It’s time to admit it. The doomsday models from March on the COVID-19 pandemic were wrong.

We were led into a panic. We were told that even if we shut down the economy, we would still be looking at overwhelmed hospitals and countless deaths.

Week after week after week after week we were told that we were but a week away from being just like Italy.

Sweden has been demonized and shouted down on the world stage for their daring to break ranks and refusing a full lockdown. If the doomsayers were to be believed, Sweden should have been overwhelmed with infections and deaths weeks ago.

It simply hasn’t happened. While the death rate has been higher in Sweden than some of it’s neighbors, it is still 8th out of ten of its comparable neighbors and we are talking about 1000 people out of 10 million. Tragic for the families of the 1000 dead but not the overwhelming catastrophe that folks claimed was coming.

Clearly Italy is the outlier in things.

This isn’t to say that the virus is harmless by any means. It is killing thousands and we need to do everything within reason to mitigate the spread.

It would be dangerous and foolish to simply end all restrictions without a plan for how that would work and it would definitely have to be an incremental thing. We have enough information now and can see enough examples around the world to help us rationally approach ending this catastrophic shutdown. European nations have already begun to ease off and its time for us to follow suit.

Every day all I could see was more news of businesses going under while governments on all levels are running out of reasonable funding options to try and stave off mass poverty due to the shutdown.

It was refreshing to read this morning’s news to see that the Alberta government is putting together a plan to reopen the economy.

Kenney is basing the plan on the actions of Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea who are all on the downswing of the curve.

The focus appears to be on aggressive testing which makes sense. Identifying and quarantining the infected has proven around the world to be far more effective and is certainly less damaging than trying to mass quarantine the healthy for an indefinite period.

As a province we can’t close borders but we can certainly quarantine those who have come in from elsewhere and test them.

I am not thrilled with the plans to track folks through cell phones and such but do understand that when we have indeed identified infected people, we need to ensure that they can’t and won’t infect others. That is part of the plan as well and I can see how it will be effective. Again, it focuses on the infected rather than the healthy and low risk.

A timeline hasn’t been set but it appears that we will start to re-open soon.

Nobody wants your dear granny to get infected and die. Nobody wants to see a large spike in infections. We need to get realistic however and some hard cost/benefit analysis needs to be done.

We will never end all infections but we can mitigate them. That means using a rational plan using real world examples rather than flawed modeling.

It will take decades to recover from this but at least we may finally be seeing a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.