Juno News - November 26, 2022


The winners and losers of the pandemic

Mentioned
Tagnol
The reality of Covid-19 (ft. Jay Bhattacharya) The last gasps of the Covid Crazies

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

167.56

Word count

398

Sentence count

26


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the mistakes governments made when it came to responding to the Black Plague pandemic of the early 20th century. We talk about the mistakes they made, how they corrected themselves, and what they learned from them.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Yeah, you kind of touched upon the Great Barrington Declaration. We'll get to that in a bit. But just a question before that, with so many screw ups by governments around the world, who, in your opinion, got it right? Which places got it right? Well, almost everyone else was getting it wrong. And what exactly did they get right?
00:00:20.620 Well, I don't think there's any place that got it all completely right. It was not possible in the fog of war. But I do think that some places were better than others. So, for instance, let's take Sweden, because that's the most prominent example of a country that followed a very different policy. I think in the early days of the pandemic, the Swedish Stockholm public health actually made huge errors.
00:00:44.440 They sent COVID-infected patients back to their nursing homes, causing tremendous deaths in those locations. But very early on, they corrected themselves. Anders Tagnol, the head of Swedish public health, made a decision to follow the old pandemic plan, which is protection of the vulnerable.
00:01:05.560 Don't spread panic. Try to calm the population down. And that's what he did. So, like, for instance, they didn't close schools because the kids were not at risk.
00:01:18.580 And a data out of Iceland was suggesting that kids were not particularly efficient spreaders of this disease.
00:01:24.300 So, you had, like, so, and on the other hand, they tried to, after that horrible mistake in Stockholm, they tried to advise older people, you know, that this actually is a high-risk disease for them.
00:01:38.240 They organized communities to provide support for older people living in the community so they could reduce the amount of exposures they had.
00:01:46.540 They actually did recommend limitations in mass gatherings, which are completely reasonable in the disease of spreading.
00:01:53.080 But they were, mostly, it was a voluntary kind of effort to try to, and the reason why they could do this is because they built trust with the population.
00:02:00.600 The population trusted Swedish public health because their Swedish public health never lied to their population.
00:02:06.520 And as a consequence, they could make these measures that actually turned out to be quite effective.
00:02:12.880 The overall excess mortality in Sweden is actually pretty low, you know, on par with the other Scandinavian countries and below much of the rest of Europe, certainly much lower than the United States.