We’ve heard a lot about Sweden over the past year, but according to Dr Oliver Robinson Sweden isn’t the only ‘control’ that invalidates the lockdown experiment. We’ve been neglecting Finland. In an original piece for Lockdown Sceptics, the Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich points out that Finland has had the second lowest Covid death rate in Europe, yet, like Sweden, it avoided locking down.
So, what interventions did the Finnish Government make? From March to May 2020, schools were closed, public meetings were limited to 10 people, borders were shut and citizens returning from abroad were put into quarantine. Guidance was given to people with symptoms to stay at home, and over-70s were requested to avoid social contact unless essential (this last measure is notably similar to the Great Barrington Declaration’s proposed approach of ‘focused protection’). On June 1st, the number of people allowed to meet was increased to 50 and public indoor places were opened gradually. Since then, various selective international travel restrictions have been imposed.
According to the Blavatnik School of Government’s COVID-19 Response Tracker, Finland’s response to COVID-19 was marginally stricter than Sweden from March to early April 2020, then the same level of strictness from April to May, then less strict than Sweden, something which remains true to this day. You can check for yourself here.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Dr Paul Yowell, an Associate Law Professor at Oxford, has written a fascinating blog post in which he points out that Sweden hasn’t fared badly compared to its neighbours – an argument often made by lockdown enthusiasts – provided you count Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania among those neighbours. “Once you include the Baltic countries (lying immediately south of Finland) in the geographic comparison, Sweden is no longer an outlier in mortality comparisons,” he writes.
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The correlation of Covid death with obesity seems pretty strong (see link below). Add in Vitamin D levels and the solution seems fairly clear: Healthy diet and outdoor exercise.
Which makes lockdowns pretty much the exact opposite of what we should be doing.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/03/covid-deaths-high-in-countries-with-more-overweight-people-says-report
If this was seriously about health they would not have locked us down and instead encouraged us to get active and carry on as normal.
Well, during the last couple of weeks the government has been planning a curfew in Finland, probably focusing on the capital area. Not everyone agrees with the plans, but as law-abiding people most of us probably submit to the new rules without protesting, unfortunately. Covid mortality has been decreasing steadily but hardly anyone pays attention to that.
So what is the logic behind a curfew? ‘Cases’, ie dodgy PCRtests?
France has endured a 6pm curfew now for months, there is no logic behind it, but once introduced it seems a government loves it because it keeps the peasants locked up safely when its dark, without calling it a lockdown. This really has zero to do with a virus.
Lattitude is a big influence on the virus, it doesn’t like equatorial or arctic conditions, thrives in the middle , but less so in the southern hemisphere. Its very ‘picky’, seems to like the anglosphere the best, almost as if it wasn’t really a virus at all……
AIUI the logic behind a curfew is to make it more difficult for people to meet up in each other’s homes.
I have no trust in the British government nor the British Establishment, that died this past year. They can all go to hell!
If anyone wasn’t here last night, they might be wondering where everyone else has gone. Most of the regulars have understandably taken exception to what Toby wrote yesterday in defence of his decision to break up the comments section. He said the General Comments had become “a bit of a toxic swamp that is damaging the site’s reputation and putting off respectable contributors.”
The admirable Mabel Cow has created a new home for defecting swamp creatures and they’ve moved over to: https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSceptics. Early days but it’s coming along nicely. Take a look. I haven’t actually joined up yet but will do so later.
The Nordic countries were in a more favourable position than Western Europe because they have a peripheral position in Europe and are not major international business or travel hubs.
Sweden was unlucky in that the timing of Stockholm’s school half-term break exposed it to massive infection from countries (USA, UK and France) which at the time (unlike Italy or Austria) were not believed to be a threat.