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> than any neighbouring country every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think tha
by malandrew 7y ago
> than any neighbouring country
every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think that people are moving the goalposts to support their conclusion.
Yes, it's important to recognize comparables, so we can learn something, but we're not just looking for approaches to this dilemma that work in Scandinavian countries. Sweden is worse health-wise and better economically than countries most similar that totally shut down, but they are doing a lot better than other countries both health-wise and economically than other countries that shut down.
Choosing only their direct comparables, and someone will come to their conclusion that their solution was a failure, when the truth is that it was neither a total failure nor total success and we should look into it in more detail to extract some lessons that can be applied more broadly.
Dismissing Sweden as a failure would be like Alexander Fleming discarding the penicillin contaminated petri dish as a failure instead of observing more closely and learning something valuable.
- Grustaf 7y agoThe thing is that Sweden’s numbers are not just slightly worse, they’re catastrophically worse than comparable countries. They’re also much worse than a lot of not directly comparable countries, but if I would bring that up then people would just dismiss it as not comparable. The bottom line is that the swedish strategy doesn’t work in Sweden and nothing indicates that it would work anywhere.
- JPKab 7y agoNYCs numbers are catastrophically worse than Utah's numbers here in the US. Utah never did a lockdown at all and New York City did an aggressive one. The difference is obviously due to the fact that New York City is a global destination with huge inflows of people in and out of it. do you think that other Scandinavian countries are getting nearly as much travel in and out as Sweden is? I highly doubt it and I think that you are cherry picking to support your own agenda. Sweden should be compared to other global centers of commerce not to back waters like Finland and Norway. No offense to those countries but they don't register as a blip economically compared to Sweden and we all know it.