> There's been this notion that "Japan has handled the outbreak well" or, among the conspiratoricals, "the government is hiding the real numbers" where my take

> There's been this notion that "Japan has handled the outbreak well" or, among the conspiratoricals, "the government is hiding the real numbers" where my take is that the data is just not there to make any kind of conclusion either way yet. Because they aren't testing broadly in the population, which is a way of "hiding the real numbers" without it looking so nefarious... you just don't get real numbers and then there's nothing to hide. As a political tool it's a nice bit of sleight-of-hand, but as a public policy decision it's disastrous.