Sweden vs. Belgium and New York

At the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is a critical look at the dishonest narrative/media trope about Sweden being a "cautionary tale" of a government mishandling the coronavirus epidemic.

The data presented speak for themselves, but there are links to John Ioannidis just in case. That statistician-epidemiologist was highly critical of nationwide lockdowns early on, and has turned out to be more correct, I am sure, than he would have liked.

That said, it was good to see someone zero in on the following:

Image by Jonathan Brinkhorst, via Unsplash, license.

... Sweden is being criticized less because of the results of their public health policies and more because of the nature of them.

By embracing a much more market-based approach to the pandemic in lieu of a centrally planned one, Sweden is undermining the narrative that millions and millions of people would have died without lockdowns, as modelers predicted.

Without Sweden and a few similar outliers, it would be far easier for central planners to say, Sure, lockdowns were harsh and destructive. But we had no choice.

In the wake of the most destructive pandemic in a century, there will be considerable discussion as to whether the lockdowns, which stand to trigger a global depression in addition to other psychological and social costs, were truly necessary. [links omitted, bold added]

It is especially interesting to contemplate how FEE and such organs as the New York Times have discussed Sweden, with the former forthrightly admitting that Sweden was hardly an unqualifed success, and the latter passing along falsehoods so long as they made Sweden look bad. Such an exercise might provoke the following question: Do American journalists, like Michael Powell of the New York Times, not know or not care how to evaluate a given government's reaction to the pandemic?

-- CAV

P.S. The following, from John Ioannidis, are more recent estimates of the fatality of this disease:

"The death rate in a given country depends a lot on the age-structure, who are the people infected, and how they are managed," Ioannidis said. "For people younger than 45, the infection fatality rate is almost 0%. For 45 to 70, it is probably about 0.05-0.3%. For those above 70, it escalates substantially ... "

Because of this, Ioannidis sees mass lockdowns of entire populations as a mistake, though he says they may have made sense when experts believed the fatality rate of COVID-19 was as high as 3-5 percent.

It is especially damning that so many media outlets happily smear Sweden, while failing to hold the likes of Governors Cuomo and Whitmer to account for their policy of remanding corona cases to nursing homes.