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 — and sometimes still are — 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.”