The coronavirus crisis that could not be made use of…The problem of depopulation

We overcame the corona crisis

The corona epidemic began in one region of the Far East at the end of 2019, and the infection quickly spread throughout the world.

In Japan, the infection spread rapidly from the spring of 2020, and the government was busy responding, but while they were unable to come up with any fundamental solutions and were making stopgap measures, the coronavirus changed to a type with a lower rate of severe symptoms, and people eventually returned to their normal lives.

The remaining problem of population concentration in urban areas

Now, when we think about infectious diseases, it is natural that infections spread quickly in densely populated areas. In that reason, the government’s countermeasures were to reduce opportunities for human contact by “staying at home” and “teleworking”.

This in itself is not wrong as an infectious disease countermeasure, but when we consider the problems of population concentration in urban areas and the hollowing out of rural areas that Japan faces, I think there must have been another way to solve this population problem and infectious disease countermeasures.

Reverse thinking

One of the countermeasures against infectious diseases is to reduce the chances of human-to-human infection, but in large cities, people are close to each other and that make easy f to spread infections.

On the other hand, in depopulated areas, people are farther apart, making it harder for the infection to spread than in large cities.

Considering this, the probability of infection will decrease if people are moved from large cities to depopulated areas and the distance between people in large cities is increased.

To achieve this, for example, policies such as reducing corporate tax to zero in depopulated areas could be implemented to attract companies to move to rural areas from urban areas, which would lead to people moving from large cities to depopulated areas and reducing the population density of large cities.

In addition, depopulated areas could have increased tax revenue by moved companies from cities, which would have been a good result for companies, local governments in depopulated areas, and infectious disease countermeasures.

The corona crisis was not utilized

Although the coronavirus crisis is an unhappy event, but it is unfortunate that the situation was not even discussed, as it could have been a good chance to solve both the infectious disease and the depopulation problem we are currently facing at the same time.