reality check for leaders across the world as they consider easing coronavirus lockdowns: Experts say restrictions were lifted too quickly and too soon because of pressure from local businesses, coupled with a false sense of security in its declining infection rate.

“Hokkaido shows, for example, that what’s happening in the U.S. with individual governors opening up is very dangerous; of course you can’t close interstate traffic but you need to put controls in place,” says Kazuto Suzuki, Vice Dean of International Politics at Hokkaido University. “That’s what we now know: Even if you control the first wave, you can’t relax.”

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7 comments:

  1. Take note "Reopen America" crowd

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    1. Reopen America !!!! For scared or precondition people, stay home if you think you need to. That's fine with me, but I like freedom. Those that trade freedom for safety deserve neither

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  2. That's because there was no opportunity for immunity. So everyone is fresh outside, and picking it up like feathers to tar.

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  3. A test lab has spoken with these results

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  4. 12:42

    If you're scared then STAY HOME! Don't force me to though.

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  5. The death rate of staying closed will make coronavirus look like a drop in the bucket

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  6. Most of them have been using masks in public for years, so what's that say about the affectivness of masks?

    China too.....

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