September 5, 2020

Fifty: New Hampshire: Images of the Granite State

This photo story is part of Fifty, a collection of images from each of the United States.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/08/new-hampshire-photos/615793/

New Hampshire is one of the smallest states in the U.S., ranking 46th out of 50. It also has one of the smallest populations, with fewer than 1.4 million residents. From the Great North Woods through the White Mountains and Lakes Region to the cities and the sea coast in the south, here are a few glimpses of the landscape of New Hampshire and some of the wildlife and people calling it home.




















much more at the links

September 4, 2020

Ok but other than the easily provable lie the denial is bulletproof

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1301716611494281216

September 4, 2020

NYT Breaking: Suspect in Fatal Portland Shooting Is Killed by Officers During Arrest

Michael Forest Reinoehl, an antifa supporter, died when law enforcement went to arrest him, four officials said. He was being investigated in the fatal shooting of a member of a far-right group.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/michael-reinoehl-arrest-portland-shooting.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes


Emergency workers attending to Aaron J. Danielson after he was shot during protests in Portland, Ore., on Saturday night.Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times

SEATTLE — A man being investigated in the fatal shooting of a right-wing activist who was part of a pro-Trump caravan in Portland, Ore., was killed on Thursday night when authorities moved to arrest him, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.

The officials said the suspect, Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, was killed during the encounter in Lacey, Wash., southwest of Seattle, when a federal fugitive task force moved to apprehend him. An arrest warrant had been issued by the Portland police earlier Thursday, on the same day that Vice News published an interview with Mr. Reinoehl in which he appeared to admit to the shooting, saying, “I had no choice.”

The Portland police had been investigating Saturday’s shooting death of Aaron J. Danielson, one of the supporters of President Trump who came into downtown Portland and clashed with protesters demonstrating against racial injustice and police brutality. Mr. Reinoehl had been a persistent presence at the demonstrations in Portland over recent weeks, helping the protesters with security and suggesting on social media that the struggle was becoming a war where “there will be casualties.”

“I am 100% ANTIFA all the way!” he posted on Instagram in June, referring to a loose collection of activists that have mobilized to oppose groups they see as fascist or racist. “I am willing to fight for my brothers and sisters! Even if some of them are too ignorant to realize what antifa truly stands for. We do not want violence but we will not run from it either!”

snip

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1301724826411970566

September 3, 2020

These Tiny but Mighty Islands Combine the Best of Scotland, Iceland, and New Zealand

Some of the most epic 500 square miles on Earth.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/visiting-faroe-islands-things-to-do



The Faroe Islands -- the very definition of "under the radar" for most travelers -- recently drifted into the spotlight. Some have even dubbed this lush, supernaturally beautiful Danish territory “the next Iceland.” Set foot on the Faroes, though, and you’ll realize that statement isn’t quite true. First of all, the primary airport is barely long enough to accommodate hang gliders, let alone jumbo jets like the ones shuttling North Face-clad tourists en masse to Reykjavík. But beyond that, the sheer abundance of fairytale wonders on this archipelago puts even its Icelandic neighbors to shame. You'll continuously wonder whether or not a rip in the fabric of reality swallowed you whole and then spit you into a Tolkien-like fantasy realm.

These 18 isles, nestled in the North Atlantic between Great Britain and Greenland, are all singularly serene. Yes, the stark beauty and rugged isolation of Iceland is here, but it’s fused with the ceaseless rolling green of Scotland, girded by the grandiose solitude and scale of New Zealand's South Island. This is a place where grand, epic scale exists in distillate form. You want to get here as soon and as you safely can. And though the pandemic temporarily grounded plans for direct flights from New York, once they’re up and running it will be easier than ever for Americans to visit. Even then, though, you’re going to need to plan: Many of the obligatory sites and experiences are well off the motorway. But what’s the point of only treating the concept of “off the beaten path” figuratively? This is a place ripe for discovery. Here’s what you’ll see.



A surreal land of giants and optical illusions

At a scant 540 square miles, the entire archipelago is roughly half the size of Rhode Island. But somehow, it contains an obscene wealth of dreamlike villages and sites, like ocean waterfalls, clifftop lighthouses, mythical statues, and geometrically puzzling rock formations. To access most of it, you don’t really need to wander too far from the car. “Even though I have lived here most of my life, it is still breathtaking,” says Dánial Hoydal, co-founder of Faer Isles Distillery, whose cutting-edge facility is a must-visit stop on a mostly out-of-time journey. “The constant presence of the vast North Atlantic Ocean makes it different. It is omnipresent. You are very close to it at all times, and you can hear, feel -- and even taste it in the wind.”



He recommends the steep mountains of the northern islands, notably Cape Enniberg. Towering 1,300 feet over the surf, these are the highest sea cliffs in the world. And “Suðuroy [the southernmost island] is the most isolated but therefore has the least tourists,” he explains. “A forgotten gem.” Before you get too deep, start with the most obvious attraction, since it’s only a 15 minute drive west of the airport. Múlafossur is an iconic site. In fact, it will likely be the first image that pops up when you google, “Faroe Islands.” But that doesn’t make it any less breathtaking to behold in real life. After a 10 minute walk from the carpark, sea cliffs come into view. Careening off the edge is a steady stream of freshwater, fed from hills high above, plunging a sheer 200 feet into the ocean below. In the background, the Hobbit-like village of Gásadalur (population 18) is caught between the edge of the Atlantic and the shadows of a crenulated massif overhead.

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September 3, 2020

The QAnon Weirdos Are Rapidly Seizing The Republican Party

Even if Trump loses, the GOP and, by extension, the rest of us, will be stuck with these kooks.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-qanon-weirdos-are-rapidly-seizing



WASHINGTON, DC -- The Republican Party is in serious trouble. And by extension so is everyone else. I’m not saying we’re somehow affiliated with the crisis the GOP faces, nor am I saying we’re primarily responsible for it. I’m just saying that we all keep getting hit with the blood-spatter from the quackery happening on the other side of the aisle, and win or lose, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. We’re all aware of the origin story of the Republican political crisis by now, so I won’t belabor how exactly we arrived at this point. Suffice it to say, the Republicans and chiefly Fox News founder Roger Ailes at some point as far back as 50 years ago decided there was an untapped voting demographic ripe for the picking: the poorly educated, kneejerk white male racist vote. And since then, the Republicans have been fielding more and more candidates in gerrymandered districts who specifically appeal to that voting bloc.

While the party cultivated a new breed of doofuses to shoehorn into various posts, Ailes, the media Pied Piper of the movement, provided the grievances and propaganda to get the word out. This eventually led to substandard weirdos like Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, Steve King, and of course Donald Trump. Trump turned out to be the ultimate form of the destructor, as they say in Ghostbusters. In addition to all of the other immensely damaging Trump things culminating in America’s first fascist tyranny, the current president has become a gateway through which the Q collective is emerging, as if from another plane of existence, and there’s no immediate way the party establishment will be able to cull them from their midst. Indeed, the Republican Party is on the verge of being taken over by the looniest of the loonies -- a group of conspiracy theorists who make Alex Jones look like Walter Cronkite. And the Q people love Donald Trump. A second term for Trump would metastasize Q and the QAnon theories throughout the party. But even if Trump loses, the GOP and, by extension, the rest of us, will be stuck with these kooks.

In case you’re not familiar with QAnon, it’s a deeply anti-Semitic, far-right set of conspiracy theories, launched by a 4chan user called “Q.” These mentally unstable internet users are clearly incapable of processing information the way Normals do. They lack the ability to separate obvious fiction from reality, and that’s just the beginning. Remember Pizzagate? That was Q. The Q disciples believe in the existence of the “deep state” -- an alleged secret underground collective of pedophilic federal bureaucrats controlling the entire nation, and that it’s systematically undermining both Trump and the Q adherents. One of their other signature “theories” -- actually, they’re less like theories more like hallucinogen-induced nightmares -- involves Hollywood celebrities kidnapping children and harvesting their blood for the “adrenochrome,” a derivative of adrenaline. They’re also disciples of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, another anti-Semitic heap of gibberish used to justify the vilification of Jewish people. The latter theory, the Elders of Zion thing, was the topic of a retweet by a woman who was scheduled to speak at the Republican convention until the heat was too much for the party and her spot was filled by a different official.

Anyway, you get the idea. A new poll by The Daily Kos and Civiqs reveals the pervasiveness of the crisis. According to the pollster, the “deep state elites” theory is regarded as “mostly true” by 33 percent of Republicans. That might seem far from scary. But wait. Only 13 percent believe it’s not true at all. In other words, 33 percent are certain of it, while as many as 87 percent of Republicans believe it to some degree or another. That’s the scary part. Christopher Ingraham, the resident numbers cruncher for The Washington Post, called the poll results “extremely, extremely grim.” That’s an understatement. Imagine carrying on debates over policy or the role of government with a party on the other side of every issue that believes pedophiles in Hollywood are drinking blood extract from kidnapped children. How can democracy function with half of the political debate gone Full Red Hat, and also Full Q Creepazoid on top of it. That’s a two-headed hydra of madness, and there’s no way a political system can endure half of it being run by escaped psychopaths.

https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1301240433628950528

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September 3, 2020

'I Moved on Her Very Heavily': Part 2

Two women, two breasts, two decisions

In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. Which might seem surprising, until you remember Trump’s modus operandi: He escapes the consequences of one outrage by turning our focus to another, in perpetuity. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet ... And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.” Carroll’s lawsuit remains in progress; a White House spokesman denied all of the women’s allegations, calling them “decades-old false statements” that had been “thoroughly litigated in the last election and rejected by the American people.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/i-moved-on-her-very-heavily-part-two/615892/



Fifty or so miles out of New York City, in a hamlet so rich, it makes Mar-a-Lago’s Palm Beach look like a John Mellencamp video, there lives a beautiful woman by the name of Karena Virginia. Today is a brilliant Monday. The sun pours down like Fort Knox gold. Karena has conducted an angel sanctuary over the weekend—connecting her friends (she calls clients “friends”) with the supernatural beings she believes are as real as each of us—and later today she is teaching friends to breathe in tune with the ocean waves for “Yoga on the Beach.” When I pull up in my car, Karena is standing in the road. To welcome me, she raises the brim of her enormous beach hat and holds a pose on one foot, lifting her arms to the gods like a forest sprite. If William Blake—the poet and artist who conversed with angels in the nude—could see Karena in her turquoise sarong and turquoise bikini bottom with the circle clasp on the hip, her long, golden-brown hair streaming down her back, he would paint her with wings.

Donald Trump once spots Karena at the U.S. Open tennis tournament as she waits for a car, but he doesn’t paint her. It is 1998, and she recalls that he says to his male pals, “Hey, look at this one. We haven’t seen her before.” “I am wearing a short, black, sleeveless A-line dress,” continues Karena, who can also tell me the exact skirt, sweater, and shoes she is wearing when she meets her husband a year later. “I call my friend immediately after I get in the car and tell her what happened and ask if she thinks it is because my dress is too short. I remember thinking my protective Italian father would have been appalled at my outfit, because Trump, as he is walking toward me with his entourage, says: ‘Look at those legs.’ It’s my fault that I allow him to grab my arm without my pulling away. And then he goes further”—she demonstrates, quickly sliding her knuckles back and forth on the right side of her bust—“and he grabs my breast.”

Now let us leave Karena and visit a handsome apartment on the Upper West Side. It is 21 years later, June 2019. A lawyer sits in an armchair suckling a newborn. The child is about the size of a basset hound—he weighed nearly 10 pounds at birth—and the lawyer, a peach-complexioned looker (yes, reader, another pretty woman, but we are dealing with a man who, you’ll recall, denies that he attacks women by claiming they’re not “his type”), glances up from the giant baby. “This is off the record,” she announces to her companions, several women who are being interviewed about sexual assault. The lawyer is not taking part in the discussion, but her story is so on point that she couldn’t help but chime in. The journalist is The New York Times’ Megan Twohey, who in 2016 reported some of the earliest sexual-misconduct allegations against Trump and who, along with Jodi Kantor and Ronan Farrow, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story. “Of course,” Twohey says, off the record. And the lawyer says: “Trump grabbed my boob.”



snip

September 2, 2020

the burger is the same age as me, both born in 1996

TikTok

September 1, 2020

Trump's Campaign Is About To Take A Very Dangerous Turn, And Democrats Should Be Extremely Alarmed

This is going to get very dark, very quickly. Donald Trump’s election campaign might not be disciplined, well-run, or even particularly smart. But it has several advantages that Joe Biden’s does not, most of which stem from the president’s total disregard for political norms and normal human decency. While Trump has an assembly of campaign managers, spokespeople and organizers around him, he has molded his current operation into a mirror of himself. While this means total dysfunction and chaos at all levels, Trump has historically shown a remarkable ability to survive self inflicted disaster and come out on top. It is a dangerous mistake to think that Trump is politically stupid. He isn’t.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/trumps-campaign-is-about-to-take





Do not underestimate Trump

If Joe Biden’s campaign is to deliver the resounding victory they badly need to get rid of Trump, they need to pay very, very close attention to what is happening in his campaign right now, and make sure they have the ability to counter repeatedly. And hard. While the president is a narcissistic sociopath with little ability to control his egoic impulses, his political instincts can be unnervingly good. Trump doesn’t strategize per se, but he has an uncanny ability to sense the mood of his supporters, instill fear in white Americans, and sow chaos to his advantage. This mastery of the dark arts of politics delivered him victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and has allowed him to completely takeover the GOP and turn it into his own personality cult. Trump’s political weaponry should never be underestimated, because as Hillary Clinton recently warned Biden, the president is “somebody unlike anyone you've been involved with before in politics, someone who lies with impunity, who literally will say anything, try to throw you off your game." More than that, Trump will literally do anything to throw Biden of his game too. Trump’s “strategy” in politics is to engage in all out warfare by throwing as many things at his opponent as possible. Trump, it should be remembered, brought Bill Clinton’s sexual assault accusers to a press conference before his debate with Hillary Clinton, literally stalked her on stage, and then promised to throw her in jail. This year, the Trump campaign is going even darker.

Law and Order Is Trump’s Issue

As Black Lives Matter protests flare up around the country in response to police violence, the country is embroiled in what could be described as low level civil war. Armed right wing militias are driving into cities to fight protestors, and sometimes kill them. Reported the NYTimes: The police in Kenosha shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, in the back, fueling protests there and elsewhere, while right-wing groups in Portland came into the city to confront Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Last week in Kenosha, 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Illinois went to the scene of unrest there openly carrying a rifle and saying he had come to protect businesses. Before the night was over, two people had been fatally shot, and Mr. Rittenhouse has now been charged with homicides. With the violence, Trump has found his opportunity. Pointedly, Trump has refused to condemn the white militias or Kyle Rittenhouse (despite clear video footage of the violence and killings), and instead has been laying the blame on antifa, Black Lives Matters protestors, and liberal mayors of cities hit by violence. He has been threatening to send in federal troops to quell protestors and done absolutely nothing to try to calm the situation down. As Joe Biden noted in a powerful speech yesterday in Pennsylvania, “he can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it.” Trump wants more tension on the streets, more violence, and more police brutality. Why? Because he understands the optics help sell him as the law and order candidate.

The New Strategy

The GOP convention last week starkly laid out this new strategy. Every speaker knew what to say; the country is out of control, Democrats hate the police, and Donald Trump is the only one who can maintain law and order. “Your vote will decide whether we protect law-abiding Americans or whether we give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens,” Trump told the audience gathered at The White House. “How can the Democratic Party ask to lead our country when it spent so much time tearing down our country?” Trump understands that he needs to claw back educated white people who live in the suburbs, particularly women if he is to capture the Electoral College. He has been busy alarming them about “low income housing” invading the suburbs (read: black people) under a Biden administration, and knows white suburban voters care a great deal about law and order. Like a rat scavenging for food, Trump has sniffed out the one area where he believes he can eat into Biden’s substantial lead. Evidence from recent polls show that it is working as Trump narrowed the gap between him and Biden significantly. With this kind of data, Trump is going to do everything in his power to ensure there is more hate, more racism, and more violence in the coming weeks.

snip

September 1, 2020

Chris Hayes is pushing his bullshit on Sweden again, both the lie about herd immunity, and about

our economy being just as trashed as the rest of the EU. I have even seen it labelled as close to the WORST in the EU. That is utter tosh as well.

I am at wit's end that these dual lies keep getting shovelled in the US media. So much disinformation about Sweden out there, especially in the US media, some of it just flat out lies. The worst thing that happened to us, framing wise, was when bad faith actors (with ZERO knowledge of what was actually going on) on the RW started trying to us us as a cudgel to beat their enemies in the US over the head with. I have posted so so many updates over the past 6 months, but it often gets lost in the fog, and also many take an a priori hostile stance in terms of anything to do with Sweden and COVID-19.


Herd immunity was never the primary goal here in Sweden. I keep seeing this posted over and over and it is simply incorrect. It has come up over and over again because some officials have started talking about Stockholm (where we live) reaching this level by the end of May. That has been misconstrued by so many to think that the drive for herd immunity is the principal core strategy, when it is not.

Hallengren: Sweden Not Pursuing Herd Immunity

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2020-04-29/hallengren-sweden-not-pursuing-herd-immunity

Sweden’s Minister for Health and Social Affairs, Lena Hallengren, explains the country is not pursuing a policy of ’herd immunity’ when it comes to coronavirus and that looser restrictions in Sweden are being used because of how long they may have to stay in place. She tells Daybreak Europe’s Caroline Hepker and Roger Hearing it is too early to make comparisons about which countries have made the right policy choices in addressing the pandemic.

Running time 11:20

(Audio at the link.)


Another huge myth, pushed by cheap, shoddy journalism is that it is the Wild West here, and basically the entire country is running around like banshees with zero mitigation actions. This is utter tosh.

see this article for further drilling down:

'The biggest myth about Sweden is that life is going on as normal'

https://www.thelocal.se/20200424/interview-isabella-lovin-coronavirus-the-biggest-myth-about-sweden-is-that-life-is-going-on-as-normal

also

Sweden to shut bars and restaurants that ignore coronavirus restrictions

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-stockholm/sweden-to-shut-bars-and-restaurants-that-ignore-coronavirus-restrictions-idUSKCN2262AX


Now I shall deal again with the very bad aspects of what happened, as I am in no way try to sugarcoat anything


Our large fail, a horrid tragedy (and the main reason we are so badly off in terms of deaths per million compared to Denmark, Norway, and Finland) was our nursing homes and our scattered site elderly care. They account for as much as 70% (there is a shedload of argument here atm, some say it is even higher, some say it is lower, around 55-60%, but certainly it is higher than our neighbour Nordic nations) of our deaths en toto. We (unfortunately) had a FAR more lax system in terms of visitation/protocols and in terms of higher staff turnover than the other Nordics do with their elderly-care homes. Those arguments and finger-pointings are now (and have been for months, even as the deaths has basically slowed to a drip) the hottest topic in the whole country atm. They fucked up bad.

Several months ago, on SVT (our state TV,) a group of doctors and healthcare experts (these fall into the group that say it is around 70% of all deaths) said we if had similar nursing home deaths and overall elderly deaths per million rates that Denmark has, our deaths per million OVERALL (for all age cohorts) would only be a wee bit higher than the Danes. They also said that if you adjust for the vastly increased level of COVID-19 in the immigrant/refugee saturated areas, and make their percentages of population the same as Denmark or Norway (let alone Finland which has by far the fewest number of immigrants and refugees as a % in all of the Nordics, most who go there are only going to immediately flood over the Finnish/Swedish border, as Denmark cut them off down south at the Öresund) that our overall death (when combined with a similar elderly care death rate as discussed above) would not only be lower than Denmark, but would be approaching Norway levels.

They also said that other Nordics are being far more conservative than Sweden has been with their COVID-19 death attributions so all the other Nordics have higher death rates than they are letting on (that war of words has been going on for months, and has gotten REALLY nasty at times, especially with Denmark versus Sweden, quelle surprise), All the other Nordics have a very hostile stance in regards to Sweden in terms of our refugee/immigration policy. That group (the refugees/immigrants) have also be really hard hit here as well, as they do not practice social distancing to a level anywhere near to what the native Swedes do, plus they are less well-off income wise, and also health wise (for a number of reasons.) That is the reason for the lowered death rates when adjustments are made for an apples-to-apples comparison, as opposed to the chalk and cheese raw numbers that are rammed in our face far too often. I do, however have to add, that ANY discussion, as I said above, of immigration/refugee here is Sweden has been a minefield for ages, although the Syrian conflict several years back, finally broke the silence (at peak, we were taking in the US equivalent of 3 to 5 MILLION a month and the far RW white nationalist Sweden Democrats (SD, in Swedish Sverigedemokraterna) were surging towards a historic, terrifying victory, until some of the other parties finally caved in and slowed the inflows and changed the laws (to a point).

(A bit of an aside, SD, whilst hardcore RW, white nationalists, are also pretty much VERY anti-Russian as well, for centuries-long historic reasons that are almost never talked about in the foreign press as well. We do have some hardcore, actual neo nazi parties who DO love Russia, but they are microscopic in size. The biggest, Alternativ för Sverige, has only around 1200 members, most other have less than 100)


more on the false charge of herd immunity being our basic strategy

Sweden hits back at Trump's 'herd immunity' criticism

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/sweden-hits-back-at-trump-s-herd-immunity-criticism-1.1419502

Sweden’s foreign minister Ann Linde has dismissed criticism by U.S. president Donald Trump concerning the country’s outlier strategy to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. “He has used a factual error,” the minister said in an interview on broadcaster TV4 on Wednesday. Her comments follow Trump’s remarks a day earlier when he told reporters that Sweden is trying to achieve “herd immunity” and “is suffering greatly” from not doing enough.

The Nordic country is under intense scrutiny as it continues to experiment with a laxer policy response to the virus despite an accelerating death toll. Restaurants, shopping centers and primary schools all remain open in Scandinavia’s biggest economy. “Some countries seem to think that we aren’t doing anything, but we’re doing a lot of things that suit Sweden,” Linde said.

President Trump’s comments have also drawn the ire of Sweden’s top epidemiologist. “If you compare the situation to New York, where I have a relative working, things here are working well,” Anders Tegnell said in an interview with state broadcaster SVT. Meanwhile Sweden’s prime minister Stefan Lofven has said he sees no reason to respond to Trump, according to Swedish newspaper Expressen. “I have spoken lately to about 10 heads of state and I note that we are all following the same lead strategy,” Lofven said.

snip

Also, contrary to a lot of disnfo that I see pushed (especially in the US news) our economy contacted far less than the EU overall (the EU contracted 40% more, and multiple nations contracted close to, or more than double ours), and we are on track to go back to positive growth by Q1 or Q2 2021. The vast majority of our contraction came from a drop in exports, mainly from the supply chain for raw materials freezing up, and also from external demand from other countries diminishing. We also were the close to the only EU nation that has positive growth in Q1 2020.



Coronavirus: Sweden's economy hit less hard by pandemic

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53664354

Sweden, which avoided a lockdown during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, saw its economy shrink 8.6% in the April-to-June period from the previous three months. The flash estimate from the Swedish statistics office indicated that the country had fared better than other EU nations which took stricter measures.

However, it was still the largest quarterly fall for at least 40 years. The European Union saw a contraction of 11.9% for the same period. Individual nations did even worse, with Spain seeing an 18.5% contraction, while the French and Italian economies shrank by 13.8% and 12.4% respectively.



Sweden has largely relied on voluntary social distancing guidelines since the start of the pandemic, including working from home where possible and avoiding public transport. Although businesses have largely continued to operate in Sweden, the country's economy is highly dependent on exports, which were hit by lack of demand from abroad.

The authorities here have always said the country's Covid-19 strategy wasn't designed to protect the economy. They have stressed that the aim was to introduce sustainable, long-term, measures. But the government did hope that keeping more of society open would help limit job losses and mitigate the effect on businesses.

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