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Nexus X HumectressTom Woods has been doing some good coverage of the present state of medical martial law this week. Check out some of these programs along with the comments from his e-newsletter posted below.
What the Governors Should Do Now
Is the Coronavirus a Libertarian Moment?
Lockdowns vs. Human Flourishing: Is There Another Approach?
By Tom Woods
It would be nice if people could be honest and say: we really don’t understand a lot of what’s going on with this virus.
Whenever you point out anomalies, there’s always a quick and cartoonish answer — why, this country adopted more lockdown measures than that one!
Oh? Then why have twice as many people per million died in locked-down Belgium than in the more relaxed Netherlands?
Why has Vietnam seen zero deaths? Zero! What extremes would it have had to implement for the “lockdowns explain everything” thesis to work there?
A week ago I pointed out a CNN article from March 23 lecturing Hong Kong about reopening too soon.
Headline: “Hong Kong appeared to have the coronavirus under control, then it let its guard down”
We read at that time that the number of confirmed cases had doubled in the previous week.
When I noted on April 8 (sixteen days after the article was published) that the number of deaths in Hong Kong was still unchanged (just four), I got a little lecture: don’t you know the average case-fatality day is 20?
Well, it’s now day 23. You’ll never guess: still just the four deaths, despite that “doubling of confirmed cases.”
Sweden, too, has been lectured for not implementing “lockdown” (how I hate the regime’s terminology, which is instantly adopted by the populace). They’re supposed to be having terrible results. There was an outbreak in Stockholm nursing homes, it’s true, but the rest of Sweden’s experience is actually quite interesting.
In fact, a Swedish expat in my private group has been giving us a daily update about conditions in Sweden. Here’s today’s (minus his charts):
I said yesterday that I feared that we would see a spike in newly reported cases, both in terms of just confirmed new cases, as well as deaths and ICU admissions, due to the long 4-day Easter weekend in Sweden. I’m happy to say that I was wrong, and that I’m now cautiously optimistic that the trend is turning downwards from now on. The data reported for today is obviously not complete, and so we’ll see a correction of that tomorrow.
In any case I downloaded the data sets from the Public Health Department in Sweden, and made the charts below for people to see [they are posted in the group]. I still do not have access to the breakdown by nationality, unfortunately, but I’m writing to them and asking them for it.
Just a general observation is that we can now see how the curve is actually flattening, and the reported daily cases are going down. It should be added that as of yesterday there were 530 covid patients in ICU. Today there are 525. So that is also an indicator that more people are leaving the ICU than being admitted to the ICU. The ICUs across the country as a whole, are not operating under full capacity, and the field hospital in Stockholm is still empty.
On an additional note, the state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, has been subject to a very coordinated attack from the “experts” in academia. Twenty of them took to the media in an op-ed published by one of the biggest newspapers in the country, where they call his approach “extremely dangerous,” and they (the academics) are calling for a complete shutdown of Stockholm, and also for Anders Tegnell’s resignation.
They are viscerally disturbed that this state epidemiologist is not listening to them, and is leading with an independent, different approach. Yesterday, he was grilled at the prime news hour, “Aktuellt” by one of these so called “experts,” who went after him on national television. Nevertheless, the Public Health Department is not changing strategy. And so far, from what I can tell, Tegnell will reign supreme when this is done with. But I’m not going to be too optimistic yet, because this can change, and I’m very aware of that.
