Lockdown diary, day 61
A very good piece by the Guardian/Observer journalist Nick Cohen giving one side of the argument about the strategy Sweden has followed.
You can read it here.
There are a lot of ironies about this article, starting out with the fact that it is being re-tweeted and shared by a lot of people who I am convinced have not read it properly.
That's because they are quoting some of the memorable insults it contains against various political leaders they don't like, but those insults are almost incidental to the main thrust of the article which manages to make points which are inconvenient for the narratives told by people on both sides of almost every political divide.
Cohen is one of the few journalists who has bothered to divide the statistics for death or infections by the relevant population sizes before using them to make an international comparison.
Which immediately gives him points in my view towards a rare "numerate journalist" award and is inconvenient for many on the left who like quoting comparisons based on absolute numbers because those make certain governments they don't like look as bad as possible.,
He has also been open enough to confront the fact that as someone who likes many things about the government of Sweden, he thinks they've got their strategy on the Coronavirus badly wrong.
That's the bit that some on the right won't like, because many of them have been lauding the Swedish strategy.
I actually think that the jury is still out on this one.
The reply "Ask me in December" from Professor David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, on being asked whether the UK’s outbreak of Coronavirus will prove to be the worst in Europe. (see here for the context) applies equally to Sweden.
However, the myth that Sweden has managed to avoid both a lockdown and a substantial number of deaths is just that - a myth - and you only have to divide the numbers of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden by population size to see that, like just about everywhere in Europe, they have been badly hit.
Sadly there are no easy answers.
Keep well.
You can read it here.
There are a lot of ironies about this article, starting out with the fact that it is being re-tweeted and shared by a lot of people who I am convinced have not read it properly.
That's because they are quoting some of the memorable insults it contains against various political leaders they don't like, but those insults are almost incidental to the main thrust of the article which manages to make points which are inconvenient for the narratives told by people on both sides of almost every political divide.
Cohen is one of the few journalists who has bothered to divide the statistics for death or infections by the relevant population sizes before using them to make an international comparison.
Which immediately gives him points in my view towards a rare "numerate journalist" award and is inconvenient for many on the left who like quoting comparisons based on absolute numbers because those make certain governments they don't like look as bad as possible.,
He has also been open enough to confront the fact that as someone who likes many things about the government of Sweden, he thinks they've got their strategy on the Coronavirus badly wrong.
That's the bit that some on the right won't like, because many of them have been lauding the Swedish strategy.
I actually think that the jury is still out on this one.
The reply "Ask me in December" from Professor David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, on being asked whether the UK’s outbreak of Coronavirus will prove to be the worst in Europe. (see here for the context) applies equally to Sweden.
However, the myth that Sweden has managed to avoid both a lockdown and a substantial number of deaths is just that - a myth - and you only have to divide the numbers of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden by population size to see that, like just about everywhere in Europe, they have been badly hit.
Sadly there are no easy answers.
Keep well.
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