It all started because of Omicron
Why the millionaire David Sacks was wrong and how that prompted me to start my newsletter?
Before I’ll tell you how the Omicron variant inspired me to start this newsletter, I have to thank you for being my first 3 readers. Writing for real people makes this much more interesting and it means a lot to me.
The backstory of what prompted me to start this newsletter started last Friday when I was walking by the sunny Mediterranean Sea and listening to The All in podcast.
It’s a podcast where four friends who also happen to be millionaire entrepreneurs and investors gather around for a weekly session where they talk about business and politics. They bash each other in a friendly manner and get into arguments that are the salt of the show.
During the last year, it has also been a very good source of data regarding the coronavirus pandemic. Especially David Friedberg, who’s the show’s “sultan science”, has some of the best explanations about COVID-19 and mRNA-based vaccines.
They’ve also talked a lot about different policies regarding COVID-19 like lockdowns and mask usage and what they think about those policies in which situations.
This week David Sacks was heavily criticizing the lockdowns and how useless they were in order to prevent covid. He was talking about how successful Sweden was with its no lockdowns policy. As a background, Sweden didn’t do any lockdowns or mask mandates for a long time in order to achieve herd immunity, where so many of the people would have had the virus that it would stop spreading. Sweden’s more loose policy received a lot of criticism at the time.
So Sacks was arguing against lockdowns: “We have data from Sweden. Sweden’s data is no worse than anybody else’s.”
This sounded very much wrong and I had to check the numbers. From Statista the actual numbers say that Sweden had actually 15X deaths compared to Norway or Finland. It has double the population compared to each of them, but still, it has had a way higher death toll.
Even compared to Denmark, which has a direct connection to mainland Europe and thus much more exposure area for covid, Sweden’s numbers are still much worse.
So saying that look at how successful Sweden was with the coronavirus is very ill-advised.
Of course, it might be that Sacks was comparing the data to USA’s numbers, against which almost any western country looks good.
Another thing that was briefly mentioned in the podcast was the fact that this is again a virus that’s originated from South Africa. The point was raised that actually, this could be from somewhere else in Africa, but only recognized in South Africa. Unfortunately, we actually don’t know if this disease is even originally from Africa. The craziest part of this thing is, that when the South African officials had recognized the variant, it was almost immediately found in a lot of other countries on all continents. Still, the countries responded in panic and both EU and USA banned flights from the African countries where the Omicron virus was found. If we know that it’s found from many countries, but we punish the country who speaks first about it, it sounds like a bad incentive for being the first one who finds the new variants. I don’t think that’s the policy we want to have in place.
Newsletter growth update and thoughts
In order to grow the newsletter, I’ve been active in Indie Hackers, where I posted about the launch of the newsletter and what are all the things I’m planning on doing in order to grow it.
I think I managed to get at least 1 new subscriber from that post, and there’s already some engagement under there. I’ll post to Indie Hackers any time I’ve got something that could be useful for others that are trying to grow their newsletters.
Another thing that I did was to join Substack Writers Unite Discord. Over there I’m looking for feedback and tips on how to grow the Substack and to become a better writer. I was sharing my substack there and maybe got one subscriber there too.
But great start with infinite growth speed! 🚀
Please send feedback about the post. I know that it might be a subject that some people are super bored already, so if you feel like that too, please let me know!
Subscribers: 0 → 3
Nice work