Swedes are too polite to call us stupid…
… instead they call us crazy.
The leader of the Swedish government’s epidemiology team is interviewed in “Sweden’s Covid Expert Says ‘World Went Mad’ With Lockdowns” (Bloomberg):
The man behind Sweden’s controversial Covid-19 strategy has characterized lockdowns imposed across much of the globe as a form of “madness” that flies in the face of what is known about handling viral outbreaks.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, said he advised against such restrictions on movement because of the detrimental side effects they often entail.
“It was as if the world had gone mad, and everything we had discussed was forgotten,” Tegnell said in a podcast with Swedish Radio on Wednesday. “The cases became too many and the political pressure got too strong. And then Sweden stood there rather alone.”
Tegnell admits he misjudged the deadly potential of the coronavirus in its early stages, but has refused to consider abandoning his strategy. He says restricting movement to the radical extent seen across much of the globe can create other problems, including increased domestic abuse, loneliness and mass unemployment.
“In the same way that all drugs have side effects, measures against a pandemic also have negative effects,” he said. “At an authority like ours, which works with a broad spectrum of public health issues, it is natural to take these aspects into account.”
What would he think of Maskachusetts? Our kids might not have learned anything for the past three months and maybe won’t get to return to school in September, either, and they may have gained weight and lost muscle tone as they go into Month 4 of shutdown, but at least they are masked!
Tegnell also advised against using face masks, arguing there’s little scientific evidence they work. And he says it’s clear that closing down schools was an unnecessary response to the pandemic, a notion that’s actually supported in a recent French study.
Have you enjoyed being shut down and throwing rocks at the reckless Swedes? Dr. Tegnell says you’ll probably get to do it every year for the next few decades:
Tegnell’s underlying argument is that Covid-19 isn’t going away any time soon, meaning sudden, severe lockdowns will ultimately prove ineffective in addressing the longer-term threat. Meanwhile, the virus has recently resurfaced in a number of places where authorities thought they’d brought it under control, including Beijing.
The article is a good illustration of American journalism. Because Tegnell is a infidel relative to the Church of Shutdown, his credentials are left out. He is just some guy who works for the Swedish government, not a Scientist (Wikipedia by contrast: “Tegnell obtained a PhD in Medicine from Linköping University in 2003 and a MSc in Epidemiology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2004”).
The section in which the article appears is “Sweden’s Coronavirus Experiment”. In other words, it is not the U.S. that is conducting an “experiment” by trying something that has never been tried before (i.e., shutting down a modern society/economy and health care system). It is Sweden that is engaging in a wild “experiment” by doing what humans have always done when confronting a new virus.
From my Sweden pictures:
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