Posted on 08/30/2023 12:34:12 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The Scandinavian country suffered fewer excess deaths and far less economic and social damage than other rich countries that had more restrictive pandemic policies.
The reigning narrative of Sweden during the pandemic is that the Swedish government took a brazenly hands-off approach to COVID-19—and suffered mass, avoidable deaths as a result.
During the spring and summer of 2020, Sweden bucked the international trend by not issuing emergency stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, or school closures. With the exception of restrictions on nursing home visits and large gatherings, the country stayed open during that time.
The concurrent spike in COVID deaths it experienced, particularly in comparison to its Scandinavian peers, was all the proof politicians and much of the press needed to dismiss its liberal approach as inferior to Chinese-inspired lockdowns that swept the rest of the globe.
The New York Times called the country a "cautionary tale." Then-President Donald Trump denounced the country's approach on Twitter.
Yet, this interpretation of Sweden's COVID-19 performance as disastrous and deadly is largely wrong, argues Johan Norberg in a new paper for the Cato Institute.
The data that's accumulated over the past three years suggests that Sweden's "laissez faire approach seems to have paid off," writes Norberg.
"It seems likely that Sweden did much better than other countries in terms of the economy, education, mental health, and domestic abuse, and still came away from the pandemic with fewer excess deaths than in almost any other European country, and less than half that of the United States."
Sweden has largely been dismissed as a failure on COVID-19 because its COVID death rate was middle-of-the-back of the list when compared to other European countries and much higher than other Scandinavian countries that had harsher restrictions.
Neighboring Norway had about half the COVID death rate of Sweden when looking at the period of January 2020 to June 2023, for instance.
Yet Norberg argues just looking at COVID deaths overstates the deadliness of the pandemic in Sweden, given the country's greater surveillance of COVID cases and broader definition of a "COVID-19 death."
Swedish "authorities automatically checked the lists of people who were infected against the population register, so everyone who died and had tested positive for the virus was counted as a COVID-19 death, even if they died from a heart attack or a fall," writes Norberg.
That contrasts with Norway, which depended on individual doctors to proactively report COVID-19 deaths to public health authorities. As a result, the Norwegians probably undercounted their COVID deaths, while Sweden overcounted.
Instead, Norberg focuses on excess deaths—the difference between the number of overall deaths in the country and the expected number of deaths based on past mortality rates. Here, Sweden ended up having the fewest excess deaths of any European country, seeing only a 4.4 percent excess death rate.
That's slightly better than Norway's 5 percent and less than half of Europe's average excess death rate of 11 percent.
Sweden did get hit harder earlier in the pandemic, and it's on this earlier performance that much of the commentary about the country's pandemic failures came from. That snapshot is misleading.
"Sweden's comparatively dismal performance at the start of the pandemic was mostly a result of other countries having managed to delay cases and deaths, rather than having prevented them," writes Norberg. "Sweden suffered most of its deaths in 2020, while the Nordic neighbors and many other countries got them in 2022."
The Cato paper cites one Norwegian public health official as saying, "Other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place."
Norberg's paper repeats a common practical argument against lockdowns: that they're unnecessary because people will voluntarily restrict their interactions with others in response to rising risk of the virus.
"That people adapt voluntarily when they realize that lives are at stake. Swedes quickly changed their behavior and mostly followed the recommendations," writes Norberg, citing data showing a rise in remote work arrangements and a collapse in public transit ridership early in the pandemic.
He suggests that the reliance on voluntary compliance meant Swedes were more willing to comply with pandemic precautions for longer. Mandatory COVID restrictions in other countries bred backlash to any countermeasures, leading to a greater number of deaths later on.
Perhaps that's true. But if it is, it doesn't seem any of it made much of a difference in the deadliness of the pandemic. Again, Sweden ended up in basically the same place in terms of overall mortality as its Nordic peers (and in a much better place than many other rich countries.) To the degree voluntary pandemic precautions worked, they likely had only the same delaying effect as its neighbors' mandatory lockdowns.
The real benefit of Sweden's more liberal pandemic policies then appears to be that it had far better social and economic outcomes than its neighbors, despite experiencing roughly the same number of excess COVID deaths.
Swedish students suffered no learning loss during the pandemic, whereas half of U.S. students did. The country's economic growth outperformed the eurozone and the United States. It avoided other countries' increased suicide rates and deteriorated mental health.
To be sure, Sweden's COVID-19 policies weren't completely anarchic. Some of the restrictions the country adopted during the winter of 2020 and spring and summer of 2021 were comparable, or even stricter than what many U.S. states had in place.
That includes bans on public gatherings of more than eight people from November 2020 through May 2021. By comparison, many U.S. states had ended capacity restrictions and mass gathering limits well before then.
The country was nevertheless much more respectful of people's individual choices during the pandemic than other European countries and most U.S. states. That additional freedom doesn't appear to have proven more deadly in the aggregate. Instead, it seems to have helped Sweden avoid many of the asocial knock-on effects of banning or restricting public life for months or years at a time.
Or could it be the Swedes are healthier in general ... less fat meaning less diabetes, less hypertension, less heart disease.
Sweden was compared to other countries, not just the U.S., including neighbors such as Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Do you think Sweden is that much healthier than any country on earth?
Also, Sweden has a risk factor that is much more of a risk than diabetes, etc. In Sweden, there is a lot less sunlight for a major part of the year, meaning potentially people with much lower Vitamin D.
The Barrington Group of epidemiologists recommended the same and were vilified by the corrupt CDC/NIH/US Pharma coalition. Most veterinarians would have recommended the same as they have had experience with epidemics and are steeped in epidemiology. Several basic tenets of epidemiology were ignored by those that were supposed to be looking after our best interests.
Is saving Greta Thunberg something of which to be proud?
“In Sweden, there is a lot less sunlight for a major part of the year, meaning potentially people with much lower Vitamin D.”
I lived in Sverige in the 80s for a while in the winter, and while I almost froze there is sunlight.
And while ground reindeer meat is really good there is almost no fat.
before the migrant influx the Sweeds were pretty homogenous and healthy
I see what you did there!
‘I wish Trump adopted the Swedish model. Big miss.’
it would also have helped if he could’ve held off bashing Kemp and DeSantis for easing draconian restrictions...
I got a kick out of some freepers who couldn’t wait for bad news from Sweden so they could breathlessly tell us about it...
But the pandemic paid off very well indeed for a certain number of people....
"Meet The 40 New Billionaires Who Got Rich Fighting Covid-19"
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/04/06/meet-the-40-new-billionaires-who-got-rich-fighting-covid-19/?sh=102f23ef17e5
I didn’t read the article and I don’t need to. I mostly don’t trust studies, even if they support what I think. Regardless, freedom was the correct decision even if it would have led to the deaths of many more people.
I think Trump was weirded out by the fake computer models that said that 2 million people would die if he didn’t follow the advice of Fauci, Birx, et. al. They paralyzed him. Not to mention, he is something of a Howard Hughes like germaphobe. On the bright side, he did hand over public health control to the governors which allowed us to compare the effectiveness of draconian lockdown blue states versus laissez faire red states. It’s clear the red states did better.
Ping
Did you think that National Emergency ended?
No, it has just dropped the Public Health.
Now as just the National Emergency, they don’t tell you what mask to wear, they will just tell you where you can’t put your money.
Maybe you missed it. A National Emergency has already told you from where you can receive money.
So now 2 National Emergencies got you coming and going.
They will tell you it is for National Security reasons. I’m sure it is. It used to be the normal was a cover for security. Now security is the cover for routine crime.
Agreed
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