Pandemic diary: Year 3

It's now been three years since my first pandemic diary entry on this blog. My previous one was a year ago, when I noted that our government had pretty much abandoned trying to contain the pandemic at all. The official death toll on 1.1.2022 was 1 564. As I write this, the WHO Covid dashboard has our total deaths at about 8 900. In my previous post, I said we'd need to triple our death toll from what was then about 3 000 to reach per capita numbers like Sweden. Well, we've done it.

So what happened? I'll show you. I no longer have screenshotted graphics from our government broadcaster, because they've quit publishing covid statistics. These are from Our World in Data.

The graph below shows the story of our pandemic. For the first year or so, we were very successful at suppressing the pandemic. Deaths were well below the world average, let alone the EU average. We were on par with Asia. Until something changed, and away we went.

In the fall of 2021, our government pretty much decided that we're going to stop suppressing the pandemic. The next graph is from about a week ago, and it shows the consequences of that decision.

Over the past year, covid deaths in Finland have been way higher, per capita, than in the UK or the US. We're also way above the EU average, let alone the world. We simply decided that actually, we're just going to let people die.

The one thing I associate this with, more than anything, is a cheerful media appearance by our very cinematic prime minister. On September 24, she was on the cover of one of our major afternoon papers, with the huge headline: It is time to live!

Obviously it wasn't just one interview: rather, it coincided with a general lifting of restrictions. Masks and distancing are no longer recommended, and in general, people are being encouraged to behave as if there was no pandemic at all. Below you can see the results.

It's actually really interesting to look at all the Nordic countries. First of all, this is the only real frame of reference for assessing Sweden's performance. People in English-speaking countries occasionally make very misleading arguments about Sweden, because they compare Swedish policy outcomes to their own. Surely the comparison point has to be very similar societies, with very different pandemic policies. Below is what it looks like. Frankly, if you think pandemic mortality in Sweden wasn't high, your baseline is wrong.

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So here we are. On New Year's Day 2022, 1 500 people in Finland had died of Covid. Now the number is 9 000. We were doing a world-class job of suppressing the pandemic - until we decided to quit. Almost ten thousand people died, and we're still pretending it isn't happening. Get on the subway today, and there's barely a mask in sight. We're doling out record amounts of sick pay, but even that can't sway the government into doing anything. It is time to live. Except, of course, for the 7 500 people who died after we lifted restrictions.

What's horrible about all this is that this pretence that there's no pandemic is empowering all the worst people. We now have folks who were grumbling about the restrictions claiming that they were never necessary in the first place. It's honestly kind of terrifying that hundreds of thousands of people get sick, thousands die, and there are actual people out here saying that the greatest atrocity was that they weren't allowed to go to the gym or the karaoke bar. It's certainly now easier to understand why the 1918 pandemic seems to have vanished from the historical record.

First it was hoarding pasta and toilet paper, then it was "time to live", i.e. "I don't give a shit who dies, it won't be me". The necropolitics of Covid suggest that we're in for an unbelievably grim time with the climate crisis.