Apr 19, 2020 (Kyodo) - As the coronavirus pandemic rages unabated, nations around the world have started looking at each other to understand how they might impede the virus' spread.
Some experts say customs and social habits in Japan such as wearing face masks during seasonal flu outbreaks, bowing rather than handshaking, and removing shoes at home might play some role in hindering transmission of the virus, although to what extent is still unknown.
But even as the scientific evidence remains pending, populations in Western countries have embraced at least one habit -- the donning of face masks in public -- that just months earlier they had seen as a quirk of Japanese or East Asian behavior.
At the same time, Japan's apparently robust practices of social hygiene could have a downside, too -- the lack of urgency with which Japan is embracing social distancing, possibly due to overconfidence in the protection afforded by its hygiene habits.
In Japan, the confirmed rate of infection has been low thus far -- about 72 confirmed cases per million people in a population of 126 million, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the United Nations as of April 17.
One factor that may be keeping the figure low is Japan's modest testing rate compared with other countries. As of Thursday, Japan had tested about 100,000 people, or a rate of 0.8 tests per 1,000 people, compared with over 540,000 tests (10.46/1,000) in South Korea, according to Our World in Data.
But even taking that into account, the comparison with infection cases in other developed countries -- over 2,000 per million people in the United States and 3,900/million in Spain -- is stark, especially considering Japan's huge population of elderly people, who are seen as more susceptible to the virus.
