Sweden

Team Apocalypse hate, hates, hates Sweden. After all, Sweden didn't listen. It didn't lock down its entire economy. It didn't close schools, it didn't demand that masks be worn. It didn't close restaurants or stores or gyms. Its leaders didn't hide in the basement making vacuous comments about "following the science" ... and guess what? It's showing about the same (or better) virus outcomes as those countries that did all of that. Except ... without the economic and social carnage that Team Apocalypse's catastrophist recommendations created.

Dan Hannan comments:

My columns on Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus always provoke an angry response. But it is striking that, the better Sweden does, the angrier its critics become.

Like anti-Trumpers who couldn’t hide their annoyance at the success of the U.S. economy, or British Remainers who longed for a recession so as to be able to say “I told you so” about Brexit, lockdown enthusiasts determinedly screen out the good news ...

The lockdown was initially sold across the world as the only way to avert calamity. The cost of the closures (in terms of lost liberty, lost livelihoods, and, indeed, lost lives through non-coronavirus health conditions) was so vast that there was no other way to justify it. Lockdown proponents didn’t say, “This might slightly reduce the mortality rate.” They said, “Do it or our hospitals will be overwhelmed!”

Which was, to be fair, what they initially expected to happen in Sweden. “Heading for disaster” was the headline in Britain’s right-wing Sun. “They are leading us to catastrophe,” agreed the left-wing Guardian. Time magazine reported that “Sweden’s relaxed approach to the coronavirus could already be backfiring” and quoted a doctor saying that it would “probably end in a historical massacre.” “We fear that Sweden has picked the worst possible time to experiment with national chauvinism,” chided the Washington Post. President Trump, justifying his own crackdown, bizarrely claimed that Sweden “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.”

Not one commentator in March or April argued that Sweden might be less at risk than other places. Lockdown enthusiasts have switched very suddenly from “Sweden is heading for a genocide” to “well, we couldn’t do that here because we’re nothing like Sweden.”

All of the doomsday scenarios concerning Sweden were wrong. Team Apocalypse was WRONG! In fact, they've been a lot more wrong than right. Their projections and models have been off by orders of magnitude. Their experts (the inimitable Dr. Fauci comes to mind) have been catastrophists whose comments were overwrought and dangerous. Their political party—the Democrats—demanded actions (e.g., lockdowns and school closures) whose catastrophic outcomes were then used as weapons against Trump. Their trained hamsters in the media maintained death and case scoreboards without the granularity needed to understand that COVID-19 is serious (for a targeted demographic—the old), but not significantly more serious than a bad flu season for everyone else.

It will take years to recover from the economic and societal damage Team Apocalypse, through its recommendations and demands, has done. Yet the Team doubles down, insisting that what they did was right and demanding more of the same.

They weren't right, and they should be ashamed. But they aren't. Team Apocalypse believes that pandemic porn provides them political leverage. It did do that, but the fact that they've ruined lives and livelihoods is beyond their concern ... except as it might be used to garner votes. 'Despicable' doesn't even begin to cover it.

UPDATE:

These two tweets summarize nicely:

This experiment was designed by hysterics, catastrophists, and fools. If only they suffered the consequences, all would be fine. But that's not the case. They're forcing all of us into an experiment driven by their fear (and political ambition). The experiment has gone bad, really, really badly, but they won't let it end.

A growing number of epidemiologists recognize that the experiment is an abject failure. Fraiser Myers writes:

As much of the world gears up for a second round of lockdowns, and restrictions on everyday life grow ever tighter, a group of infectious-disease epidemiologists and public-health scientists have come together to propose an alternative. The Great Barrington Declaration was spearheaded by Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School, Sunetra Gupta from Oxford University and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University Medical School.

The declaration was bound to cause controversy for going against the global political consensus, which holds that lockdowns are key to minimising mortality from Covid-19. Instead, the signatories argue that younger people, who face minimal risk from the virus, should be able to go about their lives unimpeded, while resources are devoted to protecting the most vulnerable. The lockdowns, they argue, have not only caused an intolerable amount of collateral damage, but have also contributed to a higher number of Covid deaths. But for making this argument, the declaration has been censored.

And once again, we're back to fantasy vs. reality. Team Apocalypse and their progressive membership are all about fantasy. The fact that their experiment (i.e., the lockdowns) has failed is reality. At least some serious scientists are beginning to speak out.  Just today, the signatories of the The Great Barrington Declaration have been joined by the W.H.O. that finally has come to the conclusion that lockdowns are a very bad idea and should NOT be renewed in any form.