The damage to the economy from the lockdown will cause more net suffering than the virus would have with no lockdown. Sweden didn't lockdown and their hospitals are not overrun. I'm really not sure what the driver to maintain lockdown is now we know this.
What function are you using to compare economic damage to medical damage? Americans started radically decreasing their going-out even before the lockdowns and without lockdowns a significant portion of the US will still stay home. So what's that look like? Economic damage plus health damage? At what point do we encourage people to stop quarantining voluntarily and go out and risk infection just to stop the economic damage?
Sweden didn't lock down and has several times as many cases of COVID-19 as the other Nordic countries. Not having overrun hospitals is not the main metric here. Overwhelming resources leads to worse and worse outcomes but thousands of COVID-19 cases is associated in and of itself with excess death.
> While "lockdown" isn't a technical term used by public-health officials, it can refer to anything from mandatory geographic quarantines to non-mandatory recommendations to stay at home, closures of certain types of businesses, or bans on events and gatherings, Lindsay Wiley, a health law professor at the Washington College of Law, told Vox.
It goes on to say that Sweden has '"low-scale" lockdown'.
So, when people can argue that Sweden has no lockdown, and people can argue that Sweden had a lockdown, albeit 'low-scale' ... well, you can see how hard it is to use the word.
This page embeds the video "Anders Tegnell shows lockdowns are unorthodox". However, at https://youtu.be/2HWfnZLKfQY?t=214 he comments that other Nordic countries have "much more legal lockdowns than we have", which tells me he sees Sweden as being in a lockdown.
The term 'unorthodox' appears at https://youtu.be/2HWfnZLKfQY?t=168 where he uses it in the context of "closing down their society completely".
Which suggests that FEE is using "lockdown" inconsistently. I can't help but wonder if they want to use his arguments against the extreme term in order to reject any sort of lockdown - even ones that he agrees with.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] threadSweden didn't lock down and has several times as many cases of COVID-19 as the other Nordic countries. Not having overrun hospitals is not the main metric here. Overwhelming resources leads to worse and worse outcomes but thousands of COVID-19 cases is associated in and of itself with excess death.
Quoting https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-on-lockdown-corona... :
> While "lockdown" isn't a technical term used by public-health officials, it can refer to anything from mandatory geographic quarantines to non-mandatory recommendations to stay at home, closures of certain types of businesses, or bans on events and gatherings, Lindsay Wiley, a health law professor at the Washington College of Law, told Vox.
It goes on to say that Sweden has '"low-scale" lockdown'.
So, when people can argue that Sweden has no lockdown, and people can argue that Sweden had a lockdown, albeit 'low-scale' ... well, you can see how hard it is to use the word.
This page embeds the video "Anders Tegnell shows lockdowns are unorthodox". However, at https://youtu.be/2HWfnZLKfQY?t=214 he comments that other Nordic countries have "much more legal lockdowns than we have", which tells me he sees Sweden as being in a lockdown.
The term 'unorthodox' appears at https://youtu.be/2HWfnZLKfQY?t=168 where he uses it in the context of "closing down their society completely".
Which suggests that FEE is using "lockdown" inconsistently. I can't help but wonder if they want to use his arguments against the extreme term in order to reject any sort of lockdown - even ones that he agrees with.