11 Comments
Mar 9, 2021Liked by Paul Yowell

Excellent article, thank you. A case for the policy of "herd immunity" has recently been made by this study conducted on U.S. Marines - a very controlled environment, so to speak: https://greatamericanpolitics.com/2020/11/marines-experiment-shows-covid-quarantines-have-no-effect-on-virus-spread/

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Neither Norway nor Finland have had a lockdown, going by the agreed definition, as neither has implemented a stay-at-home order or a restriction on household mixing. So they are both examples of success in handling the pandemic despite very light government restrictions.

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It's also worth noting that the lockdowns which were apparently so successful in Sweden's Nordic neighborhood looked nothing like the UK's. As I understand it, Finland has had no lockdown since the summer, and the Denmark lockdown kept all schools open and allowed up to 10 to meet throughout.

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Is there a problem with the actual data in the final graph? It doesn’t seem consistent with the Worldometer cumulative data shown higher up.

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Thank you, very well written! The measure of "lockdown stringency" is also helpful when articulating the extent to which each country or region "locked down" - just reaching consensus on what the term "lockdown" actually means is helpful.

We know that the Blatvinik school modified and adjusted their stringency index measure on Sweden so I am distrustful of their output. I also don't trust the veracity of the Google mobility data after discovering obvious flaws in it.

I believe it is important to understand the extent to which each country locked down to isolate a significant differentiating factor in the Neighbour Argument.

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