As far as I know, ivermectin is NOT approved in Japan. Unbridled recently, the only treatment afforded to Covid patients was symptom relief. Recently they have stated that they will allow some treatments of the disease but this drip was not among those. It is possible it has been more recently, but if so it has escaped my notice. One of my students, a 27 year old woman had it. She was prescribed symptom relief only, had a high fever and headache and enjoyed the remaining week in at home isolation watching movies. That was at the end of this summer. Japan’s success is mostly due to the fact that they are attributing cause of death much closer to how such has traditionally been done. If sick with lung cancer and you die, you are not counted as a Covid death but as a lung cancer death. Testing of asymptomatic people is low low low and many who are tested do so at private expense at private land and the results are generally not reported to employer not the government. We all know that the PCR is not a test rather a technique to amplify genetic material so that it can be studied. The WHO AKA The Chinese Health Organization according to Health Minister Aso, and even the CDC have warned of it rendering false positives. You want to increase the number of cases, you grab as many people as possibly, sick and not and do tha PCR procedure. You want to have as few cases as possible in hopes that the world will come to the Olympics your country is hosting, you hold to the traditional standard for testing and test only those who are sick after you have ruled out all other possibilities for the chief complaint. All it is is a numbers game. That is all it ever has been. Though in Japan self righteousness was added. they pride themselves in being cleanlier than all others on the planet and used this as the reason we were not seeing cases and deaths here. No, at that time they were not testing at all. I am afraid I am going to anger many here with my next statement but it comes from study and experience. Most every study comparing any two cultures by any metric is most likely bunk. That is not to say that those engaging in the studies are bad actors, that they are intentionally misleading. It’s that most can not begin to realize the cultural differences behind the data being compared and thus assume that they are comparing the same things when they are not.