Juno News - November 16, 2020


Let's discuss Sweden's approach to the coronavirus


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

196.4955

Word count

699

Sentence count

38


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the Swedish government's approach to dealing with coronavirus, and why it might not be as bad as some would have you believe. We also talk about some of the other countries around the world that are doing the opposite of Sweden's approach.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 I want to take a moment to address what we talk about when we talk about Sweden and that country's
00:00:10.800 approach to the coronavirus. Based on a lot of the media coverage that we get about Sweden here
00:00:15.840 in Canada and English language media, you would think that there's two extremes going on. There
00:00:20.240 are responsible countries who are locking down and doing restrictions, and then there's Sweden,
00:00:24.960 which doesn't care, and they care more about, oh, I don't know, business and the stock market or
00:00:29.680 something so they're not bringing in any lockdowns, and that's kind of the choice. And you can also
00:00:34.720 look at the different data from all around the world, and you can really pick and choose as to
00:00:38.880 whether or not Sweden's doing excellent or they're doing terrible, because there's some countries that
00:00:42.560 they are doing much better than, there are other countries that they are doing much worse than,
00:00:46.320 and so forth. You can say, oh, the economy actually isn't doing amazing in Sweden, which is true,
00:00:51.040 because, well, all the other countries around them are suffering, so that has that sort of trickle-down
00:00:55.360 effect, and it hampers their economy as well. So people are going to play these pick-and-choosy
00:00:59.760 games when it comes to Sweden to say whatever they want out of the numbers, and you can rearrange
00:01:04.720 the months and so forth, get the figures you want. But one thing that is not debatable is the
00:01:10.480 overarching guiding philosophy that they're doing in Sweden. And this is a part that I don't think is
00:01:16.320 discussed enough. And what guides them is individual responsibility, personal responsibility. They have
00:01:24.320 restrictions in Sweden. People are wearing masks. There's a whole bunch of things that people are
00:01:29.760 not doing because of coronavirus. There's a whole bunch of non-essential activities that are not going
00:01:35.120 on and so forth. But here's the thing, that's voluntary choices. They believe in massive public
00:01:42.320 education, they have trust in each other, strong civics, and their officials are out there and they're
00:01:46.800 saying, look, here's the problem with coronaviruses, indoor group gatherings and so forth, not wearing a mask,
00:01:52.720 so here's what we really urge you guys to do. Look at what you're doing in your life. Look at your
00:01:58.080 activities and so forth. And please, we encourage you, bring these precautions into mind as you go
00:02:03.040 about your daily life. And many, many people are doing just that. I guess if there are some
00:02:09.120 restrictions that they feel like, look, this is too far. It's just going to destroy my business or my
00:02:13.600 livelihood. I just, I can't actually do those restrictions. Well, then they don't. And then they're
00:02:18.480 trying to find that happy medium, that balance. But here, we have these blunt restrictions where
00:02:22.960 we say, like we have said in Ontario, all right, we're reopening the gyms. And you know what, that
00:02:28.400 that cavernous two-story good life? Only 10 people at a time can be in there. And you know that tiny
00:02:34.880 little micro boutique gym? Only 10 people at a time can be in there, even though there's only ever five
00:02:40.480 people in there in the first place. These sort of bizarre blunt restrictions that are micromanaged,
00:02:45.840 top-down edicts that may not actually work. And we're not even sure why we've been given them
00:02:50.720 because we're just instructed them from on high. We're not given that personal responsibility
00:02:55.760 conversation. But in Sweden, they're breaking it all down for the populace. And while the folks are
00:03:00.640 listening and they are actually bringing in their own voluntary measures. So I think that's the thing
00:03:05.600 we have to find a better balance of here in Canada. And also just something we have to talk about
00:03:09.680 more when we talk about these other jurisdictions. There's a whole lot of things we can do right now that
00:03:14.880 kind of resemble lockdowns and activities and restrictions that actually wouldn't bring
00:03:19.520 undue harm to people that we can voluntarily do right now. And I imagine many people are as well.
00:03:25.280 It's just a lot of those top-down aggressive government lockdown people,
00:03:29.920 they're just refusing to acknowledge that. And I think that's a shame.