Globally, Sweden is 22nd in terms of COVID-19 deaths per million; in Europe it is 12th (excluding microstates).
Sweden’s second wave, so far, appears to be much smaller than the first. Total mortality for this year, for the 11 months up to December 1, is lower than 2015, when there was no hysteria, and is only a little higher than in succeeding years.
The average across this year and last (an unusually low year) is on track to be lower than any two years prior.
Across nine months about 7,900 Swedes, or 0.08 per cent, have died from or with COVID-19, a quarter of those in their 90s, and half over 80 — and vastly fewer than the 100,000-odd that catastrophists warned would die without lockdown. Sweden’s intensive care units are not even close to being full.
In short, the so-called ravaging would be news to Swedes, who have been able to go about their lives relatively normally this year.
Without the relentless drumbeat about cases in the media — often induced by mass testing rather than actual illness — few would even know there was a pandemic in Sweden or anywhere else.
A more reasonable conclusion from the data would be that Sweden has had much the same level of death as other countries, without resorting to mask orders and authoritarian lockdowns, whose costs are yet to be assessed.
In this season when respiratory virus illnesses become more common and people move indoors to keep warm, many states are turning to more severe restrictions on businesses and outdoor activities. Yet empirical data from the U.S., Europe and Japan show that lockdowns don’t eliminate the virus and don’t stop the virus from spreading. They do, however, create extremely harmful health and social problems beyond a dramatic drop in learning, including a tripling of reported depression, skyrocketing suicidal ideation, unreported child abuse, skipped visits for cancer and other medical care.
It adds up to a future health disaster. “For younger people, the lockdowns are so harmful, so deadly, there’s really no good justification,” says Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, especially when considering their extremely low risk from Covid-19.
States and cities that keep their economies locked down after highly vulnerable populations have been vaccinated will be doubling down on failed policies that are destroying families and sacrificing children, particularly among the working class and poor.
Last month, Dr. Sunetra Gupta here, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya here, discussed the fallacies behind the lockdown mania and better approaches to dealing with Covid.
Alas, Australia isn’t Covid-free after all.
Here’s the opening paragraph of this essay in Principia Scientific International:
In a statement released on December 14, 2020 the World Health Organization finally owned up to what 100,000’s of doctors and medical professionals have been saying for months: the PCR test used to diagnose COVID-19 is a hit and miss process with way too many false positives.
