Why No One Wants to Talk About Sweden
brownstone.org
brownstone.org
Insane that a contagious disease directly killed over 50,000 young people (under age 50) in the usa alone and we are still debating if our lockdown response was disproportionate?
It’s simple - people were dying who should not normally be were and the medical community was overwhelmed - we needed to lockdown untill a we knew that an effective vaccine worked or the effective transmission rate declined, or the virus mutated into a safer variant
Wars and terrorism killed far less and the impact was far greater as well
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
However - you can't argue that "we need to lockdown to stop Covid until it mutates". In fact, until recently, the argument I was commonly presented with was "we NEED to vaccinate everyone and keep restrictions so it DOESN'T mutate into a deadlier version!"
Saying that, hard to imagine a deadlier version than the horrible monstrosity that stalked our deserted streets in early 2020.
It was only the prevalence of vaccinations that prevented things from getting much worse. As far as the unvaccinated were concerned, the impact was devastating.
Just goes to show the difference in public messaging. Where I live, all the headlines said that Omicron and Delta were less deadly (but more contagious). Then again, Delta arrived here just as the vaccination campaign was starting, so where were not many column inches left to discuss the new variant.
>so you don’t need to imagine.
I sure do. I have yet to meet anyone who's had more than flu-like symptoms with any strain of Covid, and I doubt my experience is particularly unique.
Fact is that Johan Giesecke was completely wrong about almost every epidemiologically important property of SARS-CoV-2. I documented his delusions here already in April 2020: http://www.openias.org/swedens-covid19-strategy
“By analyzing over 350 studies, we estimate that the percentage of infections that never developed clinical symptoms, and thus were truly asymptomatic, was 35.1% (95% CI: 30.7 to 39.9%).” (1)
Anders Tegnell claimed on 2020-03-26 that 95-97% “will hardly notice their decease” (2).
1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109229118 2. https://twitter.com/karimjebari/status/1243623795253968902?s...
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/12/what-have-norway-...
We still haven't fully paid the cost of the lockdowns, from an economic and mental health point of view.
Here are some of the restrictions in Sweden, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden :
] The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate. ... From early 2021 amidst a surge in cases, new legislation was passed limiting visitors to venues, enacting international travel restrictions, banning nursing home visits and closing secondary schools and universities. ... Vaccine passports and other measures were introduced in December 2021.
] Alcohol sales were banned after 10pm, gatherings were limited to a maximum of eight people and some schools switched to online learning in response
] a requirement for vaccine passports for gatherings of over 500 people were introduced in December 2021
Don't know where you live, but in the US, these are considered infringements of freedom.
Banning digital advertising feels like more of an obvious public good every day.
You need to compare number of cancer deaths (due to non-screening), and anything else that would have been preventative and now won't be.
You need to compare psychological cost of covid with lockdown versus no lockdown (schools, workplaces, etc.).
You need to compare all of the benefits of life without a lockdown not just the costs.
My personal feeling is that Sweden was too early to lift restrictions, but now everyone else is too late.
Whenever somebody compares US to a single Nordic country, it is all about an agenda and not to find things out.
Also: And only deaths are considered. It ignores that we did not know if there was any long term effects on people or if the hospital system would be overloaded if "If things had simply been left to run their course".
(The latter was the main consideration when Denmark closed down: not to avoid deaths, but to avoid hospitals to be overloaded)
There is no point comparing Sweden to “at least 56 countries that did worse” because Sweden is a highly advanced society with excellent healthcare infrastructure (poor healthcare infrastructure is very strongly correlated with worse outcomes).
Sweden’s entire original approach (which they changed, btw, after which their death rate plummeted) was based on a single fallacy. That asymptomatic people did not spread COVID. Unfortunately, since Tegnell refused to initially believe this, which led to a lot of deaths, he doubled down until the evidence for asymptomatic spread became too strong to ignore, at which point Sweden also did change their approach, and incorporated lockdowns, etc into the mix of tools that they used.
Of course, by that point our understanding of COVID was much better, testing was far more prevalent and widespread, efc. So lockdowns we’re not really necessary outside of rare circumstances.
There's been a fair amount of talk recently on the topic, e.g.
Scathing evaluation of Sweden's COVID response reveals 'failures' to control the virus https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scathing-evaluation-swedens-co...
"Sweden's record is disastrous"
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-cov...
"Study details COVID's toll on essential workers, health workers in Sweden"
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/04/study-de...
"Sweden’s Deadly COVID Failure"
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/06/Sweden-Deadly-COVID-F...
Dispute the conclusions all you want .. but they are talking.
I'm glad for how things we're handled in Canada, except that I wish we'd locked down sooner and harder at the start of subsequent waves. I also welcome many of the changes that were accelerated, notably working from home and elimination or simplification of many fees and services. Having hand sanitizer everywhere is also great for cold/flu seasons too.
We need some studies on how bad the average American is at guesswork. 9% is an incredibly bad guess.
There's other really well written articles from PHDs about how their model literally would only work in Sweden.
The author is only bestseller of a book based on their experience not a perspective from someone trying to approach it like an academic as far as I can tell.
The history books won't be kind to the people who resisted them either. IMHO, if this era has any particular significance at all, it will be a story of a crack up before a long term, shambolic decline. The future belongs to the societies that can come together.
If this were the 40s, the lock-down resisters would be agitating against rationing instead of mending and making do and collecting stuff for scrap metal drives.