Quarantined Cruise Passengers Have Many Questions. Japan Has Few Answers.
Critics say the government is making a coronavirus episode worse by not being more forthcoming.
TOKYO — The 3,600 people aboard the Diamond Princess, locked down for more than a week and desperate for information, have been reduced to peering out windows as hazmat-suited workers. They have Wi-Fi, but it is spotty, and even if it were not, they might search in vain for information about their plight from tight-lipped Japanese authorities.
Experts in crisis management said the government was offering a textbook example of how not to handle a public health crisis.
“Repeatedly explain what is known, and what is unknown, and then people can get more information about what remains unknown,” said Dr. Hana Hayashi, a public health strategist at McCann Healthcare Worldwide Japan. “It sounds very simple, but by continuing to do this, people’s concerns will be reduced.” ⬅️ ?🙄? ⬆️
[In Japan, the bull-shit in italics is called “gaining understanding” and is applied to everything from A to Z. BS ”gaining understanding” for explanations and excuses are repeated and repeated and repeated and... until you become numb to it. ”Gaining understanding” is one of their favourite phrases, second perhaps only to “Extremely regrettable” or “I was drunk and don’t remember.”
Why won’t Japan test everyone on board for the virus?
As of Tuesday, only 439 had been tested, and the Japanese authorities have sent mixed messages.
For days, officials have said the country simply does not have the ability to test everyone on the ship. But on Tuesday, as demands grew, Dr. Masami Sakoi, an assistant health minister, said at a news briefing that the health ministry was considering expanding its testing capacity.
Japan’s insistence that it is an issue of practicality has been met with some skepticism.
Critics of the government’s handling of the outbreak say that officials simply are not explaining enough of their thinking as they face an epidemiological challenge with no easy playbook. The government’s communications strategy has undermined trust, and speculation has sometimes filled the void, including about whether there could be alternatives to keeping so many people locked inside a contaminated vessel.
“Here you have people locked down on a pseudo prison on a cruise ship,” said Kyle Cleveland, a professor of sociology at the Tokyo campus of Temple University who has studied Japan’s response to another crisis, the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns.
“Is it really a matter of not having enough tests?”
In China, after all, where more than 44,000 people have been infected and deaths have surpassed 1,100, health officials are performing thousands of coronavirus tests a day.
Peace of mind has been hard to come by for many passengers, in no small part because of the Japanese government’s limited communication.
Passengers isolated in their cabins have been checking their phones for news updates and social media posts, while their families back home are frantically pressing for information.
By failing to hold regular and timely news briefings and doling out cryptic information, the government “has made the problem seem much larger than it looks,” said Hiromi Murakami, an expert on health policy at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
“It’s mostly bureaucrats who have to deal with a lot of things, and they don’t know how to respond sometimes,” Ms. Murakami said. “They’re not used to dealing with questions. They don’t know how to answer them, and they think if they can’t answer them, what’s the purpose of having a press conference. So they avoid these situations.”
That may soon prove harder to do. Experts say the Diamond Princess may be only the beginning of Japan’s challenges with the coronavirus.
“Probably it’s a tiny portion of our problem in Japan,” said Hitoshi Oshitani, a professor of virology at Tohoku University. “If we have a few hundred cases in Japan and there are probably thousands of contacts around these few hundred, the numbers will increase every day.”
The government has been saying little. On Sunday and Monday, it waited hours to confirm that there were new infections on board, even as the captain of the Diamond Princess announced them to the ship.
Still, rumors abound.
Early Tuesday, Japanese news outlets reported that the health authorities were considering taking some elderly passengers off the ship, but officials refused to comment.
In the absence of official communication, some have found their own way to communicate: Japanese passengers, who make up about half of the 2,666 guests on board, unfurled cloth signs off their balconies.
“Serious lack of medicine, lack of information,” read one.
Critics say the government is making a coronavirus episode worse by not being more forthcoming.
TOKYO — The 3,600 people aboard the Diamond Princess, locked down for more than a week and desperate for information, have been reduced to peering out windows as hazmat-suited workers. They have Wi-Fi, but it is spotty, and even if it were not, they might search in vain for information about their plight from tight-lipped Japanese authorities.
Experts in crisis management said the government was offering a textbook example of how not to handle a public health crisis.
“Repeatedly explain what is known, and what is unknown, and then people can get more information about what remains unknown,” said Dr. Hana Hayashi, a public health strategist at McCann Healthcare Worldwide Japan. “It sounds very simple, but by continuing to do this, people’s concerns will be reduced.” ⬅️ ?🙄? ⬆️
[In Japan, the bull-shit in italics is called “gaining understanding” and is applied to everything from A to Z. BS ”gaining understanding” for explanations and excuses are repeated and repeated and repeated and... until you become numb to it. ”Gaining understanding” is one of their favourite phrases, second perhaps only to “Extremely regrettable” or “I was drunk and don’t remember.”
Why won’t Japan test everyone on board for the virus?
As of Tuesday, only 439 had been tested, and the Japanese authorities have sent mixed messages.
For days, officials have said the country simply does not have the ability to test everyone on the ship. But on Tuesday, as demands grew, Dr. Masami Sakoi, an assistant health minister, said at a news briefing that the health ministry was considering expanding its testing capacity.
Japan’s insistence that it is an issue of practicality has been met with some skepticism.
Critics of the government’s handling of the outbreak say that officials simply are not explaining enough of their thinking as they face an epidemiological challenge with no easy playbook. The government’s communications strategy has undermined trust, and speculation has sometimes filled the void, including about whether there could be alternatives to keeping so many people locked inside a contaminated vessel.
“Here you have people locked down on a pseudo prison on a cruise ship,” said Kyle Cleveland, a professor of sociology at the Tokyo campus of Temple University who has studied Japan’s response to another crisis, the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns.
“Is it really a matter of not having enough tests?”
In China, after all, where more than 44,000 people have been infected and deaths have surpassed 1,100, health officials are performing thousands of coronavirus tests a day.
Peace of mind has been hard to come by for many passengers, in no small part because of the Japanese government’s limited communication.
Passengers isolated in their cabins have been checking their phones for news updates and social media posts, while their families back home are frantically pressing for information.
By failing to hold regular and timely news briefings and doling out cryptic information, the government “has made the problem seem much larger than it looks,” said Hiromi Murakami, an expert on health policy at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
“It’s mostly bureaucrats who have to deal with a lot of things, and they don’t know how to respond sometimes,” Ms. Murakami said. “They’re not used to dealing with questions. They don’t know how to answer them, and they think if they can’t answer them, what’s the purpose of having a press conference. So they avoid these situations.”
That may soon prove harder to do. Experts say the Diamond Princess may be only the beginning of Japan’s challenges with the coronavirus.
“Probably it’s a tiny portion of our problem in Japan,” said Hitoshi Oshitani, a professor of virology at Tohoku University. “If we have a few hundred cases in Japan and there are probably thousands of contacts around these few hundred, the numbers will increase every day.”
The government has been saying little. On Sunday and Monday, it waited hours to confirm that there were new infections on board, even as the captain of the Diamond Princess announced them to the ship.
Still, rumors abound.
Early Tuesday, Japanese news outlets reported that the health authorities were considering taking some elderly passengers off the ship, but officials refused to comment.
In the absence of official communication, some have found their own way to communicate: Japanese passengers, who make up about half of the 2,666 guests on board, unfurled cloth signs off their balconies.
“Serious lack of medicine, lack of information,” read one.