Rich and Strange Aeons

5 days ago (minus 8 hours): I decide to risk eating out. Upper story mall restaurant; half-open walls; CO2 generally under 600; not crowded. Sounds low risk, right? Drawbacks: it was after 7 PM, so a lot of people might have passed through; I was eating hot soba soup, so had to be unmasked for a while. (Vs dumplings, say, where you can just pop it under the mask and avoid breathing unfiltered air.) No one was coughing, though a couple women near by were talking a lot.

2 days later: I feel slightly oogy. Got more sleep, woke up tired (there were other plausible explanations), low energy by 4 PM, just a bit of nasal drip (as from dusting a lot, say)

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Future behavior: so literally the first time I try to "live normally" on my own, I get infected. This is not making it more likely for me to dine out indoors. Maybe I'm susceptible because my innate immune system is quiescent, I dunno. But, staying masked seems to work in avoiding actual severe illness, so I'll keep doing that.

OTOH with the tests here so cheap, I think I'll start doing regular surveillance testing, rather than only after some symptoms.

I'm also extending my stay here some more, in case things turn worse; last thing I want is to have to try to change Airbnbs while really feeling a flu. Turns out the price was dropping too, neat; still not as cheap as I could get by leaving Tokyo, but hey, health.

So, Japanese people wear masks a lot. Probably the main thing that got them through most of the pandemic, along with avoiding "the three Cs" and good contact tracing; Japan never had lockdowns. (And was worst in class for rich Asian countries for most of the pandemic, too.) But they already had the custom of wearing masks when sick, to protect others. So I wondered, did that make an observable difference in flu seasons, say?

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So what's the final verdict? It's *possible* that Japan has a much lower flu burden than the US: the strongest case for that is comparative hospitalizations per capita, with an 8-fold ratio. There's also a 4x ratio in deaths -- though that might be mostly canceled out if the US is estimating 'flu-associated' deaths (pulmonary and pneumonia and such, not just respiratory) and Japan isn't. OTOH medical visits don't seem dissimilar, given the greater likelihood of Japanese people to go see a doctor. But if flu transmission is similar, then Japan must have a much *lower* chance of being hospitalized for flu, which would be odd. Epidemiology is hard! Especially as a layman sticking my nose in and not knowing the messy details.

And of course even if there is a big difference in cases or deaths, I've done nothing to show that masking is responsible, though intuitively, sick people wearing masks when out of the house should help a lot.