Johan Norberg is a well-known Swedish Essayist that had a great point about the Swedish relaxed lockdown policy:
“I get so many questions from people that Sweden you are doing this crazy experiment. Ahhh, but my response is you are doing a crazy experiment because the world has never shut down to this extent this rapidly before. Shutting down societies, workplaces, schools, and borders. And that’s an experiment and we do not know what is going to work out for the best in the long run.”
He makes a great observation and it seems like most of the world has lost their common sense. Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and some other countries did not push for draconian measures to be put in place.
I think of this quote when I look at the reactions by some of the countries, especially the modern ones:
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
From: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Here is another video that was taken when the lockdown first began. Just to give you a perspective of what they were trying to do: