I very much enjoy hearing from my friends via email, whenever my entire society is shut down by a global pandemic and I’m forbidden, for health policy reasons, from gathering with friends in person. I don’t partake in the social media scene — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — because so much of the activity strikes me as shallow and insipid.
If I’m going to waste my life on internet, I want, at the very least, to have my notions challenged. So email will have to do, for now.
A friend’s email this past weekend challenged my notions, by including a link to an article posted on AFA.net — the American Family Association. The article was titled “Shutdowns Were Pointless All Along” and the writer, evangelical radio host Bryan Fischer, introduced the topic with this warning:
ATTENTION: Major social media outlets are finding ways to block the conservative/evangelical viewpoint. Click here for daily electronic delivery of The Stand’s Daily Digest – the day’s top blogs from AFA.
Mr. Fischer then reminds us that President Trump continues to lead us on the correct course, unlike “major social media outlets” and the nation’s governors and the mainstream media.
President Trump wisely has taken his first steps to reopen America, and has just as wisely reminded the nation’s governors that the ball is in their court. This is not just wise, it’s brilliant: if people are torqued at government restrictions, they will not have the president to blame. Their beef will be with their governors and their governors alone.
I’ve argued from the beginning of this manufactured crisis that far more damage will be done by the panic than by the virus. It turns out I was right. And now a prominent Israeli professor is confirming what I have said all along.
The prominent Israeli professor mentioned here is none other than Yitzhak Ben Israel of Tel Aviv University, who serves on the advisory board for one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies — Teva Pharmaceuticals, with dual headquarters in Israel and New Jersey. The professor has reportedly concluded that all the shutdowns — all the closing of churches, schools, beaches, businesses, restaurants, and parks — was “nothing more than economy-destroying madness.”
“It has all been unnecessary because coronavirus runs its own course no matter what governments do or do not do”, writes Mr. Fischer.
As proof of this, Professor Ben Israel “plotted the rates of new coronavirus infections in the US, the UK, Sweden, Italy, Israel, Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain… He discovered an amazing and even astounding thing. It didn’t matter whether a country pursued a severe incarceration-in-place policy like Israel, or went about business as usual like Sweden, coronavirus followed precisely the same pattern.” The confirmed cases, and deaths, spiked, and then tapered off.
Shutdowns were pointless all along.
Or… were they?
You can read Professor Ben Israel’s six-page analysis on Google Drive. (I hope you can read Hebrew.)
Radio host Fischer (who presumably can read Hebrew) compares Israel to Sweden, as one example:
Israel has imposed strict quarantines. It does not allow residents to even leave their neighborhoods to buy food. Beyond that, they are only permitted to leave their homes for essential work and medical care… These restrictions applied even during Holy Week… and Easter Mass was performed at a nearly empty Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the site where Jesus was crucified.
In Stockholm, by stark contrast, cafes and restaurants are open. Kids are going to school and to soccer practice. Parks are full. Sweden, in other words, is open for business. People are practicing some social distancing, and gatherings of more than 50 people have been suspended.
But the disease has followed the same arc in both places, which means Israel – and the United States – locked everybody down for no good reason.
So Sweden — where minimal government orders were put in place — is seeing essentially the same results as Israel?
Here’s a quote from Sweden’s foreign minister, Ann Linde, who spoke recently at a briefing in Stockholm, stating that the idea that life “goes on as normal” in Sweden is “a myth”.
“Many people stay at home and have stopped traveling. Many businesses are collapsing. Unemployment is expected to rise dramatically… Sweden shares the same goals regarding the COVID-19 outbreak as all other countries: to save lives and protect public health. We work with the same challenges as other countries — the scale and speed of the virus, the pressure on the national health system — and we use the same tools as most countries do…”
When I checked the World Health Organization website on Saturday, it appeared that Israel (population 9 million) has seen 148 COVID deaths.
The same map indicated that Sweden (population 10 million) has seen 1,400 COVID deaths. Almost ten times the death rate seen in Israel?
Here’s a recent chart comparing Sweden’s COVID experience with some nearby Nordic countries that did decide to lock down. (Plus South Korea, for some reason.) The data below comes from the European CDC. I’m not sure where Professor Ben Israel obtained his “pointless” data.
Once again, it appears that the aggressive lock-down policies in Norway and Finland have resulted in a death total one-tenth of Sweden’s total.
Which of the lines shown on the chart above do Americans want us to most closely emulate? We understand that Mr. Fischer and the readers of AFA.net probably want to follow the path blazed by Sweden’s relaxed government policies.
I’m not sure I agree with that course.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.