I agree fully with your comment above. I'm glad I live in a region with a mask order, though compliance among non-Asians here is hit or miss. That kind of diffe

I agree fully with your comment above. I'm glad I live in a region with a mask order, though compliance among non-Asians here is hit or miss. That kind of difference (which I guess isn't quite environmental; in an earlier comment I'd included "pre-existing behavioral", which I should have here) has made life easier for the Japanese government and harder for the American one--again, not to excuse the late and confused mask messaging from the USA, just to say that even with early and clear messaging the USA would probably still have had lower and less competent mask use than Japan. I certainly don't mean to suggest we shouldn't be trying our best ideas to control the virus, even if we're not sure whether they'll work or why. I just don't like the idea of low death counts as conclusive evidence that whatever a government is doing is good, especially to the extent it lets authoritarians that have seen low death counts (for reasons related or unrelated to their response) like China promote their models to the rest of the world.