Juno News - Let's take a look at COVID-19 numbers in Sweden and Florida

00:00:00.000 One of the more troubling, perplexing aspects of the coronavirus conversation is the deep

00:00:09.920 passion and energy that some people bring to arguing that jurisdictions that have not had

00:00:16.020 the tightest of lockdowns are somehow major failures, catastrophes, don't even consider it,

00:00:22.320 don't go there, something to be avoided. I'm talking, of course, about Florida, and yes,

00:00:27.680 Sweden. Boy, people love to passionately debate Sweden. Oh, it's failed, it's failed, it's awful,

00:00:32.440 it's a catastrophe, and so forth. And then you look at the numbers. In Europe, 30-odd states,

00:00:37.800 you can look at the chart, and you compare cases per capita for all these countries there, and Sweden

00:00:42.520 is 12. They're just kind of in the middle of the pack. But you would think, hold on a second,

00:00:47.680 if they failed, if they're a disaster, wouldn't they be one? Wouldn't they be the highest cases

00:00:52.800 per capita by great orders of magnitude? And then you take the other fact that by not having

00:00:57.460 the same similar strict lockdowns as other countries have had, they've not had those

00:01:01.740 societal harms that other jurisdictions have suffered. So you go, oh, some of that actually

00:01:06.760 looks kind of attractive. Maybe at the very least, we should back away from going on and on about how

00:01:12.360 there's such a big failure. Florida, that other jurisdiction, again, you bring up the charts when

00:01:17.260 it comes to per capita cases by state. And right now, as of me recording this, they are 27th,

00:01:23.460 27th, 27th for cases per capita. They are almost directly in the middle of the pack for US states,

00:01:30.320 and they have some of the lighter restrictions out there. What does this tell us? Again, I think

00:01:35.120 the main thing it tells us is that those people who say, absolutely proof, these lockdowns, they are

00:01:41.140 going to work. They are going to be a great success. And if you open some things, if you dare to

00:01:46.000 suggest, you know what, I think you can have the bookstores open, just enforce social distancing,

00:01:52.180 encouraging hand washing and so forth, stuff about masks, those various rules. I think we don't have

00:01:57.960 to shut down a used bookstore from having, what, two customers, three customers. Here in Canada,

00:02:02.820 the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, they humbly suggested, hey, maybe we can open retail

00:02:08.720 to three customers at a time, but have all these protocols in place. And in Ontario, the government

00:02:13.980 said, no, no, we can't possibly do that. It's not safe. We got to shut her down. And then you look at

00:02:19.140 these other jurisdictions, you go, well, I don't know, they haven't necessarily shut down their

00:02:24.120 used bookstores. Should we really be declaring these places the massive failures that they are?

00:02:29.520 Or should we be a little bit more humble, a little bit more cautious in our pronouncements and

00:02:33.780 kind of start to challenge our assumptions about some of the prevailing narratives that are out there?

00:02:38.960 Yep, I think the facts show maybe, dare I say, we should consider the latter.

Juno News - January 11, 2021