Thing is, if Canada didn't adopt stay-at-home orders, shutdowns of non-essential businesses, social distancing and masking and their COVID-19 death rate were comparable to Sweden (5.7 deaths/10k pop vs. 2.37 deaths/10k pop) there would be a huge moral outrage. We would have 21,531 COVID deaths instead of 8,962.

Sweden's head epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was receiving death threats for going with the herd immunity strategy. It's a very politically unpopular position to take and took a lot of balls for him to do. But all the retards who were saying that Sweden was gonna have 100,000 deaths look very foolish now. And Sweden's curve has been crushed while life is fairly normal for them. While the rest of the world is living in fear of a second wave.

The 2017-18 flu/pneumonia killed 8,511 Canadians in 2018 without any social distancing/masking, no stay-at-home orders, no shutdown of non-essential businesses. 21,531 dead Canadians is like 2.5x a bad flu season. This virus is at least 2.5x the 2017-18 flu's lethality (which was the most lethal flu we had in awhile). Though the 2017-18 flu did have the benefit of a vaccine as well. There is no vaccine for any coronavirus.

You have to understand how politically unpopular Sweden's strategy was to understand why our politicians decided to go with stay-at-home orders, social distancing and masking. The narrative right now is that Sweden and Anders Tegnell were very selfish for letting so many granmas and granpa's die. The epidemiologist does admit that Sweden could have done more to protect long term care and the elderly and sick and he has some regrets about that. But he is still Public Enemy #1 with pro-lockdown people except for maybe Trump.

Society needs to have a frank discussion about how many cases, positivity rate, hospitalization and death is acceptable. Before they introduce a flu case and death ticker and this shit goes on forever. Because our society was cool with 6,000-8,500 Canadians dying a year of flu/pneumonia for years.