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/118/ Three Articles: Covid (Patreon)

Published:
2020-04-21 07:00:02
Imported:
2024-07
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In this latest Three Articles, we discuss responses to Covid-19.

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Sosialisten_

This episode is sadly as disappointing as most of the rest of your commentary on the coronavirus crisis. You praise Sweden for its handling of the pandemic. This is a country that now has the 7th highest number of covid-19 deaths per capita in the world, and that far exceeds all its neighbours! Don't you realize that this is in total contrast to the views you have spent three years advocating on this podcast? Sweden is a prime example of progressive neoliberalism, it is perhaps the country in the world that is most infected by woke identity politics. And the move towards neoliberal economic policies has been more throughout going in Sweden than in other Nordic countries, under both right-wing governments and under the current Social Democratic/Green coalition. Indeed, this ultraliberal approach to the pandemic also has its parallels in Sweden's very lax approach to immigration and integration policy, which have seen the country accept an unusually large number of refugees and other immigrants, which has led to many social problems there. You also used to be critics of unelected technocrats, and supportive of democratic political agency. Well, one of the reasons Sweden adopted and stuck to its disastrous approach to the pandemic is that it is unusually technocratic compared to most other countries. It has been chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell that has been taking the decisions, while the democratically elected politicians have been much less involved than in other countries. Not surprisingly, it is the liberal establishment that have close ranks around the Swedish strategy, while critics have often been smeared as far-right, Russian bots etc. You can contrast this with Denmark, where it was recently reported that the mid-March shutdown had been decided by Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen and the rest of the government, overriding the technocratic experts. But in 2020, Aufhebunga Bunga choose to side with foot-dragging technocracy over vigorous democracy! Alex claims that there is a contrast between criticizing the lack of preparedness most countries have been exposed to have, and criticizing the too late and too insufficient measures that have been taken to limit the spread of the virus once it occurred. This is a totally false dichotomy that you have made up in your minds. In reality, the people who do one of these things also do the other. You can easily find numerous examples of this from all over the world. And a country like Finland, which as a matter of policy have 6 months supplies of PPE, still shut down in order to stop virus spread. It’s not either/or, you have to do both! George says that the only two possibilities that are being discussed are herd immunity or lockdown. Now, "lockdown" (or shutdown) can apparently mean different thing in different countries. I live in a country, Norway, that shut down already on the 12th of March, in sharp contrast with the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden which all waited much longer before taking substantive measures like quarantines and shutdowns. Is life under lockdown ideal? Of course not, but it has been a short-term measure that to a large extent was over weeks ago, as we got the spread of the virus under control relatively fast. Then Phil claims that there is no other alternative than relying on most of the population getting infected and letting herd immunity stop the further spread of the virus. This is terrible advice for a virus where somewhere between 0.5-1-0% of those who gets it dies, and several times this number will have to be hospitalized! Shutting down early, and then testing, tracing and isolating have always been the best strategy, and countries that have done so have fared much better than the UK and other countries where the government delayed doing much of anything for as long as they could. He also says that the countries with a liberal approach will have the better economic outcomes. This completely misses the nature of the economic crisis, which is primarily caused by the pandemic, not by the measures that have been taken to contain it. People adjust their consumption and travel habits in the face of a deadly pandemic, whether the government bans certain activities or not. It’s not like the Swedish economy hasn’t been effected by the disease. Like elsewhere, unemployment is up and growth is down. Moreover, I believe that in the slightly longer run it's beneficial to frontload the negative economic impact, to take a stronger but shorter-lasting cure, as opposed to a weaker but longer-lasting one. For instance, Greece recently announced that they would open for international tourism from selected countries with low coronavirus rates. Among the countries allowed are Norway, Denmark and Germany, while Sweden, UK and USA are excluded. And Norway and Denmark will open their borders on the 15th of June, allowing for quarantine-free travel. I'm not an economist, but do you really think this shows that the countries that shut down early hurt their economy more than those who waited longer? You also espouse this view that it is middle class people who support taking decisive measure to stop the virus, while the working class supports the liberal Johnson/Löfven approach. While I've been working in an office for the last few years, and from home since mid-March, I've also been an industrial worker. Let me tell you, the number of people per square meter in an office workplace far exceeds that in a factory. This is obviously the case with the increasingly common open-plan offices, but also in smaller shared offices. On the other hand, large factory halls are much less crowded. Sometimes, there are more robots than people, and workers often sit alone in small sheds running the conveyor belts etc. I also notice that trade unions have not opposed the shutdowns, neither in Norway, the UK or the USA. Quite the contrary, unions have been critical of prematurely reopening the economy. Perhaps organized labour know something that university professors like you and other upper middle-class people don't? Indeed, the calls to reopen have been calls to send more working-class people back to their workplaces in the middle of the pandemic, while much of the middle classes would continue to work from home. Yes, the working class suffers disproportionately, but working people understand that it doesn’t help them if they get sick that academics and professionals are also taking up the limited number of ICU beds and respirators.