Posted on 04/19/2020 7:03:29 PM PDT by grundle
... while the rest of the world has been shutting down schools, shops and restaurants, banning non-essential travel, and sending the police to shout at those who dare to dawdle in their local park, Sweden remains largely open for business.
Our schools are full of students, and I can still visit restaurants in Malmo, where I’ve lived for more than 20 years. I’m working from home, but many offices remain open. I can have friends over for lunch. Should I want to, I could drive to the countryside for a weekend away...
People say we are putting the economy ahead of saving lives, but the economy is lives. A stronger economy means better healthcare for everyone for years to come. Generally, Swedes like to play the long game and right now we’re thinking about the state of play two, five or even 10 years from now. It’s not just about beating the virus, it’s about coming out of the crisis healthy. It’s easy to tally up deaths from the disease, but what about the impact a lockdown will have in terms of unemployment, homelessness, mental illness, and suicides? ...
Perhaps our most controversial policy has been to keep schools open. But shutting schools would mean key workers, including doctors and nurses, would have to stay at home (or else kids would need to be sent to their grandparents, a high-risk group). Also, Swedes are considering the negative long-term consequences on our kids if they miss a half year of school. Since they are unlikely to contract the virus, isn’t it better that they should carry on studying?
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Great country. At least it was before they invited the Somalis to live there.
There is nothing anybody can do, but wear gloves and masks. Everything else will not do anything.
If someone had told me six months ago that Sweden would have important lessons about freedom, liberty and dealing with risk to teach the USA I would have laughed in their face.
No guarantees of course, but I suspect when we look back we're going to see the futility of the lockdown as a medium term strategy.
It can be defended as the short term strategy (that time has passed) when nobody knew what kind of real numbers this thing was going to post and we wanted to protect health infrastructure from imploding which could have resulted in worse economic impact that what what we're looking at. But we only kicked the can down the road, and now it's time to deal with the can ... of green beans.
The Swedes seem to have a handle in coping with the pandemic. Now if they could just do something about their immigrant population.
Sweden has ~15k confirmed cases and ~1500 deaths from CV.
It has a population of ~10M.
Herd immunity requires at least 60% get infected.
Sweden is no where near herd immunity.
Even if the number of actual cases is 100x confirmed cases.
And their economy is almost as equally fcuk as everyone else because they are part of the European and global supply chain/market.
The extra ~4k Swedish corpses vs death rate in Norway bought them ~10k customer facing retail jobs for ~6 more months this year.
Statistics for Sweden are available.
Upshot: don’t follow Sweden’s lead. Not looking favorable.
Sweden’s numbers are hard to read. They test about 7000 per million pop, but there is no data on what quality test they do. They do 7000 fewer tests per 1Million population than the US’s 11000, presuming same test quality.
They have more deaths per 1M population than the US, at 153 vs the US 122. 24% more. That’s a lot.
They have fewer cases declared per 1M population than the US with Sweden 1400 and US 2300. So they are getting more deaths per 1M pop with fewer cases, likely because they test less.
They have 14,380 cases in a population of 10 million. So 14 people in every 1000 have been tested infected. X10 for untested infected and it’s about 1% of the population that can infect you if you do nothing about it.
The Brits were going to pursue this approach. Quarantine only elderly and everybody else would be sent out to get infected and eventually immune. That died almost overnight when the report of re-infections emerged. The Brits saw that and saw that their strategy would fail and lockdown was called.
If Sweden were really “listening to science not fear” they would know that herd immunity is not guaranteed, any more than immunity from a subsequent infection. Sure, the really nasty SARS seems to cause antibody protection that can last two years, but the common cold (also from the family of coronaviruses) does not. They are really rolling the dice here.
Sweden doesn't know a g*dd@mn thing. Sweden is wrong about socialism, wrong about letting third world crap people move into their country, and wrong about how to deal with an epidemic. These are fools who rush in where angels fear to tread, and if anything is working in their favor, it's the lack of density of population coupled with the white people being more resistant to the virus.
Don't ever hold Sweden up as a model for anything. They are about the stupidest people on the whole d@mn planet right now, and it remains to be seen if they will come out of this through sheer luck alone.
Kind of the opposite of FreeRepublic. If you would have told me the many Freepers would gladly trade their liberties to assuage their hysteria and fear , I would have laughed.
But here we are.
Well put.
Sweden must not have a hyper hysterical press.
It broke my heart.
Tough talk by a lot of folks after this won’t mean much.
In my personal life, people who are conservative freedom lovers locked down like it’s the freaking black death.
Taking precautions is smart.
Shutting down and hiding and being so TERRIFIED of death when you always showed how religious you were is not smart and was deceitful.
I was not nearly as religious as these people, I thought.
I have taken precautions but I’ve been out. A bunch of times. I pray and I live.
The ones I thought were so religious live in sheer terror as if they have no faith.
I wish President Trump had followed the Swedish/South Dakota model instead of the totally discredited Fauci/Birx model.
22 million people and counting would still have jobs for starters. Millions of small businesses wouldn’t have gone bankrupt. Calls to suicide hot lines wouldn’t be up over 1000 %. Domestic abuse hot line calls wouldn’t be skyrocketing. And on and on.
not sure why you would say that-their numbers are not that bad ,they have about 3-4% of our population and that means if their numbers were on par with ours it would show about 1300 to 1400 deaths so their deaths are in line or slightly worse than ours
Sweden Coronavirus Cases:
14,385
Deaths:
1,540
Recovered:
550
This new Sweden is great is a fallacy. It is roughly the size of California. California is handling it also. One size fits all is simplistic and naive.
The Reason for the Season: why flu strikes in winter
A common misconception is that the flu is caused by cold temperatures. However, the influenza virus is necessary to have the flu, so cold temperatures can only be a contributing factor. In fact, some people have argued that it is not cold temperatures that make the flu more common in the winter. Rather, they attest that the lack of sunlight or the different lifestyles people lead in winter months are the primary contributing factors. Here are the most popular theories about why the flu strikes in winter:
1) During the winter, people spend more time indoors with the windows sealed, so they are more likely to breathe the same air as someone who has the flu and thus contract the virus...
The reason why 'lock downs' do not work... You are forcing people to gather in one place, stuck indoors and if somebody within a household, or seniors residence, or long term care home becomes infected... They spread the flu to everybody within that home or facility... Lock downs have caused the flu to spread... Wearing mask without lock downs (like they commonly do in Japan) has prevented the spread of the flu.
Common sense... The World Health Organization and many of the 'experts' who dealt with this virus had none... The health experts and leaders of Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Sweden do have common sense and these four locals are not locked down and have the lowest infection rates... And in Sweden they don't even wear mask, so their rate is slightly higher but still very low in comparison to locked down countries.
Huh?
California has a population of 40 million.
Sweden’s population is 10 million.
Meanwhile New York State which has a population of just 20 million (to Sweden’s 10 million), has vastly more coronavirus deaths and cases than Sweden has.
And New York has lockdowns. Sweden hasn’t.
Who is better off?
Certainly not New York.
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