Mass Casualty Event in Japan in 2022

Post #1009

Of every 10,000 people who die in Japan, 9,997 of them (99.97%) are cremated. This allows you to use cremation statistics to track overall deaths. But Japan is an ageing nation, so more deaths are expected to occur every year. After establishing a baseline on the rate of growth in the yearly deaths, a 99% Prediction Interval can be used.

The 99% Prediction Interval let’s you know if any surge in deaths had been so unusual as to represent a “mass casualty event” (death count beyond the upper boundary of a 99% Prediction Interval). Here are the results without that Prediction Interval:

The regression line equation reveals that a typical year has ~12,750 more deaths in it than the previous year did, and the trend line has been extrapolated forward a few years to show what the expectations would be. Notice how 2020 fit right in with expectations — indicating that COVID, without a COVID shot, was not dangerous.

But by December of 2021, most people in Japan had taken COVID shots, as is revealed by the average number of shots per 100 persons given out over the prior 6 months:

By December of 2021, Japan had reached a COVID shot uptake rate of 1.4 shots per person (140 shots per 100 persons) over the prior 6 months. The COVID shot uptake rate of the USA — peaking in the summer of 2021 (before Japan) — is added for perspective. The addition of the Prediction Interval reveals mass casualty in 2022:

While the 2021 deaths (red) sit just beyond the upper bound of the 99% Prediction Interval (yellow), the 2022 deaths sit far beyond the upper bound — indicating a mass casualty event occurred in the year of 2022. The actual cremations in 2022 were higher than the expected cremations by a whopping 170,000 (definitely a mass casualty event).

But this is after the predominant COVID variant had become one that is no more dangerous to get than the flu: the Omicron variant:

When over 70% of the deaths that you ascribe to an infection are not really deaths “from” that infection, but are merely deaths “with” that infection, then that means that less than 30% of the reported deaths actually do come from that infection. It also means that your official death estimate is more than 3 times too large.

Another way to say this is that the true COVID deaths were less than a third of the numbers that were being officially reported by governments.

But if COVID was no worse than flu in 2022, how can you explain the mass casualty seen in Japan? The best explanation for it is the late peak in the uptake of COVID shots, because Japan’s uptake of COVID shots reached much higher than that found in the USA: they entered 2022 with much higher COVID shot coverage than the USA.

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NOTE: A follow-up report has been made for South Korea here.