This is happening everywhere in the world (except a few countries where most people are vaccinated and/or tested heavily): people ran out of money, goverments failed to help them, and at this point it's worth to take the risk of getting COVID for much more people than to stay hungry and get homeless.
Alternative explanation. In japan people dont care anymore and we are hit by a new wave which is definitely looking like a new peak of infections. Add to that absolutely no border control and lazy authorities and thats a recipe for things getting out of control.
I entered Japan close to two weeks ago from Europe. Super strict and well managed border control. Passengers were supervised and escorted to a special quarantine hotel for the first three days of quarantine. After that they use an app on my phone to keep track of where I am. For 14 days I have to "check in" my location multiple times per day.
The place with no border control i Europe. Not Japan.
The 3 days quarantine is only for people arriving from a list of countries with a known mutated strain. It's much less strict if the passenger did not arrived from the listed countries ([1]; the one in the parenthesis, the table below is countries which PCR result is required).
Officially the rule is to be quarantine in the designated place for 14 days and to report everyday. However, the loophole is the designated place also includes your home, and if you happen to use LINE, the daily report becomes just a button press in the app. Location tracking is only recommended, not required. (The Japanese document on location tracking is just to enable location history on Google Maps or enable Significant Location on iPhone[2])
[1]: https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/kenkou_iryo... Note the English version of this document is very outdated (Mar 26, 2020 for the English version vs. Mar 21, 2021 for the Japanese version.) See [3] for a more up-to-date one, although in a different format.
... lucky there's no world sporting event that will congregate thousands of people from around the globe in Japan in a few weeks time.
They should have cancelled the Olympics to at least 2022... I hope historians don't look back at sports ball being the catalyst of third/fourth waves and stronger/newer strains all across the globe in 2022.
International spectators are not allowed at the Olympics this time. And there will be strict protocols for athletes. Not sure how this can cause such a massive new wave.
I'm from Hungary (currently the top on the official list of deaths/millions of people), where people were so scared, that the first wave was almost non-existant. Now it's the opposite, though at least people are getting vaccinated aggressively, they just don't wait enough for the vaccines to get into effect.
Another example is my girlfriend who is from Colombia: people were very careful last year, but now there's a huge demonstration happening because of a proposed tax reform, which shows how desparate people are like, and how much it overwrites their fear of COVID. I'm sure that well see the results in the number of deaths in a month or two there.
I'm in Mexico, but going back to Hungary in a few weeks to try to get my COVID vaccine. There's a soccer match tomorrow (I mean Saturday) with Fradi, the favourite football team of the prime minister, that's why he opened up the country more. Many people just go with it, as they just want to get back to normal, even though the vaccines that people got are not protecting yet.
His main goal is to open up even more to be able to organize EU soccer championship, that's why he's rushing ahead.
Viktor Orban wanted to be a professional soccer player when he was a child, but he wasn't good enough, and now the whole country is suffering because of his childhood trauma.
The spike is big, but not dead people hanging from the trees big. Hospitals are well over capacity, staff is over-overworked, and there was a recent new change in the law that regulates healthcare workers. 5-6 thousand HC workers declined the new forced change, so even less staff available.
At the same time people are getting vaccinated, but the gross incompetence of the government doesn't help. (Just yesterday the website where people ought to schedule an appointment for getting a vaccine was offline day due to too much load.)
While the death/capita indicator peaked our wise leader opened the terraces of pubs and restaurants.
... I'm aware that a well ventilated terrace on a dry sunny day carries a relatively very low risk of transmission, but still. It's complete bollocks to do this without any contact tracing, any testing, etc. (That said, it's important to note that people were already not social distancing, but now it's trivial to get infected by total strangers, plus now those can infect a lot more random folks. Whereas before the opening at least people were able to do some informal checks and tracing.)
Friends in Budapest tell me it’s getting better, but they recently opened up outdoor drinking venues for the first time since November and everything was packed, no distancing and no masks, so I hope it doesn’t backfire.
Interestingly, Hungary already has vaccine passports. Not sure if they’re used for anything but I’ve seen them, same size/shape as the national ID card, and chipped. A lot of my friends got Sputnik instead of AZ, they were offered a choice.
No idea! What would a chip do? How could people use the chip? Verify it? Then why not just make an app!? (Oh, one was announced in February, but absolutely no signal about it since.)
Corruption and competence rarely go hand in hand.
The whole plastic card thing is a shitshow. I got the shot at the same time as a friend. Same day, same hospital, same vaccine type. Said friend already got the card days ago, no word about whether I should have gotten one or what's going on. No way to ask it either. Only thing folks can do is send an official application for requesting the card, which in theory is completely redundant. But it costs nothing, so I sent one. (It's just a nice form on yet another gov site.)
I guess in the US they get a paper card with a CDC logo on it and a stamp for each injection, which will be trivially easy to fake for those who want post-vaxx privileges without actually getting the jab. Saw one on Insta today.
I’m in favor of a vaccine passport but I see a lot of chaos on the horizon as countries with high denialism (US, Germany) but also big outbound tourism and business travel, get real slacky about the passport-ness of it.
