Citation?
> In fact, my hyperacctive chief of staff [Rahm Emanuel] - who'd spent enough time in Washington to know that his new, liberal president couldn't afford to look soft on terrorism - was obsessed with the list, cornering those responsible for our targeting operations to find out what was taking so long when it came to locating number 10 or 14.
> I took no joy in any of this. It didn't make me feel powerful. I'd entered politics to help kids get a better education, to help families get healthcare, to help poor countries grow more food - it was that kind of power that I measured myself against.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden?view=total-deaths&tab=...
I’m not sure why Tegnell gets so much hate for doing a softer economic shutdown, and getting similar results as more draconian approaches. As a bonus, projections say they’ll hit herd immunity sooner than many countries (assuming vaccine rollouts).
I guess, as you point out, history is written by the victorious, and Sweden’s minority approach will always be backed by a minority political voice.
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So for Sweden to be doing about as well (in deaths per capita) as the rest of Europe is a sign of failure on Sweden's part. To be doing better than the US is no comparison at all.
If you compare it to other Nordic countries (which are more comparable in terms of population density), it's doing much worse: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
Anyway, isn't this all my point? Sweden gets an excuse because other countries aren't doing well. Nobody is expecting anyone to do well. Why bother trying to save lives if nobody else is trying either? Why bother trying to do as well as Vietnam (which literally shares a land border with China!) if nobody is going to hold you to that standard?
But that doesn't seem to match what Our World in Data is actually showing right now: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index?ta...
Sweden's stringency peaked around 65 and has never dropped below 55. Since early June, Norway has mostly been above 40.
So I'm curious what happened - did Our World in Data change their methodology? Did they add new data?
They also mention that 1) they are aggregating all policies, so this isn't a measure of "lockdown," 2) they are measuring the stringency of policies, not their effect (e.g., "Hard curfew at 10pm unless you're going to/from work" is pretty stringent, but probably less effective than "No indoor dining"), and 3) that they measure the maximum stringency of any subnational unit. I'd be very curious to see how exactly they compute their numbers. For instance, if there's a weak national policy on things like travel and quarantine that causes municipalities to do whatever smaller things are in their power like restricting visits to nursing homes, does that add up to a "more stringent" response in their measurement?
Or put more simply - apart from numbers on this chart, what is it that backs up the claim that Sweden had a more aggressive response than Norway and Finland did?
(Furthermore, FEE is a hard-capitalist advocacy organization and is interested in pushing a narrative around reduced government policies around everything, so their interpretations should be taken with a grain of salt, which is why I'm trying to find the original data. The conclusion of their article offers no policy position other than admitting we are powerless to control the course of virulent disease, which seems ... rather contradicted by history.)
And, similarly, different countries have had wildly different rates of success at dealing with covid, but history will not remember Ardern or Phúc as a hero for the lives they saved, and it won't remember any national leader who didn't manage to do the same (Trump, Biden, or especially Löfven and Tegnell) as villains. It will remember Trump and Biden as leaders of a superpower, and it will remember, falsely, that covid surprised everyone and everyone dealt with it as best they could. Again, the incentives are bad. Why bother to try your hardest if people don't mind if you fail and you get some temporary popularity from saying "Everything is fine, go party"?
People respond to incentives, and this applies to everything from national politics to, oh, workplace politics. Remember that Twitter banned Trump because enough of their employees finally had enough (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/how-twi...) more than any policy reason per se. Companies listen to unions when having the unionized employees present enough of an incentive for management to listen. Companies listen to non-unionized employees under the same conditions, too. A union just makes things more formal.
The fact that Biden did not feel compelled to suspend all military activity and lock down the country immediately upon assuming the presidency is certainly a failure of our society. If you want to say it's a personal failure, I (a Biden voter) will gladly join you. Let's just make sure we keep saying it for every president.