Last Updated on March 23, 2021 by cwl
Reason published an article today from an actual resident of Sweden. Johan Norberg is a Senior Fellow at the Cato institute, and in his article he quotes a COVID-19 mortality rate in Sweden of 120 deaths per million. The data comes from the coronavirus subpage of Our World in Data. This is a pretty cool site for tracking and comparing virus information at the international level.
The article also describes how different virus testing and reporting policies can skew results to be either optimistic or pessimistic. It’s really hard to compare virus data from countries that have different data collection methods.
The author also points out that the Imperial College virus model that was so influential with political leaders only handled two situations: an enforced national lockdown or zero change in behavior. No wonder the “do nothing” situation looked so bad; it assumed that people would be incapable of using common sense precautions as the virus ran through the population. So apparently there was nobody around POTUS Donny that could have said, “Hey wait a minute, let’s take a closer look at these scenarios, are there not other ways to model this outbreak”? Hard to believe…
Anyway, the article is worth a read if only to help calm and focus the mind on a different way of reacting to a crisis: “first do no harm”.