Japan’s government has taken a number of measures, including declaring a state of emergency, to combat the spread COVID-19. We examine the mechanisms through which the government’s policies have led to changes in people’s behavior. Using smartphone location data, we construct a daily prefecture-level stay-at-home measure to identify the following two effects: (1) the effect that citizens refrained from going out in line with the government’s request, and (2) the effect that government announcements reinforced awareness with regard to the seriousness of the pandemic and people voluntarily refrained from going out. Our main findings are as follows. First, the declaration of the state of emergency reduced the number of people leaving their homes by 8.5% through the first channel, which is of the same order of magnitude as the estimates obtained for lockdowns in the United States. Second, a 1% increase in new infections in a prefecture reduces people’s outings in that prefecture by 0.027%. Third, the government’s requests are responsible for about one quarter of the decrease in outings in Tokyo, while the remaining three quarters are the result of citizens obtaining new information through government announcements and the daily release of the number of infections. The findings suggest that what mattered for containing the spread of COVID-19 was not strong, legally binding measures but the provision of appropriate information that encouraged people to change their behavior.

Changes in people’s behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic can be regarded as the result of two types of effects: the “intervention effect” (changes resulting from government orders for people to change their behavior) and the “information effect” (voluntary changes in people’s behavior based on information about the pandemic). Using age-specific mobile location data, we examine how the intervention and information effects differ across age groups. Our main findings are as follows. First, the age profile of the intervention effect shows that the degree to which people refrained from going out was smaller for older age groups, who are at a higher risk of serious illness and death, than for younger age groups. Second, the age profile of the information effect shows that the degree to which people stayed at home tended to increase with age for weekends and holidays. Thus, while Acemoglu et al. (2020) proposed targeted lockdowns requiring stricter lockdown policies for the oldest group in order to protect those at a high risk of serious illness and death, our findings suggest that Japan’s government intervention had a very different effect in that it primarily reduced outings by the young, and what led to the quarantining of older groups at higher risk instead was people’s voluntary response to information about the pandemic. Third, the information effect has been on a downward trend since the summer of 2020. It is relatively more pronounced among the young, so that the age profile of the information effect remains upward sloping.

Electron-impact detachment of ${\mathrm{H}}^{\mathrm{-}}$ was studied with the TARN II storage ring (at the Institute for Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo) and the associated high-resolution electron beam. The relative cross sections were measured for the relative energies between electron and ion from 0 to 60 eV in search of the ${\mathrm{H}}^{2\mathrm{-}}$ resonances that were reported earlier. No evidence was found for the existence of these resonance states. © 1996 The American Physical Society.

Delayed platelet recovery is an inherent problem with cord blood cell transplantation (CBCT). To investigate this problem, the number of human megakaryocyte (MK) progenitor cells in cord blood (CB; n = 24) was measured and compared with that in G-CSF-mobilized peripheral blood stem cells (PBSC; n = 25). The median numbers of colony-forming units for MK (CFU-MK) that were detected by a serum-free assay system in CB and peripheral blood (PB) were 26 (range, 6-102)/10(5) nucleated cells (NC) and 37 (2-540)/10(5) mononuclear cells (MNC), respectively. The numbers of colony-forming units for granulocyte/macrophage (CFU-GM) were 88 (33-241)/10(5) NC in CB and 138 (6.3-1,250)/10(5) MNC in PB. The frequencies of CD34(+) cells in CB and PB were, respectively, 0.44% (0.10-1.07) and 0.98% (0.05-20.8). The numbers of CFU-MK in CB and PBSC were correlated with those of CD34(+) cells. The estimated number of infused CFU-MK in CBCT was 1/15 that of PBSC transplantation (PBSCT), based upon the above data and the widely used standard doses for both types of transplants. Further, the numbers of infused CFU-MK in patients who received allogeneic PBSCT at our institute were inversely correlated with the speed of platelet recovery. These data indicate that delayed platelet recovery after CBCT is simply due to the low number of CFU-MK contained in grafts.