The most telling evidence out of the Sweden experiment is that their economy isn't doing any better than anyone else's.
The lockdowns didn't f*** up the economy, the virus did.
There are multiple trillion-dollar industries in this country that most people just won't do right now whether they're open or not.
Of course, I support salvaging everything we can and I don't support staying in lockdown forever, but the virus did this, not policy.
Nah, first of all this isn’t correct. Not if you don’t think single digital % of GDP doesn’t matters. Second of all, there is a little bit of difference between the US economy and the Swedish economy. Sweden lives mostly on exporting, the US economy is a consumer industry that drives itself. Then you of course have the pure size aspect.
My point is just, sure Swedish economy is record bad right now, but in many sectors it’s also record good compared to countries around it. You could just spin it both ways, Sweden’s strategy has been amazing it has increased the numbers of night stayed at hotels in April by 200,000% vs it’s neighbor Norway!
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(it was maybe down 80%, but 80% is still better than 100%)
Also, you do actually miss the point. From day 1, heck from day -30, Sweden has not so much chosen a different policy than others as just choosing the only policy it saw available.
The experts from the get go concluded that a shut down is not an option, it will never work. This is simply what it is all about — right or wrong. They strongly argued from day 1 that it just would be pointless, and convinced the politicians (there is no doubt whatsoever that this is driven by the epidemiologists and not the politicians).
They, the epidemiologists, have said that if we shut down, we can maybe do it for a month or two — then the people won’t accept it. A vaccine will best case scenario take 18 months, shutting down for 2 of 18 months won’t help at all, shutting down 12 of 18 months won’t help at all either, you will get the same number of deaths just a couple of months later.
If you believe this, you don’t shut down. Right? There are no other options than to do what Sweden is doing.
Could the Swedish epidemiologist be wrong? Definitely. I would be surprised if they weren’t. I don’t think they where wrong about how long you can shut down, even if it was needed, I don’t think the US could have shut down for 18 months, not with a case fatality rate of under 1% that to 70-80% will kill elders, 18 months is a long time and a shut down will get exponentially higher negative effects the longer you enforce it.
But I definitely would not rule out that you can push the numbers low and keep them low with directed disciplined social distancing practices. Masks etc. No large gatherings. Contact tracking. Or you can’t — time will tell.
This is the retired state epidemiologist of Sweden, but the current one is his protigee (so) and think the same things. Listen to him to hear his view on things (it’s about a month old), get some perspective.