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Patrick McKenzie lives in Japan, and has shared lots of information on how the Conoravirus has affected Japan.

You may say:

Cool. I don't know Patrick McKenzie, and I consider myself up to speed on how the corona virus has affected Japan.

Using mostly his words, I'll make a case for why this is likely something you should pay attention to, across several dimensions.

Patrick usually tweets his thoughts but because most of what he tweets requires some prior knowledge/context to fully appreciate, I'll do a quick "intro to Coronavirus in Japan as told by Patrick McKenzie."

This will be necessarily a bit wandering, because at times it seems that Patrick starts a thread without finishing it, only to pick it up a few weeks later, in which his conclusion makes perfect sense if you've got the context from when he started the thread weeks prior.

Why are you qualified to do this, Josh?

1. Most of what Patrick has tweeted has caused me to nod, and think he said that so well, and poignantly, dancing a line of "saying things without saying things"
2. Reporters who have not been reading him for the last few years will need to get up to speed in less than "a few years", I hope that this document might help.

Explicitly, this document started today, 2020-04-27 2:40p Mountain Time because of this tweet

• Timeline of things happening in Japan (currently working off, quoting, and summarazing https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/#a-brief-timeline-of-the-last-30-days)
• Patrick's specific interventions in circulating this whitepaper
• Why patrick's write-up and "pre-registered result" of the above white paper is so important
• current/recent happenings, as they tie in to events in Japan of March/April

Japan Medical Association calls for extending the nationwide state of emergency past its original one month timeline (through May 6). Justification: have not achieved hoped-for level of reduction in cases / growth of cases.https://t.co/lZVH2hEyBU

— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) April 28, 2020

From An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

A brief timeline of the last ~30 days

Note from Josh: I'll be summarizing portions of what I'm quoting below. My summaries will be italicized, with every section linking to the relevant section in Patrick McKenzie's post. I suggest reading the original source, of course

Here is a brief recap of an extremely fluid situation, for the convenience of readers who have not kept up with it. The March 22nd and March 25th entries are not widely known.

Thursday March 19th: The NHK panel of experts outlines the national consensus on the coronavirus situation, what the plan is, and what the risk factors to the plan are. Archived in Japanese and in English. (This is an unofficial translation commissioned from an unaffiliated commercial translation agency.)

Saturday March 21st: Governor Yoshimura (of Osaka) distributes, on live television, an official assessment of the situation in Osaka and Hyogo.

Few note that this happened or understand the significance of the assessment until later in the week.

Sunday March 22nd: I tweet a hash at 11:24 AM, discussed below. (not widely known) (this is a hash of the memo that led to the white paper, discussed below.)

Monday March 23rd: Governor Koike (of Tokyo) gives a press conference, at which she claims that it may be necessary to impose a lockdown on Tokyo if there is a rapid rise in infections. She immediately clarifies that this must be avoided at all costs.

Tuesday March 24th: A sporting event is postponed.

Wednesday March 25th: I tweet a hash at 1:31 PM, discussed below. (not widely known) dropping a hash explanation, summary is: proves that certain knowledge was known at a certain time, before such knowledge perhaps becomes more widely known The hash is the white paper discussed below.

Later in the day, Governor Koike (of Tokyo) urges the populace to start taking voluntary social distancing measures beginning on Saturday.

Thursday March 26th: The New York Times publishes Japan’s virus success has puzzled the world. Has its luck run out?.

A short time later, economist Tyler Cowen at George Mason University published The coronavirus situation in Japan is probably much worse than you think, covering claims made by a “working group.” Those claims are discussed in more detail below.

In other news: the government’s panel of experts formally assesses that coronavirus is likely “rampant” throughout Japan.

Friday March 27th: NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, does a segment on why “a powerful American newspaper” has such questions about Japan’s well-contained coronavirus issue. Many reporters domestically begin to ask hard questions.

Saturday March 28th: The Prime Minister addresses the nation, explains there is no present need to declare a state of emergency, but explains that Japan is in “a state of national hardship (国難) such that it has not experienced since the war.”

Sunday March 29th through Sunday April 5th: There are increasingly urgent calls from prefectural governments, the Japanese Medical Association, researchers, and others to declare a state of emergency.

Monday April 6th: The Prime Minister announces a state of emergency will be declared in seven prefectures, including Osaka and Tokyo.

Tuesday April 7th: The New York Times publishes Japan declared a coronavirus emergency. Is it too late?

Thursday April 9th: Aichi requests that the government broaden the scope of the state of emergency to include Aichi.

Thursday April 16th: Japan broadens the state of emergency to include the entire nation, and designates 13 prefectures as being of particular concern, including Tokyo, Osaka, and Aichi. There are published reports in Tokyo of hospitals turning away suspected coronavirus patients.

Friday April 17th: The Prime Minister addresses the nation, imploring it to reduce human-to-human contact by 70~80%.

Monday April 20th: Increasingly specific and repeated calls to strengthen social distancing measures are beginning to show some objective improvement, though the situation is incredibly complex and in different phases throughout the nation. The number of infections continues to increase rapidly.

There are increasing reports of difficulties in accessing medical care.

The number of acknowledged coronavirus cases exceeds 11,000. The number of acknowledged cases requiring the highest level of care is approximately 230.

The National Policy Agency has reclassified several suspicious deaths, including a man who passed away on a city street in Tokyo, as having been caused by coronavirus.

Tuesday April 21st: There are increasingly common warnings by experts that, given the degree of spread of the infection, it is implausible that it will be rolled back within a year. We will likely see new outbreaks and new waves.

Experts warn we will likely need to institute far stricter measures than seemed reasonable a month ago, to avoid a collapse of the medical system. The situation was much worse than we thought.

On March 26th at 11:13 PM JST, economist Tyler Cowen published an essay on Marginal Revolution titled “The situation in Japan is probably much worse than you think.” The essay recounts of his correspondence, over the prior several days, with an anonymous “working group”, operating in Tokyo.

The Working Group (proper noun hereafter) concluded that Japan had a geographically distributed coronavirus epidemic and predicted a public health crisis in April. The Working Group had been quietly circulating its evidence with appropriate parties in policy circles. As there had been pronouncements by experts officially which were equivalent to their research’s core result, that Japan factually had a coronavirus epidemic, the Working Group published the white paper anonymously to allow the public to prepare.

I instigated the Working Group and I was the primary author of its white paper.

Dr. Cowen linked to a copy of the white paper. We had published it anonymously via a third-party website moments before. Our choice to be anonymous was a considered one and is discussed in more detail below.

Reception of the white paper was mixed. Some people viewed it with understandable concern, given the prevailing consensus that Japan was weathering the situation well. Some organizations were moved by its claims and took high-quality actions in response to it. Some people questioned the motives of the authors and suggested it was extremely unlikely to be correct, because credible science doesn’t get done by amateurs and then anonymously pastebinned.

We had circulated an earlier version of the white paper privately to several parties to check results, obtain feedback, and inform their own investigations. Dr. Cowen was one of those parties.

[...]

The Working Group's White paper on Japan and covid-19

[...]

Was the white paper correct?

Were these results novel and useful?

These conclusions were pre-registered via cryptographic commitment

The memo that instigated the Working Group

Why did you publish the hash and not the memo?

Dropping a hash can be like lighting a signal fire

Someone read between the lines

The Working Group convenes

Did the white paper cause any concrete actions?

What about a sporting event?

Why was the epidemic not more obvious earlier?

Some open questions and hypotheses regarding them

Why are you publishing this now?

• Patrick McKenzie twitter, personal website
• NYT: Japan's Virus Success Has Puzzled the World. Is Its Luck Running Out?
• Tyler Cowen at George Mason University: The coronavirus situation in Japan is probably much worse than you think

• ReportMule report on Patio11's coverage

I started this doc because of this tweet, in which Patrick said:

Hey Internets, crazy idea for you:

I have tweeted, in the last month, much more about coronavirus in Japan than most English-language reporters know, most of it with links to authoritative sourcing.

Can you crowdsource an organized document of that, to help folks get to speed?

I'm starting this as a possible starting point for that collaboration, but I have no expectation that this be the "finished product". I write a lot of software, and when someone says "organized document" and "crowdsourced" I think "Github!".

I could see this immediately becomeing a mess of PRs with merge conflicts if many folks get involved, so I'd rather work on this in close collaboration with at max two or three others, who will have merge access to the doc, and don't need me to deal with PRs. If you're interested, could you send me an email? my email address is easy to find. I'll make you a collaborator on the repo. Or Google doc.