Except for your NYT article, these are all pieces from more than 2 months ago. And the NYT has been exceptionally poor at reporting on covid with an even hand. What it fails to mention is that though Sweden's economy will contract by the same amount as it's Scandanavian neighbors, about -8%, it's a huge win compared to UK/Italy/France which will contract by 22-30%.
It's irresponsible to believe that journalists and editorial organizations are able to cut through their own emotions and biases during what is one of the most tense times in recent history. Everyone has an opinion. The only thing without an opinion are the data.
For Sweden that data is pretty great:
- 15 deaths in the past 7 days
- ~1200 cases
If you only want to compare Sweden to its neighbors you're cherry-picking what you want your argument to say. Sweden's strategy divorced them from their neighbors and put them in the boat with us. We are apples to apples. Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges. Since we are both of the same strategy it's entirely reasonable to point to Sweden and say "hey, it's about as bad there as it is here and they didn't go hard lockdown and kids are still in school".
It's not like we can go back in time and follow New Zealand. That ship sailed five months ago.
To get a real look at the data I strongly recommend people get on Twitter and follow any of these accounts to get a good grasp on the overall situation as told by the numbers and as a bonus you'll get:
- how deaths are reported and what that means for the narrative
- cases and their level of significance
- hospital census, dwell, and coding
@ethicalskeptic
@aginnt
@boriquagato
@natesilver538 (we don't agree on how to handle this, but he's been fair in reporting data as it should be understood)
@MLevitt_NP2013 (Nobel laureate)
@AlexBerenson
> Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges.
Your logic is simply wrong here. If you want to assess the effect of the lockdown, you compare effects between similar countries that did and didn't have a lockdown. Apple trees with fertilizer vs apple trees without fertilizer. You don't learn about the effect of fertilizer by comparing apple trees with fertilizer vs orange trees with fertilizer.
I don't think anyone is arguing that Sweden's outcome is better than Norway's. I'm certainly not.
What I'm saying is that you can go without a lockdown and avoid the doomsday scenario that was so proffered about. Everyone was pointing to Sweden as though they were a cautionary tale of a state that was about to wipe out 10% of its population.
Yet here we are and that didn't play out. So the narrative switched to "but against its neighbors!". Yeah Sweden did worse, but they also showed you didn't need to go into hiding to get the same result the rest of the quasi-lockdown camp got.
What you're implying is that if the United States went full no-lockdown strategy our outcome would be different than Sweden. Whereas logically a virus does not care whether the host is Swedish, Ugandan, or American. A human is a human.
src: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/one-econo...
It's irresponsible to believe that journalists and editorial organizations are able to cut through their own emotions and biases during what is one of the most tense times in recent history. Everyone has an opinion. The only thing without an opinion are the data.
For Sweden that data is pretty great: - 15 deaths in the past 7 days - ~1200 cases
src: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
If you only want to compare Sweden to its neighbors you're cherry-picking what you want your argument to say. Sweden's strategy divorced them from their neighbors and put them in the boat with us. We are apples to apples. Sweden to Norway, when they took up the strategy, became apples to oranges. Since we are both of the same strategy it's entirely reasonable to point to Sweden and say "hey, it's about as bad there as it is here and they didn't go hard lockdown and kids are still in school".
It's not like we can go back in time and follow New Zealand. That ship sailed five months ago.
To get a real look at the data I strongly recommend people get on Twitter and follow any of these accounts to get a good grasp on the overall situation as told by the numbers and as a bonus you'll get: - how deaths are reported and what that means for the narrative - cases and their level of significance - hospital census, dwell, and coding
@ethicalskeptic @aginnt @boriquagato @natesilver538 (we don't agree on how to handle this, but he's been fair in reporting data as it should be understood) @MLevitt_NP2013 (Nobel laureate) @AlexBerenson