experiment

Lately I've been feeling like handling three kids all day without a break is causing me to lose my ability to retain information, like I am a vessel that reacts to stimuli without the ability to look back or ahead. So to force myself to use my powers of recollection a little bit, I'm going to try summarizing an article I read during the day without looking back at it. (My breaks are typically only short enough to respond to texts, but I'm usually able to read an article or two through the day as well.)

Today it was this one about Sweden's pandemic response.

Sweden's response was unique in that their head epidemiologist didn't believe masks worked or that Covid was going to be much worse than a severe flu (and even if it was, it wasn't worth shutting down the country.) So they didn't shut down or wear masks and instead went for herd immunity, which is hoping enough healthy people get it and develop immunity so that it stops spreading to those more at risk.

The reporter speaks to a couple of Swedes who had severe--and potentially preventable--cases of Covid, but still supported the countries policies, citing the potential damage of a lockdown as an inferior alternative. 

Long story short, Sweden was probably wrong. Their infection and mortality rates were higher than other Scandinavian countries, and they ended up implementing some lockdown rules. (The counterargument to this is that they are the densest Scandinavian country and should be compared to other European countries like Italy and Germany rather than Norway and Finland,,, the counterargument to that being that the rest of Europe (especially Italy) had Covid spreading within their borders long before Sweden.) And Sweden's GDP also fell more than their neighbors (though less the European average.)

But it also touches on how the world seemed to be flying blind on this thing. (50% of deaths are from nursing home spread; and if we had any idea that was coming, we could have locked them down first.) (A lot of mask research has been done during this pandemic because previous studies seemed unreliable.) And there's an interesting article by Siddhartha Mukherjee about how some countries have been inexplicably been spared by covid -- using India and Nigeria as examples that didn't do a great job with lockdowns/masks/distancing, but didn't get devastated nearly as bad as anyone expected. (One explanation is that the coronavirus doesn't survive as well in warm weather, but still, the average Indian city is exponentially denser than the densest cities in America.)

Ok, it felt good to get that out.