How one country stopped COVID dead in its tracks

“It always comes down to vaccines, to social restrictions [on] large gatherings, mask-wearing,” Dale Fisher, group chief of medicine at Singapore’s National University Health System, told The Daily Beast. “There’s no secret code that any country has discovered.”

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While many countries including the United States struggle against a stubborn minority of fervent anti-vaxxers, Japan has quietly vaccinated 80 percent of its 126 million people. That’s nearly everyone who’s over 5 years old and thus eligible.

In a lot of countries, mask mandates are deeply controversial. But not in Japan, where many people habitually wore masks in public even before the pandemic.

When SARS-CoV-2 first came to Japan, the country suffered like every other country did, scrambling to contain the virus through a combination of business and school closures, mask mandates, contact-tracing, quarantines, and travel bans.

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