“Summer turned out to be different in the Netherlands” –
https://twitter.com/HuguenotHouse/status/1414150013048004610/photo/1
Australia and the Isle of Man are both showing difficulty keeping a lid on Delta – but with single-day peak counts of 64 and 25 infections respectively, both are orders of magnitude closer to doing so than most countries. Even if they do lose control of it now, their populations will have spent a fraction of the time under lockdown until vaccination became available, and Australia will have avoided tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of cases of long term health damage.
Sweden’s famously lax approach has resulted in them becoming world leaders in long covid among the young. 33,000 children have had long covid in the UK, of whom 9,000 are still afflicted. This is nothing compared to what we will see when all restrictions are removed in just over a week. We’re looking at a devastating third wave in August, larger than anything seen to date.
This makes me particularly angry with the denialists. They bang on and on about Sweden, and they focus on death statistics only so that they can claim that the illness is of no consequence to younger people and children. Not one of them has come back to say “sorry, I was wrong”.