Yeah, I think questioning is good. According to Pat, the answers are known and further, your wife is participating in genocide. I consider that over-the-top ridiculous. There's a lot of controversy over the infection rate in Sweden, but I think the more telling issue is what's happening with the economy.
Fuck you, you miserable piece of shit. Stop putting words in my mouth.
I explicitly said, in fact it was the whole first paragraph of that very post, that we have incomplete information, and that we don't yet have a good grasp on the disease. And I provided sources backing that up. That's 180 degrees away from claiming the answers are known. I've pointed out flaws in the data on both sides, including things like the death rate in Sweden -- which is lower than the European or world averages, but higher than in the other Scandinavian countries. Though also be careful where you source your data -- I've seen a lot of graphs comparing Sweden's overall death toll to the other Scandinavian countries, which is blatantly misleading fake news because Sweden has roughly double the population of any of the other Scandinavian countries.
What's appalling -- and genocidal -- is the complete disregard for the economy shown by those making public policy. We have politicians and medical doctors talking about how we must follow the science and shutdown the economy. Except, what science? Epistemologists are experts on the nature of disease and the spread of infection, not on the economy. In fact, most of them have spent their entire lives in the public sector, so they don't even know what it's like to work in the free market. Yet they've set themselves up as experts on something they quite literally know less about than an average employee in an average company. By contrast, there are no economists up on the stage at any of these briefings. While they do occasionally trot out a few bankers and CEOs, unless you think Phillip Morris determines the science on smoking, or that Exxon should be considered the authoritative voice on the ecological impact of fracking or oil spills, you can't call that science. Not only that, but the economic shutdowns they instituted are completely untested and unprecedented. There's no "science" even on the epistemological side, except some wild speculation and theories.
The word "economy" comes from "economize". We have limited resources, and must decide how to use them, and the economy is how we allocate those resources. It's trivial and disingenuous to say this is about haircuts or McDonald's, because the economy is also how we feed ourselves, how we make medicines, and how we train people in all the specialized tasks needed to support the complex modern world. It's how we fill stores with supplies when they're depleted, how we develop and bring to market new life-saving technologies, and for many people, it's the source of self-esteem and pride. It's our lifeblood. But they shut it down without consulting any experts, looking at the science, or examining the trade offs. Those who destroyed it destroyed livelihoods and lives. They reduced incomes, educational opportunities, health outcomes, and cost lives. They also hurt the ability to respond to the pandemic -- two or three days ago NPR was talking about how the damage to the supply chain was forcing medical labs to source all kinds of alternate supplies, and how that was hurting their ability to respond to the coronavirus. (Though of course, being NPR, they blamed it on the virus, instead of on the economic shutdown.)
Yet people like Andrew Cuomo, who literally forced corona-positive patients on nursing homes and thus is single-handedly responsible for a vast number of deaths in NYC, are celebrated as heroes because they get up on stage and say "we can't put a value on human life" and use that to justify new lockdowns. Which is just compounding a deadly error with even more death, because they're ignoring the lives that will be lost and diminished due to the shutdowns.
The current estimate is each death lost to the coronavirus results in a loss of 11 or 13 years of life (men and women, respectively), so the 110K+ deaths works out to 1.3+ million years of life lost. One estimate suggest that more 700,000 life-years are being lost due to the economy shutdown, per month. Which is clearly not a good trade off, even if we assume the economic lockdowns had a major effect. Which is unlikely, because while it's still unclear how much of an effect the economic shutdowns had on the disease, the data is ambiguous. Even without considering the other ways a damaged economy hurts people, or how the infection fatality rate estimates have plummeted, that's a compelling argument for immediately and absolutely eliminating all the lockdowns.
But we don't need those relatively new assessments to recognize that public officials' completely one-sided attention to coronavirus deaths, and complete lack of attention to the economic costs, was criminal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2020/03/27/how-economists-calculate-the-costs-and-benefits-of-covid-19-lockdownshttps://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life