Like many foreign residents of Japan during the early days of the country¡¯s COVID-19 outbreak, Shane Reustle and Jiahui Zhou recall poring over websites run by the health ministry and local municipalities to try to get a clear picture of how infections were spreading in the world¡¯s third-largest economy.
But their attempts to quickly grasp the situation were ¡ª and sometimes still are ¡ª hampered by infrequent site updates, a shortage of multilingual information and overly granular statistics.
¡°In most countries, it¡¯s been pretty straightforward how many cases they have,¡± said Reustle, a Tokyo-based software engineer. ¡°But in Japan, you have this really complicated system of cruise ship passengers, charter flight passengers, officers on the ship, etc.,¡± he said, referring to the weekslong saga of an outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship that eventually led to more than 700 infections. ¡°Some different organizations count them differently.¡±
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