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The Economic Performance of Coronavirus Sweden

In Iceland, aggressive track-and-trace policies, effective quarantining, and closed borders had the country’s infection peak in early April. Soon enough we all forgot about them and their single-digit deaths. 

Instead Sweden became the black sheep. The stubborn outlier kept its society comparatively open. Shops and cafés and workplaces introduced some changes, like putting screens between customers and shop-workers. The Scandinavian nation leveraged its high internet accessibility to work from home, and public policy and persona alike appealed to common-sense behavior – like staying at home if ill, keeping physical distance, and using sanitizer (though not as religiously as the Icelanders). 

While pundits of either ideological persuasion lined up to defend it or attack it, Sweden’s elderly population kept dying. The strategy’s focus on openness, we were told, was directly to blame for care homes being unable to shield their vulnerable residents. 

Except, it turned out, that the elderly and those in nursing homes elsewhere were dying all the same: in New York, in England, in Italy, in New Orleans, stringent government restrictions or not.

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Online virtual classes are now requiring immunizations for students to attend

“I think people feel like if you’re not going to the brick and mortar school then you don’t need to have the immunizations but that’s incorrect,” Fairfax County Health Department worker Shauna Severo told NBC 4 in Washington.

Health officials claim that in Virginia students need to have their shots to attend class whether virtual or not.

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Sweden Defeated The Coronavirus Without A Lockdown – Now Its Companies Are Reaping The Benefits

Progressive critics of the Trump Administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic like to point to Sweden and portray the Nordic country’s decision to forego lockdowns as a travesty motivated by greed. Such reductive, black-and-white interpretations are inevitably the result of a childlike analysis where every hero needs to have a hero and a villain. But although Sweden’s COVID-19 czar has admitted that he would have changed certain elements of the country’s response if he could go back in time, the country’s decision to skip lockdowns, and keep the country relatively open, has paid off – even if Sweden does have a significantly higher mortality rate than its neighbors (though still lower than all of the worst-hit western European countries).

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