So after reading a misleading meme on the internet I was compelled to compare the COVID situation in Canada over the past few months to that in the USA. This is what I notice.

The Canadian stock market has crashed by a thousand points since the beginning of the year and COVID cases in Canada have **increased** 700% since mid june... Compared to america where the stock market has **increased** by 3,000 points since the beginning of the year (thatsa 33% increase) and covid cases has **dropped** by more than 50% since the beginning of july.

The issue with lockdowns is they look great to everyone who is too ignorant to understand whats going on, but they devastate the economy and do no good because the second you let up the lock down no one has immunity and the virus spreads like it is new. So in the long run you get hit hard in the wallet AND in terms of the infection. Meanwhile the americans approach may have resulted in more infection early on but fewer in the long term and without damaging the economy along the way.

@freemo I'm not sure you can handwave away the 200,000 people who are dead. The US has a death rate 17 times Europe; you can argue that's OK because the economy is more important, but you can't just ignore it.

The evidence of Sweden though is that avoiding lockdown doesn't protect your economy much - their economy slowed just as much as their neighbours, they just have more dead people. In a global market, it's hard to mitigate the effect of a global pandemic through local action.

@freemo incidentally, stock market indices measure many things - but the health of an economy is absolutely not one of them.

@tim Actually thats not true, at least not most of the time, sometimes it can be...

Typically the Stock Market in all countries, including the USA, shows very close correlation to other indicators of economic grown. For example the gold standard, the GNP tends to very closely correlate with the S&P 500 index.