Sweden: Despite Variants, No Lockdowns, No Daily Covid Deaths

 

Relatively few such as me, in three separate articles, claimed the Nordic country was sparing both the economy and something called «liberty» with its light-handed approach. « Officials Identify Big Reason Why.» Around the same time «Sweden Steadfast In Strategy As Virus Toll Continues Rising,» claimed another source. «Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy Drives Up Infection Rate,» screamed the BBC. «Sweden Has The Highest Daily Coronavirus Death Rate In The World — And It’s Getting Worse.» That’s from Yahoo Sports.

Modelers desperately tried to scare Sweden into locking down. One predicted an incredible median of 96,000 deaths, with a maximum of 183,000. At Sweden’s Lund University an academic used the parameters in the now-infamous Neil Ferguson/Imperial College model to warn that it meant 85,000 deaths for Sweden. An Uppsala University team also found the nation paying a terrible price with 40,000 Covid-19 deaths by May 1, 2020 and almost 100,000 by June.

It’s not that Sweden did nothing — but very little. «From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Public Health Agency . embarked on a de-facto herd immunity approach, allowing community transmission to occur relatively unchecked,» declared a scathing editorial in the leftwing medical journal The Lancet last December. Time to revisit Sweden as much of the world starts locking down and masking again regardless of vaccination levels, blaming the Delta variant.

And those impudent Swedes are pretty much refusing to die of Covid at all. Currently Sweden ranks 18th in Europe in vaccines per capita, right in the middle. Likewise, there are those who say Sweden finally buckled down and imposed serious restrictions. Mind, they say, it’s not all from Covid-19 per se but possibly in great part to «pre-immunity» from other infections.

Mind, the current figures are just a snapshot. «It’s not solving anything.» In essence the country «front-loaded» its deaths and decreased those deaths later on. Meanwhile, the Swede haters have also insisted that in exchange for its «butcher’s bill» the country was deriving little or no economic benefit from not shutting down. «Sweden unlikely to feel economic benefit of no-lockdown approach,» warned the Financial Times in a May 10, 2020 headline.

It admitted that so far Sweden has fared better, but select «analysts» cautioned it wouldn’t last. Despite Sweden inevitably feeling undertow from economies that did lock down, «Covid-19 has had a rather limited impact on its economy compared with most other European countries,» according to the Nordetrade. «Softer preventative restrictions against Covid-19 earlier in the year and a strong recovery in the third quarter contained the GDP contraction,» it said. Not surprisingly, it’s not just Sweden’s pro-freedom position on Covid that sticks in the MSM’s craw.

Though routinely labeled «socialist,» it ranks 10th out of 190 economies for ease of doing business, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business report for 2020.

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Source: Michael Fumento | American Institute for Economic Research