DustyBin
Established Member
But would there...if the demographics were different?
We've mentioned Sweden......but tell me, is there another country in Europe that hasn't imposed a lockdown of some sort? Serious question as I don't know the answer.
Are you saying that every European Leader is/has been wrong in what they've done?
Just briefly in regard to Sweden, I posted the graph on the relevant Sweden thread, but they aren’t experiencing anything like the number of excess deaths many other European countries are. If you look at the headline covid deaths number in isolation it doesn’t look great I’ll admit, but the number of excess deaths is relatively low.
Im not sure if any other European country has avoided lockdowns to be honest, I can’t think of any obvious examples.
As for your final question, my take on this is that China tried desperately to contain the virus and were willing to try anything, including locking down society. Italy, as the first European country to be hit, decided to follow China. The rest of Europe followed Italy as we collectively lost our nerve and abandoned traditional epidemiological thinking. The UK very nearly stuck with it but bottled it at the eleventh hour which is (at least in part) why we’ve had the worst of both worlds. I can understand and sympathise to a point with European governments as the pictures coming out of China suggested this was a SARS or even Ebola like virus in terms of virulence and so natural herd immunity was an unpalatable (and most likely unviable) strategy. This was however, in my opinion, a mistake, and one which no European governments are willing to admit to. And so we find ourselves where we are....