German Institute for Japanese Studies
Institut français de recherche sur le Japon

DIJ MFJ Web-ForumThursday, 18 June 2020,

16:00 – 17:30h (Tokyo)
09:00 – 10:30h (Hamburg/Paris)
08:00 – 09:30h (London)

How Real Are Numbers? Making Sense of
National COVID-19 Statistics
Speakers

Ansgar Lohse, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Paul-André Rosental, Sciences Po Paris
Kenji Shibuya, King’s College London

Moderators

Sophie Buhnik, Senior Researcher IFRJ-MFJ
Barbara Holthus, Deputy Director DIJ

You can access this online event here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpS-EEJOdObfgYfsQ0yoUig

The number of infections, reproduction numbers, doubling speeds, death rates:
national pandemic statistics are updated, compared and discussed daily. Thenumbers are shocking, but so are the huge national differences. Why are there
so few people infected in Japan? Why is the death rate in Germany so low?
Why is the situation in France so bad? For sure, countries apply different testing and reporting methods. Simple comparisons are likely to be misleading.
Nevertheless, these numbers are relevant as they influence important policydecisions. In our Web-Forum we ask leading experts in the field from France,
Germany and Japan to explain to us the apparent differences in national data
related to the COVID-19 pandemic and what the numbers can really tell us
about the situations in the three countries.

Introducing the speakers and moderators

Ansgar Lohse

is Director of the I. Department of Medicine at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf(UKE), Germany, since 2005. Until April 2020, he also was head of the Centre of Internal Medicineof the UKE with the focus areas of inflammation, immunology, infection, and currently acts as
Deputy Coordinator for Emerging Infections at the German Center for Infection Research. He
studied medicine and philosophy in Göttingen, London and Boston from 1978 – 1984 and received his Doctorate in 1987 at the University of Marburg. After a two-year research stay at theWeizmann Institute of Science in Israel, he worked both clinically and in research at the Johannes
Gutenberg-University Mainz. He is a specialist in gastroenterology and infectious diseases, withspecial interest in basic and clinical immunology. He serves on many scientific boards, is editor
or associate editor of various clinical and scientific journals and member of the Hamburg Academyof Sciences where he chairs the commission “Infection & Society”.

Paul-André Rosental

is a Professor in Modern History at Sciences Po in Paris. He studies the making and implementation of social, demographic and health policies in 19th and 20th century Europe and leads theresearch team ESOPP in those fields (http://esopp.ehess.fr). His latest books include A Human
Garden: French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation (BerghahnBooks, 2020); and Population, the State, and National Grandeur: Demography as a political science in modern France (Peter Lang, 2018). Having led an ERC Advanced Grant program at thecrossroads between social sciences and medicine, he has directed Silicosis: A World History(Johns Hopkins U.P., 2017), the special issue From Silicosis to Silica Hazards in the American
Journal of Industrial Medicine, 58, S1, 2015, and contributed to several publications in medical
journals including Lancet Global Health and Lancet Rheumatology.

Kenji Shibuya

is founding Director of the newly established Institute for Population Health at King’s College London. He joined King’s from The University of Tokyo where he was Professor and Chair in theDepartment of Global Health Policy, Graduate School of Medicine. He was formerly at the World
Health Organization (WHO), where he was a Chief of Health Policy, and is currently serving asSenior Advisor to the Director-General of the WHO. Professor Shibuya also played a key role insetting the direction of the Japanese Government’s global health policy after the Hokkaido Toyako
G8 Summit, as well as leading the Lancet Series on Japan published in 2011. He chaired thelandmark Advisory Panel on Health Care 2035 for the Minister of Health, Labour & Welfare andhas held academic appointments at Teikyo University School of Medicine and Harvard University.

Sophie Buhnik, Ph.D. in Geography and Urban planning, Research Fellow of the French
Research Institute on Japan at the Maison
franco-japonaise, Tokyo. Her main scientificinterests include the analysis of residential anddaily mobilities in the aging and shrinking suburbs of Japan’s large cities, and policies tackling the local effects of housing vacancy. She
coordinated the latest issue of the journal
Ebisu. Études japonaises (2019).

Barbara Holthus, Ph.D., is a Sociologist andDeputy Director of the German Institute forJapanese Studies in Tokyo. Her main research interests include marriage and the family, childcare, happiness and well-being, media, as well as demographic change. She isthe lead editor of Japan through the lens of theTokyo Olympics (2020, Routledge, with I.
Gagné, W. Manzenreiter, F. Waldenberger).