This is interesting for two reasons. The first is that it will provide a laboratory for testing whether or not this approach is wise. If Sweden comes out ahead here, we may have to consider that our response ultimately did impose unnecessary costs on our nation in order to advance a misguided approach to the pandemic.
The other reason it's interesting to me is that Sweden is one of the premier countries held up as an exemplar by Bernie Sanders et al. Yet this approach is treated as a moral monstrosity when it is proposed by anyone here, or in the UK for that matter. How will they resolve the conflict that will create?
The complaint "They're not listening to the experts" in this case means that the politicians are listening to those experts that are at the top of their own civil-service, based upon responses to this hypothetical that have been planned for years, and not listening to other Cassandras who may be lower down in the hierarchy of the health system or from other countries.
ReplyDeleteThe UK radically changed course based upon projections by Professor Neil Ferguson at Imperial College. Those projections have been revised since, and comment in the press and online is getting that wrong both ways:
Some say: Now that reality isn't conforming to his predictions, he's changed his model.
Some say: Government shut things down and that changed the circumstances, so new circumstances are why his projections are lower.
To some extent both are true, the projections were "if we keep on with the current plan" and the plan changed. But the changes in his projections do not just account for the change in government plan and action, they also adjust other factors that newer data seem to show were guesstimated to be more problematic then they turned out to be.
Our data sucks on this pandemic.
The other reason it's interesting to me is that Sweden is one of the premier countries held up as an exemplar by Bernie Sanders et al. Yet this approach is treated as a moral monstrosity when it is proposed by anyone here, or in the UK for that matter. How will they resolve the conflict that will create?
ReplyDeleteThis is just one more example of the conflict between what Bernie et al claim that Scandinavia is about versus what Scandinavia is actually about. Bernie wants to tax millionaires out of existence. Yet Scandinavia has more billionaires per capita than the United States has. Inheritance taxes are lower than in the United States. Etcetera.
Having flooded their cities with Euto-opportunists from third-world-Africa, they now exhort everyone to act with selfless cultural integrity, to be 'good citizens'. I wish them luck, but fear they will end up with a mortality distribution that's a very quickly-accelerating, catastrophically-tall bell curve. But I wish them good fortune.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/kayleighmcenany/status/1244749439480270848?s=20
ReplyDeleteThis President DJTrum, has some interesting things to say.
It's going to disappear like a miracle? Why, yes, but not for the reasons people think.