And only now they tell us …

I had a nightmare yesterday: I dreamt that Covid restrictions were back on, all over the world, and that they were even harsher than before. You could be arrested if you didn’t have a face mask on, and to go anywhere, besides a “vaccine passport”, you had to be scanned, as in the airports, by a special machine that could detect if you had a specific mRNA code in your blood. I woke up with a bad sensation. It was only a dream — or was it?

Recent data, from the WHO none the less, shows that despite being very light on lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine passports — in fact not even doing a real lockdown — Sweden had a much lower rate of excess deaths from Covid than a lot of other countries that had. The conclusion of the media is that “harsh restrictions were not the key to beating the virus.”

And now they tell us! After two years of annoying measures and forcing people to do things they didn’t want to do, causing a lot of mental health problem and business closures, some people even led to suicide, now we find out that the laissez-faire Swedish approach was the right way to go… Well, they could just asked me, I knew that from the beginning.

If you look at the graph published in the article listing excess deaths, and reproduced also below, Sweden is down at the bottom. Peru, at the top. It is worth remembering that Peru was one of the countries with some of the harshest measures and one longest lockdowns. A friend of mine, who was living in Peru at the time, told me that for a while people were required to wear not just one, but two face masks. One on top of the other. If you wore only one, you could be fined. I am not sure how the police checked that, but that’s how it was.

Now it’s almost June and the whole thing seems just a bizarre nightmare, pretty much like the one I had last night. It is hard to believe that even just months ago we could not enter into shops or restaurants without a monstrosity called “vaccine passport” and a mask covering our face.

And yet, I’m not sure if the lessons will be learned. Yes, now it’s summer in the northern hemisphere and things are pretty free, but I wonder if restrictions will come again next winter, as there are lockdowns in Shanghai and Beijing right now, and this may later spread to other countries — and I’m not talking about the virus, but about the restrictive measures. I am not sure I and most people (even those who believed it all) could go through it all again.

I suppose they got most of what they wanted — a vaccine basically forced onto millions (billions?) of people, a test for new authoritarian measures of population control, a push for digital cash. Hopefully, they will leave us in peace now?