Has Sweden Found the Right Solution to the Coronavirus?
Category: News & Politics
Via: freedom-warrior • 4 years ago • 66 commentsBy: John Fund and Joel Hay
With all panic induced lockdowns enacted around the country and the concurrently despicable blame game it's of some comfort to know there are those who choose to apply a more logical approach to the pandemic.
How does telling people they can't go to work but they can all go to the store make any sense if you don't fully know how the virus is being transmitted.
Is the cure worse than the disease?
How long before the miserable scum of the polemic sector begin to gaslight everyone with their proclamations of righteousness?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I f the COVID-19 pandemic tails off in a few weeks, months before the alarmists claim it will, they will probably pivot immediately and pat themselves on the back for the brilliant social-distancing controls that they imposed on the world. They will claim that their heroic recommendations averted total calamity. Unfortunately, they will be wrong; and Sweden, which has done almost no mandated social distancing, will probably prove them wrong.
Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist and now adviser to the Swedish Health Agency, says that other nations “have taken political, unconsidered actions ” that are not justified by the facts.
In the rush to lock down nations and, as a result, crater their economies, no one has addressed this simple yet critical question: How do we know social-isolation controls actually work? And even if they do work for some infectious epidemics, do they work for COVID-19? And even if they work for this novel coronavirus, do they have to be implemented by a certain point in the epidemic? Or are they locking down the barn door after the horses are long gone?
Without reliable information on what proportion of the population has already been exposed and successfully fought off the coronavirus, it’s worth questioning the value of social-isolation controls.
This is, in fact, the first time we have quarantined healthy people rather than quarantining the sick and vulnerable. As Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, wrote in The Spectator (U.K.) last week:
We’ve posed these simple questions to many highly trained infectious-disease doctors, epidemiologists, mathematical disease-modelers, and other smart, educated professionals. It turns out that, while you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a person of theft and throw them in jail, you don’t need any actual evidence (much less proof) to put millions of people into a highly invasive and burdensome lockdown with no end in sight and nothing to prevent the lockdown from being reimposed at the whim of public-health officials. Is this rational?
Basing the entire architecture of social distancing on the evidence from the 1918 swine flu makes no sense, especially when that architecture causes significant destruction in the lives and livelihoods of most of the American population.
“The strategy in Sweden is to focus on social distancing among the known risk groups, like the elderly. We try to use evidence-based measurements,” Emma Frans, a doctor in epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, told Euronews. “We try to adjust everyday life. The Swedish plan is to implement measurements that you can practice for a long time.”
Sweden is developing herd immunity by refusing to panic. By not requiring social isolation, Sweden’s young people spread the virus, mostly asymptomatically, as is supposed to happen in a normal flu season. They will generate protective antibodies that make it harder and harder for the Wuhan virus to reach and infect the frail and elderly who have serious underlying conditions. For perspective, the current COVID-19 death rate in Sweden (40 deaths per million of population) is substantially lower than the Swedish death rate in a normal flu season (in 2018, for instance, about 80 per million of population ).
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Survival of the Fit !
It's ALWAYS been that way.
This is the same mistake Britain made, and they're going to pay for it with thousands of avoidable hospitalizations and unnecessary deaths, just like Britain.
A steep upturn in cases and deaths over the weekend is likely about to change the situation there.
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Maybe they practice common sense distancing.
Or maybe they've simply allowed the virus to spread virtually unchecked for a longer period of time than anyone else in the region, and are about to suffer the consequences.
Well, to be fair, it wasn't a conclusive judgement. I did begin that sentence with the words "or maybe".
However, experience has already taught us a bit about how very contagious this virus is, and that it can be spread by infected but asymptomatic people who don't even know they have it. It's not like we're flying completely blind.
Wow-- did it ever!
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is 'stable' in ICU amid questions about who's running the UK
It's an interesting concept and I'm glad someone is trying it. I'm also glad it's not the USA.
Let's see where they are at the end of the month and evaluate the results.
So far Sweden, which isn't testing as much as the US, has less reported cases and more deaths per capita.