I just read the article. It is insulting. It’s why I dumped TV news in 1997. They would give the raw facts and then pontificate as if those were not the facts.
As usual, they don’t talk about what is happening but, as they’ve done since Februrary, try to scare us with what is “going to happen”. Except it doesn’t.
And they ignore that while their death rate per million was higher than neighboring countries, they also kept their culture and economy intact.
Denmark, Norway and Finland kept their culture intact during the period as well as Sweden did.
Sweden didn’t impose a lockdown, but its economy is just as bad as its neighborsSweden can be easily compared to Denmark+Norway(minus Greenland) -- similar in area, population (to the two combined) and density (to the two combined minus Greenland).
...pitted Sweden against Denmark, noting they speak near-identical languages and share a broadly similar culture and demographic, yet Denmark imposed one of the most aggressive lockdowns globally.
In both countries, the unemployment rate rose 2 percentage points (though Sweden has one extra month of data) and the consumer confidence numbers plunged in both, he said.
Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to contract by 4.5 percent this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent. The unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent in May from 7.1 percent in March. “The overall damage to the economy means the recovery will be protracted, with unemployment remaining elevated,” Oxford Economics concluded in a recent research note.
This is more or less how damage caused by the pandemic has played out in Denmark, where the central bank expects that the economy will shrink 4.1 percent this year, and where joblessness has edged up to 5.6 percent in May from 4.1 percent in March.
In short, Sweden suffered a vastly higher death rate while failing to collect on the expected economic gains.
Yet Sweden has multiples more deaths per million and its economy was as badly hit
I think it is good that the Swedish government tried this - as it is a perfect experiment to compare the effectiveness of a lockdown or its uneffectiveness. So far it looks like the lockdown made sense. I would hold off until 2022 when the epidemic is weakened to make a final call