Foxy,

"It looks like I touched a chord with you."

Yes, ignorant sanctimony tends to goad me. Things like asserting that I favour money of lives. So spare me the "but please refrain
from making assumptions about me" BS.

"Of course I care about people's lives, their jobs,
and much, much, more."

Yes, once I've pointed out that its not just money v. lives, you suddenly realise you need to pretend to have or understand some nuance.
______________________________________________________________

There are any number of reasons why a country's death rates may be higher or lower than another. Since we now know the disease is an old person's disease, the age of the population will be an issue. There is also evidence that vitamin 'D' levels will matter. Equally the level of multiple-generation co-habitation.
Sweden had an older population than many of its cohort group. It also had a higher level of non-Scandinavian inhabitants, who are more prone to the disease.
AND, Sweden took the long term view. We haven't reached a position where we can evaluate the long term. Those doing so are elevating politics over good-sense.

Just a word on Australia. Sure we have done well as compared to others. But we had all the advantages here:

1. We are an island. Most of the places that did well were islands or able to be quickly isolated - Taiwan, Japan, NZ, south Korea (not an island but its only border is permanently closed).
2. We don't have major congested cities.
3. We have high vitamin D levels on average
4. The virus hit in summer when it is weaker, so all our early mistakes were less consequential.
5. We don't have a tradition of multi-generational households.

We were more lucky than prescient.

Joe,

If you are talking about the models, they most certainly did not work. Millions dead. Not enough respirators. Not enough hospital beds. In Australia, nowhere else.

All bollocks.

mhaze,

Steele was correct in pointing out that your
previous claims were - "absolute and utter
bollocks". You are in position to talk about
ignorant sanctimony when yours is so clearly
on display for all to see.

I, unlike you do not have to pretend to have
or understand some nuance.

As for Australia's small death rates - luck had
nothing to do with it. Our government's actions did!

For the record, SR is in no more a position to talk about anything he has not been a party too or been involved personally.
So let's not try to get ahead of ourselves, or anyone else for that matter.
There are 7 billion people in the world and all of them different, so I challenge any one of you to know what is on anyone's mind.
As for the Swedish phenomenon, as I have said many times, I think outside the box and consider the things that sheeple, (there are some on OLO), don't or don't want to consider.
Many Nordic countries of which Sweden is one, for the purpose of my example, are a very pragmatic, objective and rational people, with absolutely little time for childish emotions and subjective thinking, so it is that just maybe the govt decided that the elderly were expendable and this virus was going to destroy their economy if they shut everything down, including healthy people.
So they may have expected the people who were most susceptible to the virus would take precautions, either of their own choosing or by govt promotion.
Everyone knows this virus will not just go away by itself and even those not showing any signs, are still carriers and can infect at any time later, so isolating will not stop the inevitable, in that after you have isolated you will still fall prey to it when coming into contact with carriers, as we are seeing, not only here in Australia, but overseas also.
The only difference between us and Sweden is that the rest of us, (the healthy ones) in Australia are going to suffer because of the shut-downs, where-as in Sweden, they carried on as normal, and in doing so have afforded the title of being the only country, not only in the region, to have (at last report) a 3.7% growth when everyone else including Australia is in the negative, or recession.
And one last thing, stop comparing countries, are you all such morons that you don't know the basics and pitfalls of comparing countries?

Altrav,

Here's an interesting Table comparing the numbers of deaths from the virus per every 100,000 people. It is also, obviously a measure of policy effectiveness:

http://webmail.internode.on.net/index.php/mail/viewmessage/getattachment/folder/INBOX/uniqueId/14590/filenameOriginal/Covid%2Bnumbers%2Bper%2Bmillon.pdf

Makes me proud to be Australian :)

Joe

Altrav,

According to Wikipedia, around 16,000 people have been killed by the Ebola virus since 1976, i.e. over 44 years. Overwhelmingly they have been in Africa. As Trumpf has pointed out, Africa is made up a lot of sh!thole countries.

The US has now lost more than 120,000 people to the Covid virus in barely three months, or more than seven times as many as the number of Ebola deaths in whole of Africa.

It makes some of us wonder, where is the world's worst sh!thole country ? Or is it more a matter of the US being inflicted with a sh!thouse president ?

Joe