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donathos on 14 May 2020
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JRPGfan said:
donathos said:

Like almost everything else in this blighted age, the question of Sweden's response to Covid has become politicized to the point of meaninglessness. So maybe this is dumb/naive to ask -- and I may be misremembering -- but going back a bit, wasn't the original goal of our sundry and various measures to "flatten the curve"?

Meaning that we wanted to slow the rate of infections such that they did not overwhelm medical infrastructure at any given point, not to somehow stop Covid from spreading altogether (which has long been acknowledged as impossible, so far as I can recall). Well, maybe it's yet too early to tell, but is there any way we can evaluate Sweden's approach from that perspective? Have their capacities been overwhelmed? Is it approaching that point?

Theres places that have had coronavirus, that now no longer have any active cases.
This does infact prove, that its actually possible to completely rid your country of it.
(ofc you'll always be at risk of a new outbreak, but the same is true for other places)

A country not currently having "active cases" does not mean that that country is "completely rid" of the disease. It can still exist in the community, especially given the contagious nature of this particular disease and that people can carry it asymptomatically.

Besides which, the experience of a place like Greenland versus a Brazil or the UK are not easily comparable. Ridding Greenland of active cases does not prove that the same can be done in Russia, for instance, because the challenges and circumstances are vastly different. It's like, if you'll forgive a baseball analogy, because a child can knock a t-ball off it's tee, we don't say that proves the kid is ready for the Majors. Yes, they're both hitting ball with bat, but no, they aren't the same.

Anyway, so far as I know, no one reputable has claimed that this disease can be stopped or eradicated outright. Trump has made noise about the disease simply disappearing, like a miracle, but the closest we'll get to that, imho, is an effective vaccine -- and who knows when that will be available. So I think that means that we must instead decide how best to live in the world, given that this virus persists in the population, and will for the foreseeable future.

I've supported and continue to support various lockdown measures in view of "flattening the curve," so that additional people don't succumb to Covid (or other things) due to overtaxing health resources with a deluge of new infections. But I don't think it's sensible, for instance, to insist on more severe measures so that a country like the United States can completely clear itself of the disease, when I don't think that's a feasible or realistic goal at all. Not even supposing a "total" lockdown, which cannot, after all, truly be total; even Wuhan, it seems, has not completely cleared itself.

If we're going to shift the goalposts -- if we're going to insist on continuing measures that we'd originally instituted to "flatten the curve" for something else -- let's at least do so openly, ensure our new goals are actually attainable, and determine whether the diminishing returns of stopping further spread are worth the necessarily greater price we'd have to pay, not just in coin, but also in peoples' lives and well-being.