Posted on 05/04/2020 11:55:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Sweden ranks seventh on the list of countries with most COVID-19 fatalities per capita. (I exclude microstates with populations under 100,000.) The six countries with more fatalities per capita are all in Western Europe. (I include the United Kingdom.) The fatality rate in the Netherlands is only slightly higher than in Sweden, but since April 1 it’s grown faster in the latter. Sweden appears to be on track to move up from seventh to sixth place before long.
The United States should learn from Sweden’s response to the pandemic, John Fund and Joel Hay argue in their most recent article at NRO. They think that the lesson we should take away is that Sweden’s response has been a success and is a model that other countries should follow: Go light on social-distancing restrictions, reopen schools, bars, restaurants, and gyms yesterday, and aim for herd immunity.
Arguments for lifting any given lockdown can be made. At this point in the pandemic, however, Sweden’s experience no longer clearly supports them. Granted, the landscape may look different a year from now. We’re still trying to see through the fog. Fund and Hay tout Sweden’s relatively low number of COVID-19 cases per capita, but that figure alone isn’t meaningful unless we know how many Swedes have been tested. In any case, if Swedish policymakers are aiming for herd immunity, they should want the infection rate to be higher, not lower. Twelve percent of Swedes who have tested positive have died. That figure is high — in the United States, for example, the percentage is 7 — and so perhaps Sweden is overcounting deaths related to COVID-19. But perhaps not. We don’t know.
In Sweden as elsewhere, COVID-19 is most fatal to the elderly. Pointing out that Swedes (average lifespan, 83 years) live longer on average than Americans do (79) and that more than half of Sweden’s COVID-19 fatalities have been in nursing homes, Fund and Hay imply that in Sweden the population that has died from the virus is on average a little older than in the United States. They may be right about that, although they don’t produce the statistics that would enable us to make the comparison. “On an age-adjusted basis,” they write, “Sweden has done significantly better than the U.S” when we measure “deaths per million.”
Has it? By how much? To quantify it, we would have to weight deaths by age, but what would be the formula? Would there be a single bright line, such as age 80? The death of someone older than that would count as three-fifths the death of someone younger? Whatever formula we came up with would, I hope, provoke strong moral objections, including some from me. If we’re going to imply that you should interpret fatality figures on an “age-adjusted basis,” we need to spell out what we mean, and we need to be specific.
It’s less than Cuomo’s socialist, fascist Utopia.
The fatality rate is “high”, but not much higher than some other first world countries like the US. And they’ll be done with this virus sooner because the decided not to all voluntarily cut off their balls at once.
Just plot it out by cohort.
This analysis isn’t tough.
Which is somewhat ironic, considering how ball-less they’ve been with respect to all of the koranimals raping their women and children...
What difference, at this point, does it make?
The real question is the long term integrated deaths, including suicides and delayed medical care caused by the lockdown.
Sweden might achieve herd immunity while other countries face the prospect of choosing between reopening and watching infection shoot up rendering the lockdown meaningless or staying lockeddown forever. We’ll just have to see.
On a per capita basis it is no more significant than any winter flu.
While I think that Sweden did a lot of things right, they neglected to do any isolation of the elderly from the general public. That is why their death rate is so high. They have a higher rate of elderly citizen infected with the virus, hence a higher death rate.
Sweden has not destroyed their economic infrastructure. The message is clear, at-risk population groups should be quarantined and protected. The rest of the herd should be allowed to develop immunity. Will some people die? Of course, as occurs every year with various pathogens.
Sweden doesn’t have one of their two political parties and nearly all of their media actively working with the CCP, so they kept their economy running.
It’s too soon to tell for sure, but Sweden might already have reached it’s peak of new cases and new deaths.
All of the countries with higher fatality rates than Sweden also have lockdowns, which shows how well lockdowns work. Spain, where I live, has been in lockdown since mid March. My town has over 27000 people, less than 10 reported cases and 0 deaths. The government calls this “countless lives saved,” which is a joke.
Did they have their healthcare systems get over run, with patients dying in the hallways? No? Then it was a success. Because that was their and our goal.
Until the socialists and their useful idiots moved the goalposts. And Trump inexplicable went along.
Except that it does an entire flu season's worth of death in just one month.
Trump had the right instincts to start off with, when he said all lockdowns should end by Easter so the economy can open up.
That was before Fauci and Birx stormed into the Oval Office with the fake “2.2 million are going to die” figures and demanded he change his mind.
RE: Did they have their healthcare systems get over run, with patients dying in the hallways? No? Then it was a success
The accusation is Sweden has so many deaths because they did not institute a complete lockdown like the the other EU countries.
I wonder what the answer to this question would be — IF they had instituted a lockdown like the other EU countries and destroyed their economy, can they prove that the death rate would be LESS than what they have now?
Throughout the History of Civilization, there are winners and losers after events which have a massive impact. The US will most likely be a loser. Too many people have gone crazy demanding a perfect outcome which has no impact on them. They lack the imagination and experience to adapt to new realities. Sounds like Sweden might be a winner.
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