Dear Regular Newsletter Readers,
Welcome to the first edition of our 2022 newsletter and I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year.
Overshadowing the usual happiness and prosperity that we wish to each other at this time of the year is the continuation of the Covid problem. It seems pretty clear that Covid, Delta, Omicron and other viruses that are yet to be found and named will continue to affect all our lives as we move through this year and into 2023. Unfortunately, there are some countries in the world that are still struggling to enforce certain rules and or reinstate them to try to stop the spread of Covid, such as mask wearing for school children in the UK. At first it was mandatory for school children to wear a mask and then when the number of Covid cases started to fall and more and more people were getting vaccinated the government relaxed the rules and school children were no longer forced to wear masks. It is clear to see that phasing out mask wearing in schools was premature as it has lead to more contraction of Covid and its variants and the fallout from all this is clear to see, there are so many regular teachers off school sick and there are not enough substitute cover teaching staff to support the situation.
This is just another good example of a country doing too little too late. We cannot completely blame the government, but we can say that the PM (Boris Johnson) and his cronies have been very wishy-washy with rule making and rule enforcement and this has led to the increase in Covid and other variant cases. Only last week, I heard Boris Johnson say in a BBC news interview that although it has now been made mandatory again for school children to wear masks he said that “school children will not have to wear a mask any longer than is necessary” which indicates to me that he is not comfortable reintroducing this rule (a rule that should never have been relaxed in the first place) as he is fearful of the negative reaction of the UK people. In the UK people have trouble conforming, as they do in many other countries throughout the world, and this makes policy making very challenging for governments; however, when governments like the one in the UK are wishy-washy with their policy making and prone to being accused of double standards (as they have been throughout) then this only further hampers getting people in the UK to conform.
Over here in Japan, it’s quite the opposite (as I think I have mentioned on quite a few occasions now), people follow the rules set out by the government and will not argue, they conform for the good of the people and hence the low infection rates for Covid and other variants of Covid. Although the infection numbers are beginning to increase a little bit here in Japan (Okinawa especially) they are nowhere near the number we are seeing in some other countries in the world, particularly in some European countries like the UK and France. The French president Emmanuel Macron recently made a very controversial remark in which he said that he “wanted to piss off the unvaccinated” as a means to force them to get vaccinated. He was then accused by the leader of the opposition party on the left, Marine LePen of referring to the “unvaccinated” as second class citizens and she stated that “A President should not say that”.
It is clear that people in general over in the west and in other parts of the world struggle to conform in most situations and when their governments are made up of people that also struggle with conformity and are given to double standards then there is only one likely outcome and in the case of Covid the outcome is an increase in infections and a prolonged pandemic.
Have a good weekend and we’ll be back with you next week.