In this new, short video, economist Antony Davies rightly insists on assessing the consequences of the Covid-19 lockdowns in context. (Beneath the video, I here write a bit more about it.)
I see in this video only two small negatives (beyond the distracting background noise near the end).
First, Antony says nothing, save for one brief allusion, to the fact that Covid is dangerous overwhelmingly to the elderly. Covid doesn’t take lives randomly, and (hence) whatever lives are saved by Covid lockdowns are not saved randomly.
Second, Antony doesn’t mention the “dry tinder” point – that is, the fact that Sweden last year had an unusually low number of deaths of vulnerable people. Sweden’s light-touch approach early on to Covid is even more impressive when the dry-tinder point is taken into account.
I call these points “negatives” rather than criticisms. Antony’s understandable wish to use the Yankee Stadium metric likely prevented him from being nuanced about just who was killed by Covid and who might have been saved by lockdowns. And I’m not sure how he could have worked in, to his discussion of Sweden, the dry-tinder point.
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For alerting me to this video I thank Hans Eicholz.
