Counting COVID-19 patients by hand? Japan's operation shocked everyone

According to foreign media reports, on the 17th , Japan convened a meeting of the House of Representatives Budget Committee . At the meeting , based on questions from members of parliament, it answered questions related to "how the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare counts the number of new coronavirus patients nationwide. "

The Director of the Health Bureau of the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare responded that since the outbreak of the new coronavirus epidemic, various data such as the number of newly confirmed cases have been counted manually .

He then explained the entire process, saying that after 12 o'clock every night , the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's outsourcing company searches for published data on the official websites of 47 prefectures, looks at new cases with their eyes , and then calculates the number of confirmed patients by hand . He added that the number of deaths and information on other infected patients are calculated using the same method.

Once this incident was exposed, it caused heated discussions among the Japanese people and became a hot topic on social media . People said that the government's manual calculation operation was really incredible.

The Japanese government has been heavily criticized for its backward statistical methods. People believe that the data calculated manually are not credible. Many netizens left messages accusing the government of being inefficient and said that it would be difficult to promote Japan's digital reforms in this way.

In response, Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said : "I know that since the outbreak , statistics have been calculated manually."

In fact, in addition to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, manual calculation is also particularly favored by Japanese police , and many cabinet and local administrative agencies are also accustomed to using manual calculation and manual entry methods .

Therefore, although Japan has advocated paperless office very early, it is one of the white-collar workplaces in the world where leather-bound paper notebooks are most popular and used in the largest quantities. The office equipment and hardware used by many famous Japanese companies also appear to be lagging behind, and "cold weapons" such as calculators are very common.

In 2020, statistics from Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications showed that 95% of companies still used fax machines as their main means of communication, while other methods such as office telephones and various notification cards were also the most commonly used.

As we all know, the Japanese are famous for their conservatism. Even though Japan is now a developed country, they still prefer traditional ways of life and work and resist electronicization. Although fax machines or manual calculations may not be irreplaceable, it is not easy to change their conservative thinking.

Japan

epidemic

Manual calculation