Setagaya Vaccination Update

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We’ll be getting our first shots on Monday, about two weeks after we received the tickets to be able to make a reservation. I am excited! Vaccinations are our best chance to push the reproduction rate of the virus below 1, despite the spread of the more transmissible Delta and Kappa variants (B.1.617.2 and B.1.617.1) that were first sequenced in India late last year. Right now it looks like these variants are rapidly replacing the Alpha variant that arrived from the UK earlier this year and will have largely done so by the opening of the Olympics three weeks from now.

Setagaya, the ward of Tokyo where we live, suspended its reservation system for a couple of days to perform an upgrade. Now that it has come back online, they have also extended the time period until when you can make reservations from the end of August to September 21. They will revisit it again after watching how many individuals will get vaccinations through their universities or workplaces starting from this month.

Looking at the September overview of open slots (which we can assume to be close to the pre-booking state) it seems the mass inoculation sites run by the city are designed to handle about 33,500 shots per week. All sites have some days off (presumably for the staff), but all are open Saturdays and Sundays to make it easy for people to get vaccinated without taking off time from work or schools.

Besides the mass vaccination sites people can also go to local clinics. Appointments there are mostly not done through the municipal reservation system. I have not seen any data yet on how many people are choosing their regular clinics vs mass vaccination sites, which makes it hard to get an accurate view for progress in Setagaya.

The earliest available mass vaccination slots listed right now are about 3 weeks from now. By July 20 vaccination tickets will have been mailed out to the rmaining population aged 16-59, with children age 12-15 added at the end of the month. Assuming the vaccination capacity for July 1-21 is comparable to the empty slots in September (1-21) then about 100,000 shots can be given over these three weeks, while about another half a million people will get tickets allowing them to make appointments to get two shots each. This will presumable push the available dates months into the future. The big unknown for me is how many shots the local clinics will handle.

Vaccine Supply Situation in Japan

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Currently about a million Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine doses are being used per day for general vaccinations in Japan. On top of that about 100,000 doses are used for vaccinating healthcare workers and other essential workers, such as police officers and firefighters.

The government has offered companies to vaccinate their employees using Moderna. Initially that offer was only extended to large companies with at least 1,000 employees, but after complaints smaller companies were allowed to band together or extend the service to some of their customers and business partners. Some real estate companies are offering it to all tenant companies in their office blocks. The uptake of this offer has been so overwhelming that the government is now talking about slowing down or pausing new signups for companies, as they were getting concerned the demand would outstrip the Moderna vaccine supply.

On June 4 the Japanese government updated municipalities with the vaccine distribution schedule for July and it includes lower numbers for vaccine shipments. Apparently, Pfizer has been shipping 36,000,000 doses per month in both June and July but will ship only about 2/3 of that in each of the next four months (July-October). Does that mean Japan will be unable to maintain the current pace of vaccinations? Some local governments are concerned that they were pushed to set up mass vaccination facilities, only now to be told there will be fewer vaccine doses.

However, the National government is still sitting on large stockpiles as it was due to receive 100 million doses of Pfizer and 40 million doses of Moderna by the end of June, most of which is still sitting in freezers. According to the published supply schedule, Japan should be able to sustain more than 1 million Pfizer shots a day until the end of November and 400,000 Moderna shots a day until the end of October by gradually drawing down these stockpiles.

Both dates are one month after the last contracted shipment month, by which time a total of 122 million residents would be vaccinated. The projected Pfizer usage rate is similar to what they’re doing now while in the case of Moderna the rate is more than 10 times larger (i.e. for use in future company vaccinations programs).

Assumptions:

  • 100 million Pfizer doses received by end of June
  • 41 million doses used by end of June.
  • 94 million additional doses received in roughly equal installments in July, August, September, October.
  • 40 million Moderna doses received by end of June
  • 800,000 doses used by end of June
  • 10 million additional doses received by end of September.

See this spreadsheet for an overview.

Will Japan be Vaccinated by November?

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“I want vaccines to have been given to all residents who want to receive them by the October-November period,” Japanese prime minister Suga Yoshihide said in a parliamentary debate on Wednesday, June 9, 2021. He also estimated, the grand total of doses could “exceed at least 40 million by the end of this month.”

As of June 8 the count on the Prime Minister’s Office (Kantei) website stood at 19.4 million doses, so to hit 40 million doses by the end of June requires a little more than 900,000 a day (20.6 m doses in 22 days). From the published numbers it looks like we may already be in that vicinity for the daily rate.

Even though the number of doses per day for residents age 65 and above (“koreisha”) for the most recent date added is still coming in at under 500,000 the day it’s released, but many of the local counts arrive delayed. The daily counts will later increase through daily retroactive updates. By the time all numbers for a given date have trickled in over the course of several weeks, the total often doubles. For example, the May 30 “koreisha” total was originally released as 200,187 but within 10 days it had grown to 405,165.

Let’s do a quick back of the envelope calculation to see if the projection for vaccinating all adult residents of Japan who want to get vaccinated by the end of November is realistic.

If they hit 40 million doses by end of June (which as I mentioned above requires an average of 900,000 doses a day until then) and we take a figure of 110 million adults of a a population of 126 million: assuming 80 percent of them would opt to get vaccinated, we end up with 88 million people times two doses per person, i.e. 176 million doses. Subtracting 40 million done by the end of June leaves 136 million doses to be injected between July and November (5 months). Divide the total by the roughly 150 days and it becomes clear that if they maintain about 900,000 a day for the next half a year they will indeed be done by the end of November.

However this ignores that the vaccinations are proceeding at vastly different speeds in different cities and prefectures. All things staying the way they are, once the most efficient places are done (which would happen before November) and only the laggards remain in the race, the 900,000 a day average would no longer be sustained. So the key will be to speed up the places that are lagging behind others right now.

How realistic is the 900,000 a day goal if daily vaccine counts still pop up on the Kantei website at less than 500,000? What’s the real number right now?

We can make a rough guess of what percentage of the actual daily vaccinations are represented in the initial count that gets published for a given date by looking at past data.

For example, the count for June 9 published today (June 10) for 65+ is 474,484. The actual number is likely to be over a million, as I’ll explain below. The published number is a partial count, as only about 50 percent of the vaccinations are reported via VRS (Vaccine Recording System) within one day. The rest arrives later. Another 10 percent or so arrive the next day, then another 5 percent, etc, etc until we get to over 99 percent of the total after a month or so.

I looked at the 28 days ending on June 8 and how they had changed on June 10 vs. June 9 in the Excel spreadsheets. They increased by factors of 1.0015 to 1.1845. Multiplying all these increases by each other to get the cumulative 28 day growth yields a factor of 2.27.

I repeated the same exercise for one day earlier, i.e. 28 days ending on June 7 and their change between June 9 vs. June 8. The daily increases range from 1.0058 to 1.1885. Multiplying 4 weeks’ worth of increases gives a factor of 2.47.

If we apply the lower of these factor values to today’s addition, on the assumption that the spread of what percentage of reports comes in after how many days is consistent, that would suggest an actual figure of 1.08 million vaccinations of residents 65+ done yesterday whose total count will be known by July 7 (after 28 days of reports still arriving). That’s on top of another 160,000 or so vaccinations of healthcare workers, by the way.

While it’s disgraceful that we have to figure out the state of the campaign so indirectly (because of a broken IT system built using 385 million yen of our taxes), this exercise at least gives us a good guess of how things are really going.

On that basis I’d say the government’s outline is plausible: Japan is likely to reach a goal of 40 million doses deployed by the end of June and full vaccination of willing adults by the end of November.

Setagaya Vaccination Update

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I live in Setagaya, the most populous of the 23 Special Wards (ku) of Tokyo. Out of about 195,000 residents aged 65 and over, about 141,000 have made reservations for vaccinations. Of those 73,000 have received at least one vaccine dose and 8,000 of these have received both doses. There are vacant reservation slots for another 54,000 people.

Starting from next Tuesday (June 15), tickets will be sent to the next group, including people with medical conditions and people aged 60-64. That includes my wife and myself. Note that it’s not your age today that counts but age on March 31, 2022. So anyone born before April 1, 1962 counts as age 60 and up! This is consistent with the system used for elementary school enrollment in Japan.

The next groups after that will be:

  • Age 50-59 (born before April 1, 1972): from June 30, 2021
  • Age 40-49 (born before April 1, 1982): from July 5, 2021
  • Age 30-39 (born before April 1, 1992): from July 12, 2021
  • Age 16-29: from July 20, 2021

Currently there is a published list of vaccination sites with available slots per day for each date until the end of August. At the moment free slots are available starting from early July (i.e. with a 3 week wait list). The wait list most likely will grow significantly, seeing the rate at which age groups will be added vs. the rate at which people are currently getting vaccinated.

Online reservations can be made 24 hours a day, except for website maintenance periods. Reservations can also be made by phone during daytime, but the number used is a 0570 number not covered by flat rate mobile phone plans and unreachable by IP telephony services such as Skype or Google Voice. For people who only have a mobile phone and who don’t have internet access this is not very convenient.

For the senior citizens the city has been offering a service where they can visit city run facilities who will help them make an online reservation using a smartphone. This service was further publicised via the jichikai (neighbourhood associations) in Setagaya.

Meanwhile the number of shots given to senior citizens has surpassed the number of shots to healthcare workers (10.7 vs 8.7 million doses) and first doses given to healthcare workers are exceeding 5 million, more than the 4.8 million previously quoted as the total number of healthcare workers eligible for them. Compliance seems exceptionally high.

In total, about 14.5 million out of 126 million residents have received at least one doses. The Olympic Games will begin in 44 days.

The TerraPower Natrium Reactor – a Quick Review

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TerraPower, a company funded by billionaire Bill Gates, has teamed up with several partners to build a demonstration nuclear power station in Wyoming by the end of the decade. Several sites are under consideration. The plan is to re-use the grid connection of a former thermal coal power plant, of which Wyoming has many.

The Natrium reactor developed by TerraPower in cooperation with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy is quite a departure from the design of the light water reactors (LWRs) that produce the bulk of nuclear power worldwide today. For one, its output is highly variable because it incorporates gigawatthour (GWh) energy storage using tanks of molten salt. The design is quite innovative, which creates both upsides and challenges.

After reviewing the company’s website and watching a webinar, I am quite impressed but also concerned. The reactor will still run on uranium and will produce radioactive fission products that will need to be contained and stored safely for thousands of years. This is still a largely unsolved problem. Countries that have been generating power from nuclear fuels are today sitting on thousands of tons of waste kept in intermediate storage, still without a proven long term storage solution. Eight decades since the start of the “atomic age” with the Manhattan Project that gave us nuclear reactors and atomic bombs we are only now seeing the first permanent storage site being used in Finland. Some consider this the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Proponents of nuclear power will argue that, given we already have existing waste, this is a problem we will need to address anyway and that the volume of highly active nuclear waste will remain relatively compact. Nevertheless, there is a lot that can go wrong there, especially if the volume keeps increasing.

What most excited me about the reactor concept was its incorporation of the heat store using molten salt tanks, which it borrowed from concentrated solar power (CSP). Everything from the molten salt tank to the grid connection is basically the same as in this type of solar power plant. The major difference is that the heat source is not solar power focused onto a tower by thousands of mirrors but an underground nuclear reactor. This means the designers could use existing technology developed to maturity over the last 2-3 decades for use in solar projects in Nevada, Australia, Morocco and other locations.

This part of the plant is conventional technology that will not be subject to the same regulatory oversight as the nuclear portion, making it easier and cheaper to build. At the same time, the nuclear portion of the plant is much smaller and simpler, requiring a lot less concrete and steel than in a LWR per MW of output capacity.

By incorporating the heat storage, the electrical output of the power station can be varied considerably – the TerraPower presentation showed a range of about 240 to 500 MWe, with 345 MWe available continually without charging or discharging the heat store. Output that varies by 100 percent roughly covers the demand swing between day and night in many power markets. If combined with solar and wind, the stored heat can be used to smooth out fluctuations in power output from those natural energy sources. Heat from the power station may also have applications for desalination, industrial processes and residential heating.

Conventional nuclear power stations such as PWRs or BWRs can not vary their output very much. They basically can only run at 100 percent load or be switched off. Once shut down, bringing them back up again takes a very long time. That makes them suitable only for base load but not for demand peaks such as in the afternoon or evening. For that they would have to be combined with energy storage such as pumped hydro, opportunities for which are limited by geography. Due to the literally built-in output flexibility of the salt storage system, a zero carbon grid could theoretically incorporate a lot more Natrium output capacity than would be possible with existing LWRs. From an economic point, it means the operators in a competitive electricity market with bidding for supplies can sell more power at lucrative peak prices instead of having to try to find buyers at night when demand and prices are low.

So what’s the catch? The nuclear reactor itself is a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR), basically a Fast Breeder Reactor (FBR) without the breeding: Except for the absence of a breeding blanket made of depleted uranium that slowly turns into plutonium, the technology is very similar. Perhaps you remember the Monju reactor in Fukui, Japan that was shut down after a major accident in 1995. The operators attempted to hide the extent of a coolant leak and fire, which led to a 15-year shutdown. After a second accident in 2010 the reactor was eventually decommissioned. In 1966 the prototype Fermi 1 FBR in Monroe, Michigan suffered a partial meltdown. It was permanently shut down in 1972. Several other sodium-cooled fast reactors have been built around the world, such as the French Superphénix, the Prototype Fast Reactor in Dounreay, Scotland and the SNR-300 in Kalkar, Germany. All of the above have since been shut down due to high costs or troubles or, like the one in Kalkar, were never even started up.

While sodium has a high temperature range between melting and boiling point and is a good heat conductor, it also reacts violently with water and oxygen. Naturally, you can not put out a sodium fire with water. Normally the top of the reactor vessel is filled with an inert gas such as argon to prevent sodium fires but it needs to be opened for loading and unloading fuel, during which time the sodium has to remain heated above its melting point. You do not want to start a fire then.

If an LWR overheats, steam bubbles will form that reduce the criticality, interrupting the chain reaction. By contrast, control of the chain reaction in SFRs depends 100 percent on positioning of the control rods.

While the cooling pipes will not have to withstand high steam pressures as in a BWR, they will be subject to thermal stress: The coolant temperature in an SFR is much higher, around 550 deg C (1020 F) which is basically red-hot and hot enough to melt some aluminium alloys (and of course salt, for the heat storage). When SolarReserve decided to build a molten salt CSP solar power station in Nevada, it turned to Rocketdyne to make some of the metal parts, because of their metallurgical expertise in rocket engine nozzles that are also exposed to high temperatures.

There are other viable solutions for base load in a zero carbon grid, such as geothermal power, utility scale battery storage, thermal storage using rock heated electrically with surplus wind and solar or green hydrogen powering fuel cells or gas turbines. Costs for wind, solar and battery storage have been falling rapidly for years. Once renewables are cheap enough, you can partially address issues of intermittent output by overbuilding capacity and simply idling some of it when not needed. Or you can use spare output when supply exceeds demand to produce hydrogen, for making ammonia and for use by the steel industry.

Some of these solutions depend more on geography than the Natrium reactor, which can be installed on any continent and provide power at time of day and in any season. However, it would definitely need to be safe and reliable. Ultimately, this new technology will first have to prove itself.

Vaccination Progress in Japan

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The City of Setagaya (東京都世田谷区) has announced the dates when vaccination will be expanded beyond the current group 2 (residents aged 65 and above). Between June 15-19, coupons will be mailed to group 3 which includes:

  • people with existing medical conditions
  • people aged 60-64 (anyone born no later than March 31, 1962)
  • people working in elderly care

Group 1 were the health care workers, if you are wondering!

Currently about half a million vaccinations are happening in Japan per day, about 2/3 of them aged 65 and above, 1/3 health care workers. As of Friday, 2021-05-28, over 92 percent of healthcare workers had received at least one shot and over 60 percent had received both. That leaves them only about 350,000 shots short of full coverage for first shots. About 1.55 million healthcare workers have only received one shot, so fully vaccinating them with a second shot in the next three weeks will be the bulk of the remaining vaccinations for this group.
Of the people aged 65 and above, 12.46 percent have received at least one shot and 0.86 percent have received both. Meanwhile the Olympics start in 52 days…

Setagaya also announced that more reservation slots would be opened at mass vaccination sites for people aged 65 and above, recommending people in that group who currently have dates in August to move them to July (i.e. cancel in August, make new reservation in July). This will then free up those slots for the next group.
This means there’s a good chance that both my wife and I (who were born before the March 1962 deadline for age 60-64) will get vaccinated in August.

In my last post I had pointed out that daily vaccination totals for healthcare workers and people above 65 was being handled differently. One set was being updated retroactively, the other set only once per listed date.

Basically, for healthcare workers the government publishes daily numbers (on weekdays, excluding public holidays) of the number of total shots given since the previous published total. That’s why numbers only get added for the final date, once a day. It is also why no vaccinations are listed on Saturday, Sundays and holidays — not because no healthcare workers were vaccinated on those days, but because no results are published on those days. Consequently, healthcare worker stats do not show how many healthcare workers were actually vaccinated on a particular day.

For people aged 65 and over, they precisely track the totals by the date the doses are used. So there are entries for Saturdays and Sundays, even though it may take until Tuesday for them to be listed on the website. Furthermore, unpublished counts of shots already given weeks ago are still finding their way to the Prime Minister’s Office and are then added. Here’s the total given for April 14, as listed on the day the numbers for a given recent date were also added:

May 18: 2,533
May 20: 2,666
May 27: 2,793
May 30: 3,078

A near 20 percent increase for vaccinations that already took place over a month ago is quite surprising, considering that vaccinations are tracked with Android tablets with software specifically developed for the purpose. How can a computer-based system be so slow? It actually makes fax machines look good by comparison (yes, they are still widely used here in Japan)!


Tracking Vaccination Numbers in Japan

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The website of the Prime Minister’s Office in Japan (Kantei) is providing a daily update of vaccination progress in two categories: medical staff (doctors and nurses) and senior residents (age 65 and above).

To track these vaccinations, the government has issued tablet computers running software known as the Vaccine Recording System (ワクチン接種記録システム, VRS). It was developed by Milabo, a small privately held company founded in 2013. It describes itself as:

A start-up that provides child-rearing support services such as DX, immunization, health checkup, checkup scheduler, electronic maternal and child notebook, health center reservation system, mainly for local governments.

It had previously worked with the cabinet secretariat on the “MyNumber” personal ID system that assigns a personal identification number to every resident of the country. The budget for developing VRS was 385 million yen (about US$3.5 million).

The software in the tablets is used to scan bar codes and forms when people receive their vaccine doses. Theoretically this should allow the government to accurately track the progress being made.

However, the numbers published on the website keep changing even after they are published. For example, on Monday, May 17 the Kantei website listed a total of 69,526 doses (first and second doses) given to seniors on Monday, May 10 and 57,172 on Saturday, May 15. Two days later, on Wednesday, May 19 the numbers for those two days had been revised to 71,543 and 83,311 doses, respectively. That is an increase of 2.9 percent and 45.7 percent several days after publication.

What this suggests is that the software does not track the numbers and automatically uploads them to a government server at the end of the day (say, via a mobile data connection with a SIM card). Instead, there must be manual steps involved. Comparing the results published two days apart and looking back across 4 weeks worth of data, it turns out that daily totals still change after a whole month, for example by 46 doses from 2,533 to 2,579 for Wednesday, April 14 between May 17 and 19. I mean, really?

In rare cases the numbers have also decreased by 2 or 3 doses from the previously reported totals, which would be hard to explain by late reporting: the numbers should go up but not down! This could be cases were mistakes were made that made vaccination unreliable and so the cases were purged from the total.

The good news is that currently about 77 percent of healthcare workers have received at least one dose while 42 percent have received both doses. At the current pace of second doses it should take less than two weeks for all remaining healthcare workers to have received their first shots and three weeks after that anyone willing to get the first shot will have had their second shot too. For some strange reason, the healthcare worker counts seem unaffected by the late count updates and I don’t understand why.

One thing to look forward to is for the Moderna vaccine (mRNA-1273) to receive approval in Japan at the end end of this week. It is very similar to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in terms of safety and efficacy. It has already been imported into Japan since the end of last month.

There are about 7 times more senior citizens than there are health care workers, so the number will have to increase much more. There should be enough vaccine by the end of June/early July to vaccinate about 36 million of them, but will the local governments be able to keep up with setting up vaccination sites? Each prefecture and city has been left to figure it out on its own. There is no national vaccination reservation system, each local government was left to build its own system. If the bottleneck is not vaccine supplies but organisation then the Moderna vaccine will not help all that much.

If Japan manages to vaccinate all its doctors and nurses by early June and most of its people aged 65 and above by the end of July, that still leaves about 70 million people to be vaccinated after that, with no date yet when this is expected to start and how long it is expected to take. It looks like a long road ahead to herd immunity and for life to return to normal.

Covid Vaccinations in Japan

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Japan has been lagging other rich countries on the number of vaccine shots delivered per 100 people. It reportedly comes 37th out of 37 OECD countries. Other countries already started vaccinating in December or early January while Japan didn’t approve of the its first vaccine until February. Vaccinations of doctors and nurses started in initially small numbers in March. The elderly were added starting from April 12, but again numbers were initially very small.

My 81-year old mother in Germany got her second shot before the end of March. My 86-year old mother-in-law in Japan was not even able to make an application before yesterday (May 14) and is now waiting for the vaccination date to come. Tokyo is currently in its third state of emergency, struggling with its fourth wave of infections.

For the last 7 days with published numbers for vaccinations of healthcare workers and elderly residents (2021-05-05 to 2021-05-13) the daily average is about 193,000 doses per day. At that rate it would take 3 1/2 years to finish vaccinating the entire population.

Even other rich countries in the Pacific region that (unlike Japan) currently have few new Covid cases have vaccinated far more of their population. For example, with only 5 Covid-19 deaths in the past 12 months New Zealand has been virtually Covid-free, yet it has vaccinated proportionally twice as much of its population than has Japan. The same is true for Australia and South Korea, which both have proportionally fewer cases but more vaccinations.

Like other countries, Japan has struggled to secure sufficient vaccine supplies, but that is not the whole picture. Starting from April, far more vaccine doses have been arriving than were being used, leaving 24 of 28 million doses imported by the end of April still unused in early May.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) the expected vaccine supply in May and June should allow for bringing in enough Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for the entire 36 million residents aged 65 and above by the week starting 2021-06-28, which should allow giving everyone the first shot in early July, knowing there will be enough vaccine for the second shot three weeks later, thereby finishing to vaccinate the 65+ population by the end of July.

As an aside, Japan rigidly adheres to the 3 week interval set by the manufacturer, unlike the UK and Germany which had lengthened the interval between shots to maximize early partial immunity by giving as many people as possible a first shot: The protection given by the first shot is considerably stronger than half the final protection from both shots, so fewer people will become ill or die in a population of 10 million if 1 million are half-vaccinated than if 500,000 are fully vaccinated but the rest non-vaccinated.

Shipments arrive in boxes of 195 vials. Starting from the week of 2021-05-10, all boxes will be paired with low dead space syringes needed for 6 doses per vial = 1,170 shots per box. Previously only 5 doses could be extracted with the available syringes (975 shots per box).

2021-05-10 + 2021-05-17: 16,000 boxes = 18,720,000 doses total
2021-05-24 + 2021-05-31: 13,000 boxes or more = 15,210,000 doses or more
2021-06-07 + 2021-06-14: 13,435 boxes or more = 15,718,950 doses or more
2021-06-21 + 2021-06-28: 13,434 boxes or more = 15,717,780 doses or more

The “or more” in the numbers above refers to extra supplies that may be released from the central government’s stockpile whose size they don’t normally talk about.

Combined with the much smaller numbers in April that’s a total of 62,710 boxes, enough for two doses each for 35,490,000 residents aged 65 or above.

With supplies secured, the big question will be how fast the vaccine can actually be distributed. With the national government only taking care of import and distribution of vaccines, the actual vaccinations are left to local governments and are happening in a patchwork of different approaches. For example, in Setagaya where I live, the city website lists quite a few public vaccination sites to be set up at event halls, gymnasims, etc. in the next couple of weeks and months. There’s a website to make online reservations, once your mailed coupon arrives. This is similar to the approach in Germany. In my mother-in-law’s city in Saitama prefecture however, the city lists hospitals and small clinics, none of which can be reserved online yet (reservations are by telephone only) and many of them will currently only accept people already on their patient register. That approach is not very encouraging for cranking up the volume.

The central government-run vaccination sites to be set up in Tokyo and Osaka that are supposed to handle 10,000 and 5,000 vaccinations per day respectively will not be a game changer unless there will be many more such sites operating everywhere for the rest of the year. 10,000 shots a day for 3 months (the planned operating time of the Tokyo/Kanto site) will cover 2 shots for 450,000 people, a mere 5% of the 65+ population of Tokyo+3 (Kanagawa, Saitama and Chiba) of 9 million and then there will be the much larger under-65 population still to take care of.

The next group in line will be the under-65 with pre-existing conditions, then everybody else (probably in decreasing age order). Japan will need many more mass vaccination sites, it will need to recruit and train staff (both people with a medical background and volunteers) and maybe also change some regulations to widen the circle of people qualified to give injections. Otherwise the vaccination process could drag on far into next year. Another winter with another wave of infections and an unpredictable cost in lives and economic pain would be disastrous.

See also:

Replacement Chainrings for Sugino Compact Plus Cranks (OX601D, OX801D)

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Since 2016 I have been using a Sugino OX601D “compact-plus” crank on my Elephant Bikes National Forest Explorer. A compact-plus crank offers lower gearing than conventional 50/34 “compact” or 52/36 “mid-compact” cranks. I use 42/26 rings. Another popular combination is 46/30.

These smaller tooth counts allow for lower gears, making hilly courses more accessible to many cyclists of different abilities. This used to be the purpose of triple cranks until they were largely abandoned by Shimano, Campagnolo and SRAM a couple of years ago. In 2013 Shimano dropped triples on Ultegra when it moved from 6700 to 6800. The following year it did the same to 105 with the switch from 5700 to 5800. So-called compact and mid-compact double cranks were supposed to be a replacement for triples, but in truth their gearing never went low enough for many cyclists on all kinds of terrain.

Most road triple cranks used a bolt circle of 130/74 mm or 110/74. That meant the middle could be no smaller than 38T (130 BCD) or 33T (110 BCD), though in practice 39T and 34T were more common. The 74 BCD allows rings of 32T and smaller, down to 24T. Shimano compacts give you only 110 BCD, excluding any inner rings smaller than 34T.

Into this void stepped Sugino with its compact-plus cranks that combined the more flexible gearing of triples with compatibility with double front derailleurs and shifters. They do that with a 110/74 BCD combination with 5 bolts, just like an old touring triple (typical configuration: 48/36/26).

Effectively, a compact plus crank is a triple in which the middle and large rings are replaced by one in-between ring that can do both jobs. So for example, instead of a 50/39/30 you would have a 46/30. You just give up some very tall gears, but those typically see very little actual use outside of road racing.

Eventually Shimano also jumped on the compact-plus bandwagon: It is now offering 48/31 and 46/30 cranks in its GRX group set for gravel bikes, using a proprietary 110/80 BCD setup with 4 bolts.

I’ve been very happy with my Sugino OX601D. The 42T large ring and the 26T small ring in combination with a 11-32 cassette (11 speed) provide just the right gear range for my kind of riding. I ride a lot of mountain routes with grades of 10 percent and more and 160 km or more in a day where I really appreciate being able to spin up a mountain in a low gear. If I push heavy gears, I end up paying for it with knee pain.

Recently I replaced my bicycle chain as it had worn and stretched and noticed in the process that the teeth of the large ring were quite worn too. I had put over 30,000 km on that crank already and should have replaced the most recent chain a long time ago. In any case, I realized that I now needed a new chain ring and it turned out that Sugino no longer makes it. That’s because the OX601D and OX801D cranks have been discontinued, along with the PE110S rings that were used on them.

Sugino only ever sold these cranks with ring combinations of 44T to 50T for the large ring and 30T or more for the small ring. The 40T and 42T versions of the PE110S were made specifically for use with the ZX801D, a Mountain Bike equivalent of the OX801D but Soma/Merry Sales in the US sold them as a combination with the OX601D. That’s where I had bought mine.

Sugino’s current compact-plus offering is the OX2-901D, the successor to the OX901D which in turn was the 10/11-speed version of the 9/10-speed OX801D. My OX601D is a cheaper but functionally identical version of the OX801D – basically just not as shiny. I had no problems running the OX601D in an 11-speed configuration, with an 11-speed chain, cassette and rear derailleur, but I guess there are some subtle differences with the latest versions, such as maybe the spacing between the two rings to optimize it for the narrower 11-speed chain.

The OX2-901D uses CP110S chain rings with the same 110 BCD bolt circle as the PE110S, but they’re for 11 speed. The large rings are offered in even steps from 44T to 52T and small rings (CP74S, CP110s) in even numbers from 30T to 36T. There is no 40T or 42T for the large ring or 24, 26 or 28 for the small ring as there was for the PE110S for the ZX801D because there’s no MTB equivalent of the OX2-901D. Sugono’s only concession to people needing lower gearing is the “Super Hill Climb” CY5-SHC, a 27T 74 BCD inner ring.

One option would have been to buy a CP110S 44T chain ring. Given the close family relationship between the OX2-901D, OX901D and OX801D/OX601D, I am pretty sure it would have worked worked just fine on my older crank. It would have raised the gearing on the large ring by about 5 percent though (44/42). On top of that, the difference in tooth count between the two rings would have increased from 16T (42-26) to 18T (44-28). The specification for my FD-CX70 says its maximum capacity is 16T, but it would probably would have still worked. However, 44/26 at the front with 11-32 at the rear would on paper have required a total rear derailleur capacity of 39, one more than the specification of my RD-6800-GS. That can get tricky.

Exceeding the total rear derailleur capacity theoretically creates problems during cross chaining, as the rear derailleur arm can not take up all the chain slack from switching between the two extreme positions. If the installed chain is kept short enough to not go slack when running on the the small ring at the front with the smallest sprocket at the rear, it risks the derailleur pulley making contact with the spinning cassette when running on the big ring at the front and the largest sprocket at the rear. That could be disastrous. The safer way is to keep the chain long enough for the big/big combination, which I quite often use. At worst your chain will slip in the small/small combination which should be avoided anyway (and which is easy to avoid, you just switch back to the big ring after the first couple of upshifts when you have reached the top of a steep climb).

Sugino rings are not the only choice for compact-plus cranks. French bicycle parts maker Spécialités T.A. also offers a wide variety of high quality chain rings that can be used on many different cranks. Specifically, the TA Zephyr rings are also ramped and pinned for Shimano STI and will work with 10 and 11 speed groups. When you are looking for a large ring for a Sugino OX crank, it is best to use a 110 BCD ring meant for a use as a middle in a triple. That’s because these rings are mounted on the inside of the OX crank spider, not the outside. This matters because some rings have bolt holes that are countersunk for mounting on a particular side, to match bolts with conical heads. So it makes a difference if the bolt enters the bolt hole from the left or the right. In any case, there’s a TA Zephyr 110 BCD middle in either 40T or 42T, making them suitable replacements for the PE110S 40T and 42T formerly made for the ZX801D that are no longer available (EDIT: for the 74 BCD inner replacement I used a TA Zelito, which are available in 24T, 26T, 28T, 30T and 32T).

It’s a pity that Sugino no longer offers chain ring combinations below 44/30, such as 44/28, 42/26, 40/26 or 40/24 which would all be possible with the dual bolt circle of 110/74 mm on OX and OX2 cranks. As long as TA offers the rings we can still create and maintain such combinations though.

Another great option are Rene Herse cranks, which are available in a wide range of chain ring sizes, supporting speeds from 9 to 12 speed. That may be my fall-back position a couple of years down the road.

EDIT: I bought a 110 BCD TA Zephyr 40T as the large ring and a 74 BCD TA Zelito 24T as the small ring replacement (www.bike-components.de/en). The shift quality with the Spécialités T.A. rings is fantastic. The OX601D now shifts better than with the Sugino rings, arguably as well as any mechanical shifting (non-Di2) setup of any brand or model I have ever used. I am extremely happy with it. Dropping the chain ring sizes by two teeth from 42/26 to 40/24 has not been any drawback on the flat or descents but has helped me on climbs.

“Questions About GDPR Data Access Process” Spam from Virginia

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  • NOTE: See recent updates below the original April 2021 post!

The other day, I received the following email:

Subject: Questions About GDPR Data Access Process for [DOMAINNAME]
To Whom It May Concern:

My name is [REDACTED], and I am a resident of Roanoke, Virginia. I have a few questions about your process for responding to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data access requests:

  1. Would you process a GDPR data access request from me even though I am not a resident of the European Union?
  2. Do you process GDPR data access requests via email, a website, or telephone? If via a website, what is the URL I should go to?
  3. What personal information do I have to submit for you to verify and process a GDPR data access request?
  4. What information do you provide in response to a GDPR data access request?

To be clear, I am not submitting a data access request at this time. My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request.

Thank you in advance for your answers to these questions. If there is a better contact for processing GDPR requests regarding [DOMAINNAME], I kindly ask that you forward my request to them.

I look forward to your reply without undue delay and at most within one month of this email, as required by Article 12 of GDPR.

Sincerely,

[REDACTED]

It’s a confusing email, but as it turns out, one received by many other website owners. In fact, there’s a thread about it on Reddit.

GDPR deals with processing personally identifiable information. Non-compliance can lead to stiff fines. It even applies to companies outside the EU if they process personal data of EU residents.

If you get a request regarding personally identifiable information from a EU resident, you will need to answer promptly or you can face fines. However, no such requirement exists under GDPR regarding data of individuals outside the EU.

I don’t know what the intention of the sender of this email email is, but I have my suspicions.

The email was sent from an address at “potomacmail.com”, a recently registered domain (2020-03-02). It was sent from an Amazon EC2 host (52.23.113.96). The HTML portion of the email contains an image reference to a single pixel “web bug”, an image loaded from the potomacmail.com website that will cause the IP address of the browser to be logged on that server when you open the email with a web client that doesn’t automatically block images from untrusted senders:

https://potomacmail.com/p.png?req=GDPR&target=1234

The URI contains a unique value (it was something other than 1234 in my case) that presumably identifies the recipient of the email. In other words, the senders of this email themselves collect personally identifiable information which, if the recipient happens to be in the EU, is subject to GDPR and its potential fines.

UPDATE (2021-12-11)
There is a similar spam e-mail going around recently, with almost identical wording but mentioning the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) instead of the European GDPR:

Subject: Questions About CCPA Data Access Process for [DOMAINNAME]

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is [REDACTED], and I am a resident of San Francisco, California. I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests:

1. Do you process CCPA data access requests via email, a website, or telephone? If via a website, what is the URL I should go to?
2. What personal information do I have to submit for you to verify and process a CCPA data access request?
3. What information do you provide in response to a CCPA data access request?

To be clear, I am not submitting a data access request at this time. My questions are about your process for when I do submit a request.
(…)

This email was sent from an address at “yosemitemail.com”, a domain registered on 2020-03-02 with the same registrar at the exact same time as the “potomacmail.com” domain used in the GDPR variant of this spam:

Domain Name: YOSEMITEMAIL.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2498859495_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2021-03-08T03:30:04Z
Creation Date: 2020-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.

Domain Name: POTOMACMAIL.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2498859494_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namecheap.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namecheap.com
Updated Date: 2021-03-03T22:25:43Z
Creation Date: 2020-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-03-02T02:15:46Z
Registrar: NameCheap, Inc.

As you can see, the creation time is the exact same, down to the second and the Domain IDs of the two domains are actually consecutive. Both sender domains were obviously created by the same registrant who uses them for the same purpose.

As far as I can tell, whether you are in California or outside, you are under no obligation to reply to this email. I would not advise replying to it.

UPDATE (2021-12-13)
The GDPR mails sent in the name of a person in Russia are sent from a domain registered via a different registrar about one month after the other two domains:

domain: NOVATORMAIL.RU
nserver: ns1crv.name.com.
nserver: ns2ckr.name.com.
nserver: ns3cjl.name.com.
nserver: ns4fpy.name.com.
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED, UNVERIFIED
person: Private Person
registrar: RU-CENTER-RU
admin-contact: https://www.nic.ru/whois
created: 2020-04-06T05:35:06Z
paid-till: 2022-04-06T05:35:06Z
free-date: 2022-05-07
source: TCI

Another domain used for sender addresses is “envoiemail.fr” which was registered a day after “yosemitemail.com” and “potomacmail.com”

domain: envoiemail.fr
status: ACTIVE
hold: NO
holder-c: ANO00-FRNIC
admin-c: ANO00-FRNIC
tech-c: RT12727-FRNIC
zone-c: NFC1-FRNIC
nsl-id: NSL82816-FRNIC
registrar: 1API GmbH
Expiry Date: 2022-03-03T20:45:06Z
created: 2021-03-03T20:45:06Z
last-update: 2021-03-03T20:45:07Z
source: FRNIC

All four domains have their email hosted at Google. That is not unusual, lots of domains use Gmail for mail hosting these days. It is still worth pointing out though.

POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.COM.
POTOMACMAIL.COM. 3600 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.COM.

YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.COM.
YOSEMITEMAIL.COM. 1799 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.COM.

NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
NOVATORMAIL.RU. 300 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.com.

envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 10 alt3.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 10 alt4.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
envoiemail.fr. 1799 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.com.

I am told the GDPR reply period of one month under Article 12 of GDPR only applies to data access requests, which the email specifically clarifies this is not.

UPDATE (2021-12-15)

It turns out that these deceptive emails using fake identities were sent out by a researcher at Princeton University as part of a study into how website operators implement GDPR and CCPA. In the most recent mails to website operators, the senders are now disclosing their background instead of using fake identities.

These GDPR and CCPA emails created great anxiety amongst the recipients (nobody wants to pay huge fines) and that should have been clear to the senders from the very beginning, yet they went ahead and spammed us as if we were human guinea pigs.

Even if somehow it wasn’t clear to them in the beginning, public blog posts and forum discussions after the April spam run should soon have shown them that this wasn’t going to end well. Why did they continue with the same mode of operation more than half a year later? And why did their university let them do that?

Normally I would expect to be able to easily distinguish between online scams and academic research but I guess, not any more. We are living in strange times.