Juno News - January 11, 2021


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


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

186.33084

Word count

508

Sentence count

23


Summary

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

In this episode of the podcast, Dr. Aaron Horschig sits down with Dr. Alex Blumberg to discuss some of the controversy surrounding the coronavirus crisis in Florida, Sweden, and Canada, and why maybe we should be a little more cautious in our pronouncements about them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.