I keep hearing that the spread of SARS2 in Japan recently has been exceptional and variants are a problem etc. That's kind-of unclear. The week-on-week growth rate for Tokyo has not gone above 1.3x [1]. The national growth rate is similar [2].
Last April we saw up to 3x growth week-on-week. Obviously they were different times but Tokyo also saw some 1.5x weekly growth back in Nov too.
It's possible that if we didn't have the SOE-lite (State of Emergency) for the last 2 weeks things would be worse but it's hard to know if that has had any impact at all.
What is new is that the last SOE ended long before hospitals emptied out. I don't have Tokyo's numbers but nationally ICU usage peaked at 1043 on 2021-01-27 and was only down to 631 on 2021-03-21 when the last SOE ended (cases were at 300/day in Tokyo).
I think we're entering SOE again a month later not because the variants are crazy but because ICU beds were still 60-70% full when we allowed the growth to restart and there was lots of virus around.
Maybe PM Suga really believed that after lifting the SOE in March cases would keep falling. That makes no sense to me. He's talking about lifting this SOE after 2 weeks. Good luck with that. It's a stronger SOE, so cases will drop faster but hospitals empty out quite slowly, there's not a lot he can do about that.
Stay safe everyone!
