The beautiful numbers for the year 2020 were heavily overshadowed by the pandemic that broke out earlier in the year. Or rather, the inability of medicine and the governments of developed countries to cope with it.
And how well it all started. Expectations of the Olympics, the European Football Championship. Also good economic news around the world and the warmest winter in the northern hemisphere.
But apparently the world is not allowed to live so long in such a good condition. And the global coronavirus caused a lot of other problems.
Political protests in the Americas. Worldwide unemployment and forced work from home as well as the requirement to socially distance from others on the planet, where 7 billion people live now.
But, if protests in developing countries sometimes led to a change in the political regime, in developed countries everything remained the same. Despite the fact that the media of these countries supported the protesters, they failed to achieve at least a weakening of coronavirus restrictions.
At the beginning of the quarantine, Sweden announced an experiment to develop herd immunity and limited herself to recommendations. Then it seemed, that the quarantine would be only for two weeks and why not stay at home for only two weeks for expected good result. But the virus wanted more...
After the massive outbreak in Italy, statistics came out that the deceased were mainly pensioners and 99% of them had another chronic disease, but not a single government had the courage to declare quarantine only for pensioners.
And now the whole world suffers for a whole year. Although no one writes about the situation in the poor countries of Africa and Asia, apparently the population in developed countries is better not to know about it. There are almost no reports of statistical data on the structure of cases, and news about an early vaccine and mass vaccination of the population is too much.
The governments of the world's leading countries understand what they are doing, what is wrong, and therefore put pressure on Sweden to make it's king an official statement that the coronavirus experiment was a mistake. After all, when one country without coronavirus restrictions and the situation is no worse than in others with it. The others should somehow save face.
Summing up, under all of the above, I would like to recall one phrase I heard in Russia. There are three things - truth, lies and statistics. And in all the media, we first of all see, read and hear the first two, but there are very few statistics, and the sources of these statistics sometimes do not inspire confidence causing a lot of questions...
S.S.