In any major, complex disaster, should the first thing not be to solicit all qualified opinions, debate them publicly, then choose the best, while keeping minds and eyes open for ways to improve?
To my mind one of the most conspicuous features of all this is the refusal of so many people to LEARN, to adapt, to look at the landscape and notice it is changing.
We know vastly more than we knew a year ago. We now know Sweden’s approach worked, or at least worked vastly better in absolute metrics of death and disease than ours, and with vastly less tyrannical overreach and psychological and economic damage.
I was talking with someone today who is on the other side, and asked do you know what the estimated death rate is for those who are infected? She didn’t want to know.
How could you not want to know? The world has been shut down over this fucking thing. Is it 1 in 10? 1 in a 100? 1 in 2? What is it?
So many people just seem to have entered the Twilight Zone, and have no plans to leave until they are told by the government to leave. That is scary to me.
And regarding Sweden specifically, I saw the argument repeatedly in the past week that “Sweden had a death rate TEN TIMES that of their neighbors”. It was repeated so often, you have to wonder if they created a macro for it.
Here is the FACT: Sweden had a lower death rate than we did, but it was still ten times that of Finland and Norway.
This means, logically, that WE, the UNITED STATES also had a death rate that was ten times that of Finland. I think it is actually 12x, if memory serves.
Is the logical question not “what are they doing so much better?” If reason were involved, would we not be more concerned with what Norway and Finland are getting right than what Sweden is supposedly doing wrong?
Do you know? I don’t. I don’t have enough data to be smart about it, but I do recall reading that Vitamin D deficiency in Finland is less than 1%, even in the winter, since they supplement D heavily. I think they put it in many foods, including all dairy products, which I think they consume a lot of. In the United States in contrast, in some populations–like the black population–80% or more might be deficient, particularly in the winter. It’s about 41% in the population as a whole, I assume on average across a year, and presumably higher in the winter and lower in the summer.
Here is one study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21310306/
There is so much intelligence about all this which is possible, but absent.