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The lesson is very simple: do what the Swedes do. I don’t think the Western political infrastructure can be trusted to do what’s right, they are too much motivated by the media and election money.

@marcitko said:
As you note, the pendulum seems to have swung more towards the anti-lockdown and anti-vaxer side. Maybe to the middle, I don't know.

My concerns with these new discussions are:

• these changes in sentiment seem to follow a pendulum pattern - will new findings in the future change the sentiment yet again? Does the pendulum come to rest at the middle ultimately? What is the middle for this issue?

This is still early on in the post mortem, there are many unknown factors that still need to be parsed out. For me personally, the main thing is that the voices against what Sweden was trying were so certain and moralistic in their attitudes and this says, "maybe you weren't as correct and virtuous as you were acting."

• at the beginning of the pandemic, there were many unknowns. What if some of the parameters turned out differently? Taking this into account, what can we conclude about the best response in the future?

My rudimentary understanding is that Sweden was actually following many of the guidelines that existed pre pandemic and that a lot of the rest of the world's policy was motivated by in the moment fears.

There was a lot of uncertainty and I thought acting out of precaution was wise. In my opinion some of that early precautionary stance got entrenched largely by the culture war and wasn't let go of as new information came in. My concern going forward is that if there is another pandemic and the parameters are different, which they most certainly will be, that we'll act like its Covid-19 and use it to fight all the old battles rather than seeing the new threat as it is. For example if some new pandemic does have a higher mortality rate, or effects children the way Covid effected the elderly and we act like it is Covid that could be disastrous.

I don't know, I'm just tired of the pendulum. In my life I try to avoid the wild swings and look to set a truer course. During a group walking meditation people seemed to unconsciously speed up walking out of the meditation room and slow down going in, I tried to keep an even pace, I do the same sort of thing driving in traffic. But I suppose that is just my personal annoyance and the world will do what the world does.