Not certain what Covid thread to put this, and couldn’t find it already mentioned but I could be bad at search. Just delete it if already old news…
In 2020, people around the world and EU countries was terrified about Sweden… no lockdowns, just trying to protect the elderly, recommended home work if available, recommended staying home if not feeling well pushing vaccines to elderly… everybody thought Swedish relaxed attitude to Covid would kill off half the population….
So… how is the status now? Comparing excess deaths in 2020-2022 with older years for all EU countries… Sweden is in the bottom of the list…. Just a disclaimer that excess deaths is not a perfect way to measure as it depends on many factors, but still some good for thought…
There was a massive pile-on from other countries. Anders Tegnell was basically Hitler. Frankly, though, I think the only thing they were terrified of was that Sweden was about to make them look bad. Which - predictably enough - they did. And now everyone is trying to pretend Sweden doesn’t exist.
Sweden didn’t do everything right (I believe they pushed vaccination pretty hard, and there are still a lot of wingnuts there obsessed with getting everyone repeatedly jabbed). But there’s no doubt they avoided a lot of the mayhem that happened elsewhere.
You could probably make similar points about various African countries, but the poor quality of reporting from Africa generally, the confounding burden of poverty and disease, and the ease with which their governments are deposed or rearranged for the convenience of vested interests, makes it hard to gauge how well they did.
Huge amounts of COVID deaths were contributed to other factors. Our health minister even came out and publicly said that we had people getting into car accidents being registered as COVID hospitalisations.
It looks like not locking people up had a positive effect. I personally have a friend who became an alcoholic over the last few years because of lockdowns and being stuck at home with nothing to do.
Countries which have done especially poorly, such as the US, may have done so due to “underlying health trends that had been in place before the pandemic,” according to the author Joshua Cohen.
Conversely, Sweden simply may have been especially healthy as a nation relative to its peers. Cohen doesn’t discuss the issue, but I also wonder how the effects of long COVID have impacted people there.
Some folks have tried to track the impact of letting COVID run through an unvaccinated population. According to this study, about 1 in 10 had long-term effects from the infection.
There may be other studies that are more up-to-date than this one, which looked at the impact of infections from February to August 2020.
What’s most worrying with future viruses is people refuse to accept their wrongness. Sweden was less wrong than most developed countries in its response. It was more wrong than most African countries.
I can’t believe people are incapable of accepting and learning from this. Is it ego? Are we going to have similar personality types making the same mistakes in politics next time?
Spending time recently more with base in Estonia, have to say Finland also seems done good… Wonder if the sauna culture helped? I really like this in Finland (and Estonia) too. Wiki table below shows Finland had lower death rate than Sweden.
Also of note, currently low COVID rates there so, and 0.1% use masks, refreshing (masks do help keep the cold air out though)
How to define a Covid death is so different between different countries so personally I don’t trust those numbers. In Sweden if you get confirmed as a Covid case, fully recover 3 days later but get ran over by a bus 28 days later then that is a Death by Covid in the statistics….
