To be completely honest, I personally find it pretty offensive that someone would call that "not bad"
Especially seeing the monumental tragedy that took place in care homes earlier in the year.
...
I will never be okay with anyone calling this immense loss "not bad" or "the right thing" etc. Never.
I'm with
@mango here. Its terribly important not to gloss over or minimise the seriousness of the COVID problem in any way. Its minimising the problem that has led to this worldwide failure to take action over the past 9 months, and to all the death and devastation we have experienced.
Its also important to acknowledge the effectiveness of restrictions. They work - look at Victoria, Australia. A couple of months back, they had a surge in cases, which peaked at around 700 new cases a day. They imposed hard restrictions. The daily cases has now dropped to less than 3 new cases on average over the last two weeks. That's not a typo, the current daily cases are
less than three. Victoria imposed their restrictions when the rate of cases reached 500 a day. To put this in perspective, Sweden's daily cases have consistently averaged at 150 cases or more since late March, and currently run at over 1,200 a day (which is huge, even correcting for the size of the population, which is twice that of Victoria). What Sweden treat as "okay" or "not bad", Victoria treated as a cause for serious action, and they got on top of it.
So yes, restrictions work.
Now, you can argue that its better to let some people die or become chronically ill than to make everyone endure the kinds of restrictions Victoria did (they were pretty tough in Melbourne). I would disagree, but at least you're being honest. Or you can argue that those people will die/become ill eventually, because the virus is unstoppable, so we might as well get it over with. Again, I would disagree, but at least that's defensible on some level. But you can't argue that restrictions don't work. They clearly do. And they're all we've got right now.
I'm pretty angry with every well-resourced country in the world who minimised the problem at the start and did not take action. Not only because that led to the deaths of many of their own citizens, but because it allowed the virus to spread unchecked to poor nations with few resources, who ended up facing even worse devastation. I'm maddest at the US, the wealthiest country in the world, but I'm also mad at Sweden, who for all its wealth and resources and socially progressive policies could have done so much better.
What have we learned for next time we have a global pandemic? Restrict hard, and restrict early. Don't close your ears and eyes and say its all "okay" or "not bad". Don't try to massage the statistics to whitewash it all away. Take it bloody seriously. If we'd done that right at the start, none of this would have happened.
Edited to correct statistics for Sweden (sorry, Sweden).
