There are a lot of claims like this which are very difficult to prove or disprove. Sweden was one of the few places that went very light on it's measures and never got overwhelmed and generally coped with the virus OK so far. (They admit they messed up with care homes, but that is the same as with many other countries who took far harsher measures).
What they did help show was that certain mixes of mitigation (vs suppression) measures could potentially keep R below 1 in certain places. But even there, because of a limited testing strategy, it was hard to confirm this for quite a while in Sweden. It would have been a lot more helpful if there'd been a lot more testing surveillance in Sweden, but alas.
3 - We are asking everyone to adhere to economic and social restrictions when the risks are not equal to everyone. People in certain age groups, and with health risks, are far more at risk than most people.
This site seems entirely untethered to reality? E.g. "2) Covid mortality vs. flu mortality" section appears to put IFR for covid of those at age 80 at 0.16%? Yet, we have entire countries that aren't far off from that number for population fatality rates, let alone infection fatality rate.
Wait.. I was just assuming this had to be an IFR comparison, because for something like this, anything else would be disingenuous. I should assume less. It looks like it is comparing annual mortality of flu with the current mortality of Covid-19.
1. We're still far from a year into notable spread of Covid-19. 2. Normal flu seasons don't have lockdowns, masks, bans on large events, etc. 3. In digging a bit more, this uses the 2017 flu season as a baseline, which was one of the worst.
This site is actually a great example of Covid-19 misinformation. It has a veneer of authority - Swiss Policy Research as a name sounds like it might be credible. And, it presents what, on first glance, appears to be claims grounded in science (and hey, nice graphs and all!).
But, one starts digging into the claims, and it starts to become clear the flaws.
jasonv: there are a lot of pseudoscientific resources out there with respect to Covid-19. This looks to be one of them. It's more essential than ever to vet what you're linking to these days.
2. What is your source for death rates not fluctuating with cases? In general, deaths have reliably tracked cases, with a delay of a few weeks (because it takes time to progress from diagnosis to death).
3. Shuttering the economy is not binary. With an intelligent approach, and general compliance with measures such as mask wearing, we ought to be able to control the virus without a complete shutdown. Unfortunately we keep making unintelligent tradeoffs and executing inconsistently.