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.
We will have to wait and compare the numbers a year from now. The question is whether or not Sweden is protecting it’s population more (than we are) for the period of November 2020 through April 2021, by obtaining greater herd immunity this season, and us getting a bigger 2nd wave than Sweden winds up getting. Time will tell.
Is abrogating the bill of rights the right solution.
Give me liberty or give me quarantine?
This author was an idiot, because he ignored where Sweden was on the “total infection” curve.
If sweden is halfway to herd immunity, and the other countries are only 25% of the way, you have to double the death rates for the other countries to do the comparison.
He also ignores the population density; Norway for example is only 2/3rd of Sweden, which means they naturally have more distancing, by quite a bit. At some point, a low enough population density makes it impossible to spread the virus much.
It’s the ONLY option. We are going to be doing the same thing. We are just doing it slower.
Unless you plan on living the rest of your life in a bubble, “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated”.
There was a game between Valencia and Atalanta but Valencia itself doesn’t have a large outbreak. The virus also didn’t garner a lot of attention at the time. The main culprit for the national outbreak is a large march in Madrid for International Women’s Day. The organizers of the march knew of the danger and ignored it. They even carried signs mocking the virus. The Prime Minister’s wife, who later tested positive for the virus, participated in the march. Things turned bad very quickly after that.
At least their nightmare was short and is over.
You can’t rely on simplistic comparisons like that. The population demographics are too different between Michigan and Sweden. Michigan has several times the black population of Sweden, and the death toll among blacks has been very high in Michigan. Michigan also has a higher obesity rate than Sweden. Probably lots of other factors to consider as well, but those were the first two that came to mind.
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