Coronavirus disaster in Sweden

This 22 May 2020 video says about itself:

As Deaths Soar, Doubts Grow Over Sweden’s Exceptional COVID-19 Response

Sweden has Europe’s highest per capita death rate in past week.

Translated from Dutch NOS radio today:

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has been quarantined as a precaution. Someone in his environment has been in contact with another person who later turned out to be infected with the coronavirus. The Prime Minister and his wife will be tested as soon as possible.

Sweden has also registered the highest number of new daily infections to date. 4034 new infections were added. Of all tests administered in the past week, nearly 10 percent were positive, compared to more than 5 percent a week earlier.

As a result of the growing number of infections, hospital occupancy in the Scandinavian country is also increasing. In the beginning of the corona pandemic, the country was criticized for being too lax.

The country has now taken slightly stricter measures, although they are still a lot stricter in other countries. People should work from home if possible, avoid public transport and in restaurants, a maximum of eight people are allowed to sit together at the table.

Sweden was in a favourable position, because its population density is much lower than in most European countries, diminishing chances of COVID-19 contagion. ‘Corona is just a flu’ propaganda hailed its government for its lack of pro-health measures. Now, Sweden is much worse off than other Scandinavian countries.

How pterosaurs learned flying, new research

This 2017 video is a documentary about pterosaurs.

From the University of Reading in England:

Giant lizards learnt to fly over millions of years

Study uses new method to show that Pterosaurs became twice as good at flying over their existence

October 28, 2020

Pterodactyls and other related winged reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs steadily improved their ability to fly to become the deadly masters of the sky over the course of millions of years.

A new study published in the journal Nature has shown that pterosaurs — a group of creatures that became Earth’s first flying vertebrates — evolved to improve their flight performance over their 150 million-year existence, before they went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Scientists from the Universities of Reading, Lincoln and Bristol carried out the most detailed study yet into how animals evolve to become better suited to their environments over time. They combined fossil records with a new model of flight based on today’s living birds to measure their flight efficiency and fill in the gaps in our knowledge of their evolutionary story.

This allowed the scientists to track the gradual evolution of pterosaurs and demonstrate that they became twice as good at flying over the course of their history. It also showed that their evolution was caused by consistent small improvements over a long period, rather than sudden evolutionary bursts as had been previously suggested.

Professor Chris Venditti, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading and lead author of the study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, said: “Pterosaurs were a diverse group of winged lizards, with some the size of sparrows and others with the wingspan of a light aircraft. Fans of the movie Jurassic World will have seen a dramatisation of just how huge and lethal these creatures would have been. Their diet consisted mostly of other animals, from insects to smaller dinosaurs.

“Despite their eventual prowess in the air being well-known, the question of whether pterosaurs got better at flying and whether this gave them an advantage over their ancestors has puzzled scientists for decades. There are many examples of how natural selection works on relatively short time scales, but until now it has been very difficult to demonstrate whether plants or animals adapt to become more efficient over a long period.”