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Covid-19 vs. earlier pandemics, Job Losses, Nursing Homes & Assisted Living Facilities, Reality vs. Projections, Sweden by comparison, Swiss Policy Research: Facts about Covid-19
Source: Swiss Policy Research: Facts about Covid-19
Overview diagrams
Taking Sides 
Most of the findings posted here by Swiss Policy Research were predictable by mid-March.
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Indeed! But the lockdowns had to happen anyway, to predictably decimate both the small business class and wage earners worldwide, although, yes, the global economy was already turning down in a major way.
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Absolutely agree. So the question I asked is, if the lockdowns, etc. were not really for the stated purpose, what was their purpose. I have an analytic technique I have been using for over 30 years. If something–policy, practice, etc.–does not do what it is supposed to do, not even a little bit, what does it do? In this case it obviously drove tens of millions out of work in the USA alone, killed many small and even middling businesses, rationalized trillions shoveled to Wall Street, and lowered wages; were these not the goals? Who benefited and who lost?
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It certainly does make me wonder, too . . .
I strongly suspect — not to go as far as to claim that “I know” — that the lockdown policies are indeed by (economic) design: to bankrupt sectors of the economy that otherwise might not have gone bankrupt and to additionally drive down wages and living standards, that is to say, to create thereby new opportunities for furthering the accumulation of wealth by the already obscenely rich and politically powerful.
When profits dry up, the only way forward for capital is a system-wide write-down of productive assets. The ruling classes know this better than anyone.
What the small and middling businesses will lose largely on account of the lockdowns, the larger business aggregates will in time gain; what labour will have to forgo in both the medium and long term in wages, big capital will ultimately gain in margins, at least temporarily, until the next necessary and inevitable downturn.
However, I don’t think things were planned so much as they were, and are being, improvised in the circumstances.
On the other hand, with all of the popular dissent worldwide that was beginning to rear its head, how convenient it was just then to have a pandemic arise that effectively required entire populations to comply with increasingly authoritarian measures . . .
A fascinating set of coincidences, to be sure, if that’s all that they were . . . But if so, it begins to appear as though they are by now being deliberately turned to account.
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