Sorry, are you claiming that Japan might have experienced NY-level mortality but not noticed? Did you see pictures from NYC's hospitals? You can't not notice th

Sorry, are you claiming that Japan might have experienced NY-level mortality but not noticed? Did you see pictures from NYC's hospitals? You can't not notice that. I'm not confident of much, but I'm very, very confident that coronavirus mortality in Japan has been dramatically lower than NY. If you disagree, then we're not in the same consensus reality, and there's no point in discussing further. So I'm asking why they're different. You make a lot of statements, most of which are true but which don't specifically explain that difference. For example, you state that Japan's doctors have experience with SARS, and they do; but how is that helping stop the spread? What are they doing that Americans should copy? It's not the contact tracing, except for that ~20% reduction in R at best--and if deaths are undercounted, then they're missing an even greater share of the infections. And then you seem to say that Japan and NY can't be compared anyways because they're so different? I agree they're different in many ways; so why not think about all those factors, and what we can learn from them? Would a heavy public campaign training people to correctly use masks (and enforcing their use) have brought us to Japan-level mortality with a Japan-level lockdown? Imagine the lives (and jobs, and hours of children's education) that could have been saved if yes. I agree that Japan has very different cultural norms, and those might explain much of the difference. So what are those norms, and how can we adopt them? Or maybe the dominant factor is neither masks nor lockdowns but weather, and there's nothing in our response that could have helped? Maybe it's something about our speaking habits, and language really does directly make a big difference? That last one is deliberately outlandish, but I'm not even totally sure it's false. The point I'm trying to make is that we know very little about this disease, and what we do know is confusing and contradictory. Unfortunately, most people seem to have latched onto preferred simple explanations, disregarding the evidence that doesn't support them. Given the earliness of our knowledge here, I believe that's likely to cause important opportunities to control the disease to be missed, and therefore harmful.