Here we go again

TL;DR: More testing means much highers numbers but slower growth. We are probably going to have to wait quite a while before any emergency is declared. In the end, the spread will probably be much greater than last time.

Things are not entirely the same as before but not entirely different either.

The good:

Testing is way up from before and testing policy has changed. You can get tested on demand privately, if you want to pay for it. It seems getting tested publicly is now easy too. I know of two recent stories where people with mild symptoms got tested and it was pretty easy. When doing contact tracing they now test all contacts, not just those with symptoms. Combined with the targeting of some high risk groups for mass testing and this certainly has a large impact on the number of cases discovered. The official goal of the govt now is to identify positive cases as soon as possible, including asymptomatic cases.

Even though the numbers are much higher than before, it does seem like the rate of growth is lower. This might seem odd but it makes sense. If you go from finding and isolating 10% of infections to 30% of infections your numbers triple on paper but you reduce the speed of the spread (10% and 30% are very made-up numbers).

Treatment is improving. The govt has approved a couple of medicines that help suppress the violent immune over-reaction. So we may see fewer serious cases and fewer deaths for the same number of infections.

The mixed:

This time round, it’s spreading in younger people. Some possible reasons:

• younger people get no symptoms or light symptoms and we refused to test them last time around. Maybe nothing has changed and it’s just that we are detecting it in young people.
• (not sure if this is actually true) older people are sheltering more than before
• (not sure if this is actually true) nursing and caring staff are being tested regularly so infections are not spreading into hospitals and care homes
• targeting of host clubs etc biases detection towards the young
• when you shut everything down, undetected COVID mostly survives in young people. It could take several weeks for the infection to spread from young social circles back to old social circles.

If they can keep the infection away from old people, it will keep the ICU wards empty and the deaths low.

Hospital capacity has been increased. Many more hospitals are now designated to take COVID cases. Obviously more preparation and available care is a good thing. The downside is that the govt clearly knows that it’s not going to win and is betting on higher capacity to let it drag this round out as long as possible.

The bad:

There’s no doubt that we are losing again. A few weeks ago I was hoping that maybe the spike was mostly due to the testing change. It wasn’t.

The “serious” (i.e. ICU/ECMO) number has stopped falling and has been consistently rising for a week. It’s still single digits per day but it’s growing. Those people going into ICU in the last week were infected 2-3 weeks ago.

Testing capacity is growing incredibly slowly. They started publishing the numbers a little over a month ago and it has grown from 28254 to 33030 in that time (column P). Tokyo’s all-time record is 4,507. Ireland tests about 4500/day and finds 20-40 new cases per day (Tokyo finds 250-300/dat currently). Ireland is 1/3 the size of Tokyo. The rest of Japan’s testing numbers are even worse.

The avg daily testing rate (Column Q) is about half of the official capacity. It seems likely that Tokyo is using much more than half of its capacity and will soon max out. Then they will have to get stingy on tests again, e.g. no more proactive testing of host clubs or maybe make it hard for mild cases to get tested.

The national govt really don’t seem to care or have any ability to help. In fact they seem actively harmful. No responsible govt in any country is running a domestic tourism campaign right now, they’re all watching the numbers as they carefully try to restore their economies. Japan’s govt seems to see everything as secondary to the economy and their campaign-funding lobby groups. I don’t think they put any value on quality of life or are paying attention to the fact that COVID has many non-fatal but extremely nasty and chronic outcomes.

Speculation:

Present

The current numbers are not good but the numbers don’t mean the same thing anymore. My thinking had been that the true infection rate is maybe 10x what was being detected. Japan’s Case Fatality Rate was about 5% while it seems like in reality, COVID-19 has a fatality rate of about .2%-.5% that implies that the real case numbers were 10x bigger. That assumes that the virus is just as fatal here as anywhere else and that Japan’s fatality numbers are accurate (Japan was extremely stingy with testing, the true number of deaths may be much higher).

The new testing policy changes that. We might be detecting 2x or even 5x as much as previously, especially in Tokyo where they proactively test some high risk groups.

So we’re closer to the bottom of the curve than we might seem. We’re also climbing more slowly.

Near Future

I expect the govt are going to try to squeeze as much economic value as they can out of this round until one of these happens

• ambulances cannot find hospitals for patients
• ICU/ECMO capacity runs out

What’s extremely dangerous here is that it takes about 2-3 weeks for someone to go from infection to ICU. This means that we have to shut down 3 weeks before capacity runs out. If we screw up, we may exceed capacity. Exceeding capacity for ICU means picking who we try to save and who we leave to die.

There are a couple of ways to screw up.

• Wait too long.
• Have a sudden spike. E.g. as Tokyo runs out of testing capacity the rate of spread may increase, causing a numbers to spike.
• The SOE (state of emergency) is not as effective as expected. People are tired and don’t want to stay home. Young people are already acting like there is no problem.

Also the extra capacity means that the consequences of a screw up could be much larger. Essentially we will be going much faster than before when we hit the brakes.

The SOE was declared on 2020-04-16. By that day 185 people had died (officially). By 2020-06-16 927 had died. Now it’s 996. That means that 75% of deaths occurred in the two months after hitting the brakes. If we keep going until we fill ICU capacity the death toll of the second round could be enormous.

We’ll probably see deaths start to move again soon but hopefully more slowly, given better treatment and younger patients.

In the end, I think the infection will spread much more widely than April. Given the reduced speed of spread, it might take a long time for the govt to declare an SOE. Maybe 4 weeks, as a crazy estimate that I will surely regret. I suspect Tokyo is soon going to start racing ahead of the rest of the country (moreso than it already is). So Tokyo might go into SOE earlier than that.

Until then we will have an extended period with a very large number of asymptomatic cases wandering around. That will make this round much more dangerous for people with preexisting conditions. This Bloomberg story about South Korea describes someone getting COVID-19 from a person in a neighbouring karaoke box! I was hoping I would be going out and doing fun stuff by now but I’m staying put for now.

Nobody steals wood in Japan

This is a photo of a wood warehouse near my home on a Sunday afternoon. It's closed, has been since Saturday or maybe even Friday. Can you see anything to stop all that wood being stolen? No you can't because there's nothing. This has puzzled me for over a year.

There is a rickety wooden fence pulled in front of the trucks but the 1000s of Euros of wood and who knows what else they sell is sitting right out there with no security whatsoever. How is this possible? It's not a busy street and they don't close it up any further at night time.

A few theories:

• They are paying the right people and criminals know they'll lose a finger (or more) if they try stealing from it? Or maybe they are the right people.
• There are actually no criminals in Japan. This can't be true, otherwise there'd be nothing to blame on immigrants :)
• The police are incredibly vigilant and effective...
• There is no market for stolen building materials.

Is there anywhere else in the world you could do this and expect to find everything still there on Monday morning? Switzerland?

Racism in Japan

I've been in Japan for about 10 months now and I don't think I've
experienced any direct racism in that time... until now!

We were driving home from a holiday, it was a long drive, we'd already
played I-spy and had moved on to shiro tori. This is a game where each
word has to begin with the ending of the previous word. E.g. sushi ->
shinobi -> bideo (video).

By the way, in Japanese, shiri tori is written 尻取り, according to
translate.google.com that's 尻=ass and 取=take. Not an ideal name for
a kids game and every time I hear しまじろう shouting "尻取りをしようよ”
I can't help but wonder if there are some unspeakable 2chan images of
that.

Anyway, it was Sean's turn and he was struggling for a word that
begins with "pa", so Midori decided to help him out. "I'm mama", she
said pointing at herself, "and this person is...?", pointing at me.

"Gaijin!", shouts Sean.

The correct answer was "papa".

How to ship your household to a foreign country.

Having just done this, I thought I'd write it up because it worked well but I hit a lot of dead ends and almost payed a hell of a lot more for a worse service. I didn't ship any furniture, TVs or big items, so this method is for a small or medium sized move.

What I did was ship 9 boxes of various sizes for a total of 225KG from Dublin to Narita airport as unaccompanied baggage. This cost me just over 700EUR with K International Freight, including 40EUR to come pick it up from Crumlin. I dealt with Kevin who was helpful, prompt to give a quote and answer questions. They also reinforced some of my less well done packaging, without which I suspect some of my stuff would still be littering the floor of a warehouse in Dubai. The boxes were shipped with Cathay Pacific and took about 3 days of flying via Manchester, Amsterdam, Dubai and Hong Kong. They were trackable all the way. We rented a van in Tokyo, got various bits of paper stamped by customs and loaded the boxes up. The airport part of it took about 1 hour in total, I would not like to have done it without a Japanese speaker.

Less than a week after I arrived, we had all the stuff. We could have had it sooner but I only finished packing at 4am - 5 hours before I got on the plane! Also I was happy to be a bit rested and settled in before organising the pickup and wanted to avoid any complications where my flight was delayed and the boxes arrive before me and need to be stored. I never figured out how long they would hold it for free or how much storage might cost but the Cargo Terminal in Narita is a busy place, so my guess is "not long" and "lots". I also never figured out what would happen if it arrived on the weekend. The Cathay Pacific website says customs "office ours" are Mon-Fri.

I hadn't heard of unaccompanied baggage until I was on the plane to Narita and filling out the customs form. It had a space for how many pieces of unaccompanied baggage I had, so I filled that in and confirmed with the customs guy in Tokyo that it was appropriate. I needed to fill in 2 copies of the form, one he kept and the other he stamped and I presented that when picking it up. I contacted Kevin and asked him to mark the boxes as unaccompanied baggage, which he did. I assume other countries have the same concept, but I've never seen that on a customs form before.

As for other solutions, I looked at lots of moving companies and got a range of quotes, up to many thousands of EUR. Some of the companies offered a full service, they would come and pack your whole house up and deliver it door to door. This was not what I wanted, others ranged in between. Some companies had to be harassed to actually quote me. Others wanted a list of all items in order to quote me! All were far more expensive than K International. There were even some who would put my stuff on a boat for 8 weeks and charge me a small fortune for it.

The 2nd most reasonable option was An Post who cost 145EUR for 20KG but have some tricky size restrictions on the parcels and I also don't trust them too much - according to their website, a parcel that was delivered 4 weeks ago, still hasn't arrived!

Another pretty reasonable option is Vigin's extra baggage service which charges about 100EUR for each extra bag up to 23KG (1st extra bad is only 40EUR). Since my flight started in Dublin with Aer Lingus, I could not use that. It took a bit of work to get a straight answer on that but eventually I got confirmed that I would have to pay Aer Lingus 9EUR per KG for the Dublin to London leg. Given the chance, I would have shipped it this way and avoided 2 trips to the airport but it was not to be. Fuck you Aer Lingus, if you're going to do connecting flights (unlike Ryanair) you cannot avoid checked in baggage, so by charging penal rates you're just doing yourselves out of business.

I suspect other freight forwarders would have similar prices but they do not seem to be common knowledge or targetting the "moving your house" market. I only found K International because I phoned Virgin Cargo (to see if I could bypass Aer Lingus) and they told me they don't deal directly with the public and pointed me at K International.

The only thing I regret was that I tried to pack things into the smallest number of boxes possible. This made it somewhat cheaper but really wasn't worth it. Most of my boxes were 50cm cubed (from Elephant Storage). Freight is charged by weight or if the density isn't high enough, it's charged by volume. Take the volume in cubic cm and divide by 6000 to get the "volumetric weight", you are charged for whichever weight is higher. So I just needed to make each of these boxes at least 21KG to avoid paying by volume. I did better than that but I spent a lot of time dicking around and moving stuff. I also made too many trips to the box shop. I was always sure I needed just 1 more box, I should have just bought lots and returned the ones I didn't use. I optimised for money but at huge expense of time. Lesson learned the hard way (45 min sleep before leaving for the airport and a mess in the house that my family very kindly took care of).

Also, shipping by sea tends to be no cheaper than air. I imagine if you get a container and fill it with your house and car it probably works out better but for a small move, air freight seems to be much cheaper.

Half way to Tokyo.

M and the kids got on a plane to Tokyo this morning (just barely!). That was all much harder than it should have been but they should be in the air on the way from Abu Dhabi to Tokyo now.

It's been a remarkably stressful week.

It started last weekend with me noticing that S had chicken pox just days before they were all due to fly. He actually had spots one or two days before that but I thought they were insect bites (R had insect bites aplenty). We thought we might be able to fly anyway given the timing and the official policies of airlines but the doctor said we couldn't (and if he had not still been contagious, S would have been horrible to fly with on Thursday). So now we're into insurance claims. We were lucky that managed to rebook at about the same price. It seems that not so many people want to fly Etihad via Abu Dhabi on 9/11. Any other airline or Etihad on any other day was 800e more! Virgin Atlantic take bikes for free, Etihad charge them as excess baggage (45e/kg * 20kg = 900e!). So I'm left with an enormous cardboard box with half-assembled bikes in it.

Next up was finding out at the start of the week that my original Tokyo transfer plan has been scuppered by company-wide changes in staffing. I can either wait and see with no guarantees or start down a different path. So now I'm starting down a different path. Also wondering whether I should start dusting off my CV.

Finally today, for no very good reason we barely made check-in at the airport. It didn't help that it was terminal 2 which neither of us had ever been in and, as they say, mistakes were made. It ended with my heading to oversized baggage while M took the kids up to the security queue. Oversized baggage was broken in some way and had a queue of about 30 people with golf bags when I got there. I headed to the top of the queue and explained that they had made special phone calls about our luggage at the desk and that my wife and kids were running for the flight. Once the system was working again, the nice man took our stuff. By the time I got upstairs they were gone.

With about 4 hours sleep and a major dose of adrenalin at the airport this morning I have been completely unsettled all day. I'm supposed to be tidying the house but my stomach is still spinning and doing something useful seems impossible. I wonder would I feel better if I had managed to say goodbye properly. Do the "sad goodbye" chemicals cancel out the "run for your life" chemicals? It was weird feeling like this all day. It reminds me of taking exams or sitting outside the principal's office but that's usually quite quick. Having had it for about 12 hours now, I can totally understand how people give themselves up to the police after they've committed a crime.

Narrowly avoiding shaming myself again in Japan.

The last of a lot of things I wrote last Sunday in a Cafe.

A history of friction.

My trips to Japan, staying with the in-laws have not always gone terribly smoothly. I am allergic to their house and it brings on my asthma like nothing else I have encountered. Usually I only suffer if I play soccer on a really cold day or something but their house is my kryponite. It's quite old and Japan is incredibly humid. A friend bought a bamboo bag this summer and that evening (the day she bought it), the bag had a one-inch layer of fuzzy, fluffy fungus growing on part of it. Add to this the cat, dog, birds and other animals (which have never given me a problem elsewhere) and I get wheezy within minutes of entering the house. On every trip, after a few days I have had to struggle to the English speaking doctor who gives me a bag-full of drugs and inhalers which get me back to normal in about 2 weeks.

These near-death experiences do not make me a good house-guest and last time I was there, my lack of energy (and hence enthusiasm and politeness) caused some friction.

After coming back last time, my Irish doctor gave me a preventative inhaler which I suck on every day whether I feel like it or not. It's a remarkable thing. Whenever I get a cold now, I have pretty much no symptoms until I get a fever and feel like crap. No snots, coughs or wheezes.

So, for this trip to Japan I was prepared. And it worked. For the first few days, I did feel a tiny bit wheezy in their house, so I cut back my time in there and soon after I was better. After that I seemed to get a bit of immunity and was able to hang around without any problem. It probably also helped that we were there in the summer this time. As uncomfortable as summer there is, I much prefer stripping off to wrapping up (hope you weren't eating when that image hit you). I think no more winter-time trips to Japan from now one.

Disaster looms.

I was in Japan for 3.5 weeks (1 of them spent in Okinawa) and so far had been getting on perfectly well with everyone. On my last night, with Midori and the kids asleep early, I took a trip to the big second-hand book shop near the train station. It's part of a big chain called Book Off (I have lots of ideas for a competing brand - Book You, Book Me, Book That, What the Book?, Go Book Yourself With a Chainsaw etc.). I wanted to buy some teenage-level manga, many of which have the pronunciation alongside the Kanji and in fact I got one that I'm having good success in reading (it does appear to be some kind of teenage girl time-travel romance adventure but it's enjoyable enough so far even if I have to hit the dictionary for nearly every sentence).

I borrowed Midori's dad's bike and even though he always says "don't lock it, it's not worth stealing", I did, because I knew the combination and having the bike stolen would just be so embarrassing. What I didn't know was that Midori's mother's bike looks almost the same in the dark and has a different combination!

So an hour later, I'm outside Book Off realising what has happened. I phoned the house to find that they don't know the combination number, confirming my worst fear. My last day in Japan is going to involve getting Midori's mother out of bed and down to the station in the now pouring rain to unlock her bike. I'm to ring back in 2 minutes. I think perhaps her mother doesn't know the number anymore but does know what buttons to press and is going outside to press them on another bike and make a note of the numbers.

Screw you Japanese bicycle locks!

Japanese bicycle locks are for the most part laughable. Some have a key, some have a 10-digit pad and you press down the right 4 of them and push in the tab to open the lock. In both types you are just pushing a piece of metal through the spokes in the back wheel. You're not actually locking it to anything and the whole thing could be hack-sawed off or pried open in about a minute. I guess it just stops kids from jumping on your bike to get home from school quickly. Most of the bikes are of the "mama-chari" style, a Japanese abbreviation of "mamma chariot". I saw hundreds of bikes every day and I'd say maybe once per day I would see something like bike in Dublin. That is a mountain bike, hybrid or racer (road-bike). On the rare occasion I saw one, it seemed to have a bit of a beefier lock too but still nothing special.

Anyway, I was determined not to shame myself entirely after such a smooth trip and spent some time examining the lock to see if there was something simple I could do to open it. I remembered cracking a luggage combination lock years ago by just pulling on the lock and twisting each dial until it kind of stuck a bit. Then you know the dial is at the point where it's interacting differently with the... the whatever you call the bit of metal that you're pulling on.

Wow these locks are crappy.

So I tried variations on that without success. Finally I just tried pushing and pulling the tab and seeing which button reacted. I pushed that button and wiggled some more. After 4 buttons the tab pushed in and the lock opened! I couldn't believe it. Earlier, I had assumed that such a simple approach would not work and had tried other stuff. OMG these are really, really crappy locks. It took me 8 minutes to figure this out and now that I know how, I guess it would take me about 30 seconds to open another one.

So I phoned the house again and told Mr Inagaki the code. They had already found it by then and I don't think Mr Inagaki was really listening to me - after I finished talking he proceeded to tell me the code. I rode home in the cool rain with a little buzz of victory!

In the morning when I told my story over breakfast, only Mr Inagaki thought it was cool.

No ni sai - how to ruin your child's second birthday.

The first of a few random snippets on what Sean says and does that I find amusing. For some reason, Sean's stock-phrases are much more likely to be in Japanese than Riona's were, maybe because Riona had full-time daycare in Ireland for a while and Sean never had.

Sean is almost 2 years old and still does a little bit of breast-feeding, mostly in the middle of the night. Midori is trying to end this and sometimes stops his attempts and tells him "mo sugu ni sai" which means "you're nearly 2" ("ni sai" means "2 years old"). Sean now gets grumpy and starts saying "no ni sai, no ni sai!". Sometimes just for divilment we'll say "mo sugu ni sai" to him to wind him up and it works. All good, innocent, infant-bullying fun.

What might be a problem is that Sean is 2 on Jul 15th and he'll be in Japan for that. I'm not sure what Midori is planning but he'll at least have a cake and the family around him, all repeating that dreaded phrase "ni sai, ni sai, ni sai" and he'll have a big grumpy head on him, shouting "no ni sai! no ni sai!".

I wish I could be there to see it! Obviously, I wish I could be at Sean's 2nd birthday anyway but he'll have lots more birthdays and it'll be a long time before he has another where he gets upset by anyone who mentions his age.

Japan - smoking

One afternoon I was flicking around TV looking for a cartoon or something to occupy Ríona for a few minutes. I found a cartoon, so we watched that for a few minutes. It wasn't by any means a toddler's cartoon, it was called "Gunlock (SaiYuki)" (there seem to be several seasons and variants of this anime, I have no idea which one I was watching). It's a retelling of Journey to the West (aka "Monkey Magic") with more modern characters, some guns etc. Although it wasn't a toddler's cartoon, it held Ríona's attention for while I got something else done. She seems to like any kind of cartoon at least for a few minutes.

The cartoon had some violence ("Daddy, boy fell over") but what really surprised me was that one of the main characters was smoking. He wasn't even a bad guy. I was just really shocked to see someone smoking in a kids show at 2pm.

It was actually pretty uncomfortable in Japan on several occasions, restaurants still have smoking sections, usually as big or bigger than the non-smoking sections and we sometimes had to settle for a seat in the smoking area.　We even found one that didn't have a non-smoking section at all!

What's really odd though is that it's not like smoking is entirely acceptable in Japan either. In lots of places, smoking on the street is illegal and some streets had designated smoking areas. And in true Japanese style, people obeyed these rules. I saw plenty of smokers at the smoking areas and I can't remember seeing anyone smoking in the "wrong" part of the street.

Still it's better than China. A few years ago I was in Beijing airport and I went into a restaurant. "Smoking or non-smoking?". "Non-smoking", I said. "Sit anywhere you like", said the waitress. I was sleepless and jet-lagged at the time so I didn't notice how stupid this was. For a while I was the only customer but soon some more tables filled up, including a guy smoking right beside me. It was only then that I understood my conversation with the waitress. The question was purely cosmetic - probably just for foreigners - there was no non-smoking area in this restaurant, or certainly none that the waitress was willing to enforce. I wonder if I had lit up a cigarette would I have been told to put it out because my table was non-smoking?

The snot hoover.

We arrived in Japan on Tuesday morning. All of us had colds, sniffles and coughs. Ríona had had hers for a week or two already.

On Friday, Midori decided it was time to get her checked out and brought her to a Japanese doctor. The doctor gave her antibiotics, cough syrup and aspirin. Japanese medical clinics all seem to include their own dispensary which is very handy but I wonder about the conflict of interests in terms of prescribing expensive drugs and also little things like aspirin, (maybe it's all regulated, I dunno).

The most exciting thing about the whole trip (and the bit I regret missing) was the doctor's use of a small vacuum cleaner to suck all the snots out of Ríona nose! You get to see what comes out in a glass jar too. Apparently she was not bothered by it at all.

So if that wasn't nasty enough, the doctor also told Midori that she should repeat the procedure herself. "How?", I asked, "by sucking her nose?". Apparently, yes, by sucking her nose, while giving her a bath for example. Just in case you haven't already run through the details in your head, you suck, nothing happens, you suck harder, nothing happens, harder some more... pop a torrent of hot, green snot shoots into your mouth, hitting you straight in the tonsils. Did you just gag? I know I did when I first thought about it. I imagine in real life that my mouth full of snot would quickly be followed by me puking up my own daughter's nose. Maybe if you're into live fish, sea-urchins' gonads and rancid soy-beans then it's nothing special.

Might be a good idea for Jackass...