Sweden isn’t in the news much right now, for both good and bad reasons. The good reason is that unlike in France, where massive protests and rioting inspired by new anti-coronavirus lockdown measures have made headlines, the Nordic country is peaceful. The bad one is that even though the reason it’s peaceful is because its anti-lockdown strategy has worked, the COVID-panic-porn-obsessed media don’t find this newsworthy. After all, if the masses find out that all the civilization-rending lockdowns and onerous virus restrictions are an exercise in scientific obscurantism, a lot of power-mad politicians could face career destruction.
Here’s the news the opinion cartel finds un-newsworthy: As of Wednesday, Sweden’s seven-day rolling average for China virus deaths was zero.
To be precise, Sweden has on occasion curbed restaurant opening hours (I guess the virus only attacks during certain periods of the day) and has at times enforced crowd limits at venues such as shopping malls, but these have been exceptions to the country’s rule of relying on voluntary measures to combat SARS-CoV-2.
This lies in contrast to its European neighbors, which, as the definition of insanity goes, are doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. In France, for example, “government officials have decreed that unvaccinated individuals will no longer be allowed to enter cafes, restaurants, theaters, public transportation and more,” reports the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). This is despite data indicating that many new China virus cases are among the vaccinated and that the most highly vaccinated nations have the worst COVID infection rates — and warnings that the vaccines may actually be dangerous.
“France’s approach is unique, but it’s just one of many countries around the world imposing new restrictions as fears grow over a new variant of COVID-19,” FEE later writes. “Australia’s recent restrictions have placed half the country under strict lockdown — even though a record 82,000 tests had identified just 111 new coronavirus cases — while restaurants in Portugal are struggling to survive amid newly imposed restrictions.”
In contrast, “Sweden is welcoming tourists,” FEE also informs (unlike Canada, which had its border with the United States closed to “unessential travel” for more than a year). “Businesses and schools are open with almost no restrictions. And as far as masks are concerned, not only is there no mandate in place, Swedish health officials are not even recommending them.”
(What’s more, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, warned last year that mask wearing was actually dangerous because it lends a false sense of security.)
Of course, we don’t hear much about the above from mainstream media. But this doesn’t mean Sweden isn’t getting some press. Just consider today’s Reuters headline, “COVID-19 on the rise in Swedish cities as Delta outbreaks dominate.”
Thus framing matters without pointing out that having a high infection rate combined with low hospitalization and mortality rates has a great upside — it builds herd immunity — is propagandistic reporting. It is, however, good for ratcheting up fear that will ensure bad policy’s perpetuation.
Sweden’s case is also interesting because, being a cold nation, it should be harder hit by a respiratory disease such as the China virus. Yet it’s joined in this northern-clime boat by North Dakota, which avoided COVID regulations even more assiduously, and which also has managed the disease very well.
Oh, it doesn’t get much press, either.
In fact, “Covid is the first epidemic in history in which the healthy population was locked down, and it is not even that lethal for most people,” notes writer Thomas Lifson, commenting on the matter. “How that happened is a key question for discussion, and of course is almost never even raised in the media. But Sweden’s success in using the common sense, time-tested practice of focusing on the vulnerable and leaving the rest alone is now vindicated, while those countries that failed to build herd immunity as fast continue to suffer, and even redouble their bad bet of locking down.”
But even if one reckons Sweden’s success differently, and even if its China virus numbers change in time, it doesn’t matter. Why?
Because we have no rational choice but to follow its lead. That is to say, we hear much about “following the science.” Well, here’s the science and the facts:
• Data have long shown conclusively that widespread lockdowns not only don’t mitigate China virus spread, but that they actually create a situation in which there’s more death than the pandemic alone would cause (not to mention the economic destruction and psychological distress).
• Studies show that masks, when prescribed for the general population, are at best marginally effective at reducing viral contagion; moreover, they also appear themselves to pose significant health risks.
• The six-foot social-distance prescription is fairly arbitrary and is based on the work of a 19th-century German. Ironically, though, today’s Germany prescribes a social distance of 4.92 feet while the World Health Organization’s figure is 39 inches. Of course, you’re less likely to contract a disease if you remain six feet from others than if you’re closer; you’re even safer if you stay 60 away. You’re safer still if you live isolated in the Yukon.
The point is that we must go on with life. Ours isn’t a Last Man on Earth/Omega Man situation, where a virus exterminates most of humanity and zombies roam the countryside. As renowned COVID physician Dr. Peter McCullough has pointed out, the China virus has always been treatable, and a correct and official SARS-CoV-2 treatment protocol could have saved 85 percent of those who died from the virus. (You can partially thank Anthony Fauci for its lack.)
I have elderly/vulnerable people in my life whom I love with all my heart, and I want to keep them safe. But I know two things: Draconian government measures won’t accomplish this.
And if we continue with the lockdown folly, we won’t have much of a nation left.
This wouldn’t be good for anyone — except maybe the megalomaniacs who may aspire to rule over the ashes of what was once a successful civilization
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
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I won’t dwell on this topic, as it is a difficult point to discuss, but triage creates a great deal of management choices. The limited supplies and beds were difficult to remedy, but the limited number of competent physicians was never going to be overcome. A single doctor could have dozens of critical and crashing patients for weeks or longer – it was a very bad moment. So every nation faced the necessity of discriminating on the basis of patient need and resource access, but most did so on a patient by patient basis, rather than the method Sweden chose, which I agree with your input on their choice.
So Sweden faced the triage moment as you described. It did limit the complications of treating the younger population as a consequence to their decision. It likely eliminated a great source of infection to the general public as well, since their care was quite limited, again as you well describe. I have to admit that I too strongly agree with Dr. Tegnell’s final opinion on this matter. In any event, however, by this move of reducing the size of the herd, they more quickly attained a level approaching an effective herd immunity while other nations struggled to see to the needs of each of their citizens to whatever the level of care as was possible.
I have some Swedish friends who have tried to explain the eccentric nature of their people, though they never expand much beyond stating, “you don’t understand, the Swedish people are very different from you”. So, your explanation of their uniqueness, as it were, offers a context into other matters, so I greatly appreciate your explanation on this, and I easily recognize the description of the quick confession among their ready traits. I would also like to note, Adam, that you may be a laymen related to medical issues, but I think none would find it fair to describe you as ignorant in any context, as your quick mind seems ever expanding and given to a fair analysis on many varied topics.
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@Adam
Yes, I believe you are correct upon the reasoning behind the limiting travel and maintaining a less rigid stay at home order as was adopted in many localities. The cases did continue to spread, but the possible exposure of any one infectious individual was limited to a smaller ‘population’ as it were, so the many isolated burgs of the nation were able to approach a herd immunity, individually. The point of herd immunity is to utilize acquired immunity to limit the possible exposure of unprotected individuals, ie as immuntity increased, the number of uninfected individuals was reduced and the spread was more easily maintained. It is also more complicated than this too, though.
With the Covid disease, children are a reservoir of an immune category of the population. This means they mostly don’t develop the disease with exposure, unless they are in an at-risk subcategory of children, such as a child with diabetes. It doesn’t mean they aren’t infected necessarily, but there is no disease, no illness. So children, when exposed to the disease, might become resistant to further infection while never having any symptoms of the disease, or, at most, very mild symptoms. Hence, they are automatically factored into the populations approach to herd immune category since they need no exposure to provide them an immunity to symptoms. This is not true, of course, of many other diseases. This means at the beginning of the outbreak, the population did not begin at 0% immune, as the children provided a sizeable part of the population as being immune.
The removal of the elderly from treatment also provided a great clinical benefit, though I find this a difficult topic to, quite honestly. The at-risk category, those who would require the greatest care and the greatest resources, included both the elderly as well as the population of younger ages with established disease processes, but the elderly was overwhelmingly the larger portion of the at-risk group. The treatment of the elderly was like a flash-fire overwhelming many of the nations whose healtcare systems were recognized as the best in the world – the US, UK and Italy come quickly to mind. I read closely the triage managements that were employed in Italy and Spain, specifically, and they were difficult to consider. The entire populations of whole nursing homes would be involved in just a few days into critical care wards where the beds were quite limited.
Meanwhile, those who were younger were also coming in at a lower rate, and often leaving more quickly as well. Hence, the treatment of the elderly absorbed significant resources to which no nation had access in the early months and the outcome overall was a terrible care spread among hundreds of patients. The Swedes contemplated that by eliminating the elderly from the treatment meant that these resources were not so badly stretched.
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Many thanks for your kind words, Peloni. I take it as a real complement when a medical man says that my ideas about a medical issue make sense, even though I am an ignorant layman.
The unique Swedish approach seems to have enabled its population to achieve greater natural resistance to the disease than anywhere else (I am not sure if this is accurately called “herd immunity.”). While they still have many Covid cases, they rarely lead to serious illness or death. Perhaps their approach of “compartmentalizing” the population by forbidding long-distance travel, perhaps to allow everyone within each separate area to have enough contact with others neighbors with the virus to develop herdimmunity, seems to have worked. Many people become infected with Covid, but few become seriously ill or die.
The decision not to hospitalize nursing home patients who developed Covid, but instead to give them mild pain-killers and sleeping pills in order to enable them to die more comfortably, of course raises serious ethical concerns. But it can be defended on the grounds that they did not have enough hospital beds or ICUs to deal with an infectious disease that was more deadly than what they usually had to deal with, or any other unforeseen high-casualty event.
The shortage of hospital beds and iCU units was caused by a failure to plan over many years before the pandemic hit. That is where the health care system, and possibly the parliament and government that fund it, were most to blame. But once the Covid pandemic did reach Sweden, their options for dealing with it were limited and they had to make some hard choices. Reserving hospital beds and especially iCU units for those considered most likely to recover with treatment was therefore an understandible choice under the circumstances, although I still don’t agree with it.
Another interesting aspect of Sweden’s response to the Covid crisis is that the director of the country’s national response team, Dr. Tegnell, made an open “confession” on TV when asked a question about Sweden’s “triage” policy for elderly COVID victims, not only admitted that there had been such a policy and that he had given it his approval, but that it had been morally wrong, and he now regretted having consented to it. He accepted full blame for his morally flawed decision and asked for the forgiveness of the surviving relatives of thedeceased.
This is also something of a cultural tradition in Sweden. People often volunteer confessions of wrongdoing, sometimes before friends and family and sometimes on public occasions. Some Swedes seem to think that public confession is a way to absolution and forgiveness. Often the people they confess to give reassuring responses to the effect that they don’t consider their behavior to have been as bad as they think it was. Some Swedes seem to consider these confessions to others, sometimes a sizeable group of other people, to be a kind of therapy.
@Adam is quite correct. The many libels and distortions by the media about what was happening in Sweden led me last year to consider closely what their process of combating the SARS-Cov2 virus was, as it was reasonable that if the media was deliberately distorting things, there must be some strength in their endeavors.. The cold hard cruelty of their rationale was barbaric, to my eyes at least.
The real lesson that should be learned by Sweden and her lock-down obsessed sister nations is that Early Treatment would have save all but very few of those who received serious illness, long-haul covid and/or death. The crime of ignoring these curative drugs or even the slightest efforts towards developing an alternative strongly suggests some culpability by the govts or at minimum a level of blind incompetence – and even with the explanation of blind incompetence, they and their advisors should be prosecuted for the great public harm from such willful denial of treatment to so many who suffered terribly without need.
Sweden did have a lockdown policy of sorts. People were not allowed to go more than about a five mile radius from their homes. All of the major highways in the country were closed down, except for trucks carrying essential supplies, in order to enforce this policy. People were allowed to move around freely within this five-mile radius. The thory was by compartmentalizing the virus, within limited, separate areas, it would both stop its spread and allow herd immunity to develop in each of the hundreds of isolated areas of the country. This approach seems to have worked.
The Swedes also followed a “triage” policy of allowing the elderly, especially those confined to nursing homes, to die without treatment. They also severely restrict access to ambulence services, which means that if yiu can’t drive yourself or your loved one to a hospital or doctor’s office in your own car, you are most likely a goner.
Only people deemed likely because of their age and past medical history to survive Covid if treated were allowed to be admitted to hospitals.
By allowing those most likely to die soon anyway because of their age and possession of chronic “co-mprbidities “ (such as Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, etc.), they eliminated most of the Covid victims or potential victims, leaving the surviving population consisting of those most likely to withstand the disease and/or remain asymptomatic.
Visits to nursing homes by relatives were also severely restricted, and those who visited were not allowed to touch their relatives who were residents. The nurses and attendants in nursing homes were not given any training in how to care for Covid patients, and sanitary supplies, even soap, was provided to the nursing homes only in limited quantities. This triage strategy also appears to have worked, since the majority of those who did die of Covid were nursing home residents.
While the Swedish strategy did succeed in limiting deaths from Covid, I feel it was inhumane. One reason Swedes were comfortable with this approach was that a belief that it did not make sense to go on living once one’s useful,” active life was older and one’s children were all grown up. That’s why the decision to allow nursing home patients to die was acceptable to most Swedes.
Swedish culture is quite unique. Swedes are actually more distant in terms of their ethical values from other Westerners than are the non-MUslim Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Indians, etc.)