"Basically, COVID is in all practical senses over and done with in Sweden" " People in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks"
Sweden didn't shut down - schools and businesses remained open. This allowed the virus to spread naturally and for people to build an immunity.
The shut downs prolonged the buildup of immunity in the U.S. - infection eventually goes down during the shutdown as the virus runs its course - then when opened up, the virus spreads again until it is allowed to run its course.
It's likely that the case fatality rate for COVID is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population.
COVID hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was COVID. Practically everyone who was tested had COVID, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had COVID. They came in with stomach pain and they had COVID.
Then, after a few months, all the COVID patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single COVID patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative.
Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more.
Basically, COVID is in all practical senses over and done with in Sweden.
After four months. In total COVID has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. 70% of those were over the age of 80.
That is why it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics, like the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people.
And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies, stopped children going to school, and made large portions of their population unemployed in order to deal with this disease.
The media have been proclaiming that only a small percentage of the population have antibodies, and therefore it is impossible that herd immunity has developed. Well, if herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people?
Considering that most people in Sweden are leading their lives normally now, not socially distancing, not wearing masks, there should still be high rates of infection.
Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done within a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly. At present that means Sweden has one of the highest total death rates in the world. But COVID is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected any more.
Countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway.
In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for COVID is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.
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