Everything

First, these quick takes:

Obama’s crimes — in detail, with photographic evidence. (Spoiler alert: there were none.)

FOX News on Trump — four amazing minutes last summer. It’s only gotten worse.

Second:

For those who’ve bet money we can truly afford to lose on PRKR: yet another potential source of recovery.

Third . . . w o o o o o w:

Her bizarre Putin tweets aside, Tara Reade has a remarkably troubled background. I had no idea. (Quite a contrast with Kavanaugh’s accuser.)

Finally:

Steve: “I’m moderating a panel in two weeks on Who Was Right, Sweden Or The USA? We probably won’t know the answer for another 3 years, but it’s an interesting topic.”

→ “Sweden was a lot more right than the USA, as we had NO plan, and got both the deaths and a depression. The better question might be: who was right, Sweden or Denmark?”

Sweden’s outbreak has been far deadlier than those of its neighbors, but it’s still better off than many countries that enforced strict lockdowns.

It’s all agonizing, and the jury is still out. But for now, while suffering no more deaths per capita than we have, a higher proportion of the Swedish population, having been infected, may have become immune. Time will tell.

Foreign Affairs argues that Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Will Soon Be The World’s.

Because remember as awful as even a single COVID-19 death is, there are also costs to preventing them:

Today’s children are the pandemic generation. For millions, the future is now grim.

. . . It’s impossible to overstate what this crisis will mean for the pandemic generation. This prolonged, unpredictable and highly contagious disease is upending their education, family lives, social relationships, resiliency and opportunities to pull themselves out of multigenerational cycles of poverty. The result might be a chasmic gap between relatively affluent children and those in poverty deeper than at any other time in modern history.

There is no doubt that persistent lockdowns and school closings have affected children everywhere. UNICEF reports that more than 91 percent of the world’s children are impacted by school shutdowns, and at least 117 million children are at risk of missing vital health care, including critical vaccines. . . .

Not to mention “food insecurity.”

So it’s worth considering views like this one, from a doc at Johns Hopkins:

How To Reopen America Safely

Months ago, I called for a long lockdown. Now we must minimize collateral damage.

. . . The full lockdown made sense weeks ago. But the situation is changing, and more data on the virus are now available to inform our next steps. . . .

As a physician, I firmly believe that the primary goal of our reopening strategy should be to maximize the number of lives saved. But . . . [e]xtreme forms of mitigation can have diminishing returns. . . . [T]he effects on human life are real.

In late April, the United Nations World Food Program reported that 250 million people may face starvation as a result of the economic impact of Covid-19. In America, local food banks are already congested with record wait times. There are other serious consequences of continuing stay-at-home orders and prolonging economic disruption. Deferred medical care, mental health problems, domestic violence and one of the biggest pre-Covid-19 public health problems in the United States — loneliness — are all magnified by in-home sheltering. The economic and public health harm associated with sheltering is yet to be fully measured. . . .

Professor Makary goes on to make sensible suggestions, well worth the read.

If you need something to cheer you up after all that, try these three minutes of a cat and a magpie. (Thanks, David.)

Have a great week-end!