And so the Japanese people have been told not to seek testing, nor bother visiting medical institutions unless their symptoms are severe and lasting (remember I said an infected person can be contagious without showing symptoms, and the doctors are following strict guidelines, they won’t test a patient not meeting the criteria even if the patient request for the test). Mr. Abe has, in effect, outsourced the government’s containment efforts to the population itself, while the state concentrates limited resources on the severely ill and makes little effort to increase those resources. He might also have been thinking: With no test, there can be no rise in confirmed cases either (this is an opinion, but what if this is indeed their mentality).

The inadequacy of the government’s response was laid bare by the unmitigated epidemiological and public relations disaster that was the saga of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. After a 14-day quarantine, at least 634 passengers and crew members (out of a total of 3,645 people) were confirmed to have been infected aboard the ship. “We’re in a petri dish,” one passenger said. “It’s an experiment. We’re their guinea pigs.”

Since people started leaving the ship on Feb. 19, confirmed cases among them have been reported in the United States, Australia, Israel and Britain. Whereas those countries placed returning passengers under another 14-day period of isolation, Japan simply released all Japanese nationals from the boat — and at least one of them later tested positive for Covid-19. Twenty-three passengers, most of them Japanese, were also accidentally allowed to go without having undergone mandatory medical tests.

Astonishingly, the Japanese government released without a test more than 90 officials who boarded the ship during the quarantine, even though four had already tested positive — and this, according to one report, because of concern that “they won’t be able to fulfill their official duties if found positive.” (so, let's not find out) The Health Ministry has since agreed to test 41 officials, but it still won’t test any medical professionals and quarantine officers who were on board, on grounds that “they had taken sufficient precautions” themselves.