As much as the left wants to demonize those who didn't follow their own personal opinions regarding the best strategies in mitigating Covid-19, the reality is that they continue to demonize what appeared to work, while defending what appeared to have failed. While we can make a number of different comparisons, the reality is that every situation is slightly different and everyone took a slightly different path.
Of course, from a purely technical medical standpoint, Sweden could have probably prevented cases and deaths by shutting everything down. But the Swedish leadership and population didn't want to do so. They understood and were willing to accept those risks. Now, as things begin to settle down, they are in much better economic shape than most of the world, and they still ended up with better numbers than many places in the world that were determined to destroy everything to mitigate Covid-19.
Like it or not, political leadership is all about choices, given and take, and compromise. You can never have your cake and eat it to, and every time you choose an action to help one thing, it likely damages something else. The key is to make a determination as to what is most important to you (and your constituents) and make choices that accentuate the most important things over the less important.
Quite possible the biggest and most important lesson in all of this is to make a determination as where you hit your point of diminishing returns. When you are considering extreme actions, then you have to determine how much that extreme will really help in the area in question vs how much it might hurt in other areas. You cannot close a budget gap by laying off all of your essential employees, without significant damage to your ability to function. Raising taxes too much on your business might drive them away. You have to find a happy medium.
In the case of the Covid-19 crisis, we were always going to have people pass away. The question is whether we treated this like SARS, the Swine Flu, or other pandemics (where we let it play out it's course) or to what degree we took steps to mitigate it. This was by far the most aggressive U.S. and worldwide response to a virus in history. Nothing would even come close to comparing to it. It will likely set off a global recession or depression that was foreseen at the beginning.
Yet, many believe we should have done more (not less).
As time goes on, we can look back at this more dispassionately, I think we will find that there was a very steep curve as it pertained to our diminishing returns. It felt like there were many common sense guidances that were put in place that made a great deal of difference, but that the more extreme our actions were in terms of shutting everything down, the less we saw a positive result. In fact, it looks objectively (at this point) that the more extreme measures might have done more harm than good, even from a Covid-19 mitigation standpoint.
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Unemployment down 14.7% to 13.3% with 2.5M back to work.
Btw, some of these unemployment filings are simple short term furloughs. I myself have to take 2 weeks by Aug 31st. But I'll file and it'll count.
Prof. Karl Friston: ‘80% Not Even Susceptible to COVID-19’
As the threat of COVID-19 quickly fades from foreground and the damage from governments’ experimental panic-driven ‘lockdown’ measures, some experts are now asking an important question: why do different countries achieved such vastly different results in terms of fatalities due to Coronavirus?
The answers to this question will undoubtedly destroy official claims that the COVID lockdown was somehow science-based, let alone justified.
As it turns out, a large percentage of the population were never susceptible to this virus.
In other words: the threat was completely overblown, and lockdown and social distancing policies have never been based in reality.
UnHerd reports…
Professor Karl Friston is a computer modelling expert, world-renowned for his contributions to neuroscience. He has been applying his “dynamic causal modelling” approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, and has reached some startling results.
– The differences between countries are not primarily down to government actions, but due to ‘intrinsic’ differences in the populations
– We don’t yet fully understand what is driving it, although there are theories ranging from levels of vitamin D to genetic differences
– In each country, there appears to be a portion of the population that is ‘not even in the game’
– that is, not susceptible to Covid-19. This varies hugely between countries
– In the UK, Professor Friston estimates that portion to be at least 50%, and probably more like 80%
– The similar mortality results between Sweden (no lockdown) and the UK (lockdown) are best explained by the fact that in reality there was no difference – the impact of the legal lockdown in Professor Friston’s models “literally goes away.”
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