For a good part of last week, the unrivalled highlight of Japanese television — looped on news programmes — was a short computer simulation of a salaryman sitting at his desk and coughing. Its primetime primacy is total: this cough is the Killing Eve of animated expectoration.
The imagined office in the video, like tens of thousands of its real-life equivalents around Japan, appears carefully prepared for the great return to work and new normal of life under Covid-19. The desks are separated by decent physical space and sensible plastic partitions cleave the landscape.
But it is all in vain. As the simulation shows in terrifying particulate detail, while most of the army of droplets released from the cougher’s mouth are blocked by the screens, a crack platoon makes it over the partition, delivering its deadly payload into the neighbouring workspace.