Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the Emergency Room was being overwhelmed, because that would be false. I went from seeing eight or more patients per shift to seeing two or three. While a very large proportion of the patients were covid positive, there were in total many fewer patients than usual. All the usual suspects in the Emergency Room were gone.
Official statistics bear this out. They show, for example, that hospital admissions for heart attacks in Stockholm were down 40% during the spring covid peak. Presumably people were choosing to stay home rather than go to the hospital and risk getting covid. And presumably this was resulting in unnecessary deaths – indirect deaths, not due to the virus itself, but rather due to the hysteria surrounding the virus.
This continued for about a month, and then the covid patients started to disappear. More and more of the tests came back negative. I noticed that the official statistics were telling the same story. From mid-April until early August there was a continuous decline in the number of people dying of covid in Sweden.
Jacob Sullum reports that Americans are getting sick of Covid restrictions. (I hope he’s correct; in my view, Americans aren’t yet sick enough of these restrictions.) A slice:
COVID-19 restrictions are equally capricious in other states. New York Gov. Cuomo last week banned indoor dining in New York City even though his own data showed that restaurants accounted for just 1.4 percent of infections, while Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz banned both indoor and outdoor dining at a time when 1.7 percent of cases were linked to restaurants.
When the Great Barrington Declaration was released in early October, many people dismissed it in part by ridiculing its express opposition to lockdowns as being opposition to a straw man – as opposition to policies that, while these might have been used in Spring, were now proposed by no one and were not going to be used again in response to Covid. Well, this Straw Man – as Phil Magness might say – is now stalking the land.
To so-called conservatives who are quick to identify the socialism of Democrats, if you vote for this spending monstrosity, you are no better. When you vote to pass out free money, you lose your soul and you abandon forever any semblance of moral or fiscal integrity.
So the next time you see Republicans in high moral dudgeon claiming and complaining about spending of Democrats and socialism, remind them—remind them if they supported this monstrous spending bill, that really the difference between the parties is less Adam Smith vs. Marx and more Marx vs. Engels.
