Japanese President Shinzo Abe has ordered all Japanese schools closed for a month because of fear of spreading the COVID-19 Coronavirus according to the Japan Times.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday asked all elementary, junior high and high schools nationwide to close from Monday through the students’ spring break, which typically ends in early April.
“Efforts have been made to prevent the spread of infection among children in each region, and these one or two weeks will be an extremely critical period,” Abe told a meeting of key Cabinet ministers on the coronavirus outbreak crisis.
“The government attaches the top priority to the health and safety of children, among others,” he said.
Later Thursday, the health and welfare ministry said Abe’s request does not apply to day care centers for children and after-school facilities for elementary school students. (source)
It is good that Abe is doing this, but it is unlikely at the current point this will happen in America.
In the US, people are overworked and ordered to keep working even if they are sick or not feeling well, and they are often shamed or subject to “legally permitted” measures such as write-ups or being fired if they do not work. A similar rule applies to school, where students are monitored like insects under a microscope and there is an “expectation” of compliance or else measures will be taken against them.
It is unlikely that companies or society will want to change this, instead forcing people into work, which could likely spread the virus, at which point they will then deny any responsibility and, acting like fools, will claim that they need to figure how “how this problem happened”. It is analogous to a farmer who, receiving two cows, sells one for profit, then forces the other one to produce the milk of four cows and after the cow drops dead from exhaustion, hires a consultant to figure out why the cow died.
This is what the American workplace does. It forces people to work under bad circumstances, denies responsibility for inevitable consequences, and then tries to hire “consultants” to tell them how their selfish and abusive behaviors caused their own problems without ever calling them “selfish” or “abusive.”
Unfortunately, if this happens with this virus in the US, it could cost people their lives.