Hi folks I came across this in a link inside an interesting 2 parter:
Sleepwalking into totalitarianism – Part 1
( following a TLN link to Part 2)
This seems quite a comprehensive study :
with this conclusion:
" It seems likely that Sweden did much
better than other countries in terms of the economy, educa-
tion, mental health, and domestic abuse, and still came
away from the pandemic with fewer excess deaths than in
almost any other European country, and less than half that
*of the United States—he country where both the presi-
dent and major newspapers repeatedly used Sweden as a
cautionary tale. The conclusion is uncomfortable for other
governments. It was not Sweden that engaged in a reckless,
unprecedented pandemic experiment, but the rest of the
world. This experiment did not turn out well compared to
the one country that did not throw out the manual. Millions
of people were deprived of their freedoms without a discern-
ible benefit to public health.
…
This is a lesson for the next disaster—whatever it is, and
whenever it strikes. Harsh pandemic restrictions were often
defended with reference to the precautionary principle—do
not take a particular course of action before an abundance of
evidence is available. But there was no evidence indicating
that drastic restrictions made sense. In times of uncertainty
it doesn’t seem like a precaution to put all your policy eggs
in one basket and add to the burden of a health emergency
by undermining communities, the economy, and education.
Instead, it seems like negligence. Sweden’s alternative model
was to rely more on recommendations, have faith in volun-
tary adaptations to the pandemic, and try to keep as much of
society up and running as possible. Based on what we now
know, this laissez faire approach seems to have paid off."
I don’t recall reading this before, anyone else?
cheers