Not sure if it was given openly to the public. Coworkers husband is a pediatrician, and he got it as part of Covid practice guidelines.

Correct

These truly are interesting days

Looks like mercantilism doesn't work very well when you aren't a king and the world has been under the influence of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism for 40 years.

I see. The details I was asking about earlier today are still important. 1 in 100 seems an exceedingly high rate for such a severe complication, relative to how mild the disease progresses in almost all patients of this age group.
If the number is "1 in 100 teenagers who needed hospitalization due to covid", or something similar, that would be more realistic, but also far less worrisome.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 27 2020 10:40pm

Regarding Sweden and its GDP:
https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/gdp-growth

I really struggle to see how a 0.1% growth in Q1, plus a 8.6% contraction in Q2, are supposed to add up to a growth of 5% for the year as claimed by EndlessSky. Seems to be a fantasy number.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Aug 27 2020 10:44pm

Sweden gets ~40-45% of their GDP through taxes, don't they?

This post was edited by TritonV8 on Aug 27 2020 10:46pm

That's not how GDP works. Can you explain what you mean by "through taxes"?

Complete screw up on my part. Thread jumping got my thoughts mixed up. I meant to say the average tax rates in Sweden are ~40-45%.

There's nothing wrong with high taxes if you get your money's worth.

The average household in the United States spends just shy of $1200 a month on health insurance. The average income is just shy of $62,000. The average tax rate is 24%.

So 1200 * 12 / 6200 = 23%

If we raised everybody's taxes by 10% but took away an insurance premium that costs 23% of their income that would be great. (This isn't too far away from what would really happen FYI. Even far-right libertarian groups admit we would save hundreds of billions of dollars a year with nationalized healthcare).

In Sweden they basically have this situation, where they pay higher taxes but get services in return that greatly outweigh the cost. And why wouldn't it? Buying in bulk is always cheaper, government services are just the ultimate in bulk-buying.

inb4 "but government is inefficient" and I point out that private insurance is 100% market inefficiency, and I point out that government services are actually pretty great until somebody intentionally sabotages them for political reasons, i.e. the current post office.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Aug 27 2020 11:14pm