Good evening. I’m still reporting on the coup.
Despite annual new versions of the flu virus, entire nations have never before been locked down. How did it happen that the world bought into it this time with the exception of only one major nation – Sw…
Good evening. I’m still reporting on the coup.
Despite annual new versions of the flu virus, entire nations have never before been locked down. How did it happen that the world bought into it this time with the exception of only one major nation – Sweden.
According to Sweden’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anders Tegnell, closing society completely down has never been done before, so Sweden just did what they usually do in response, and it has worked well.
Despite Sweden basically letting the virus spread like normal, in the interest of letting mother nature take over with herd immunity, Sweden ranks only #25 in the world for Total Cases, and 18th in the world for total deaths with only 4,395, which is 435 per million in population - #25 in the world. The U.S., with 33 times Sweden’s population has 1.8 million cases and 106,140 deaths which gives it 321 deaths per million.
But in Sweden, the virus has now apparently run its course. Yesterday, Sweden reported only 429 new cases of the virus and zero new deaths. The US reported nearly 17,634 new cases yesterday – 41 times more, and 583 new deaths.
One last interesting statistic that may indicate how quickly the virus is running its course; Sweden has only 228 critical cases in hospitals, while the US has 17,102 – 75 times more.
According to Dr. Tegnell, the state epidemiologist of Sweden, the high death toll:
“… really came as a surprise to us. We calculated on more people being sick, but the death toll really came as a surprise to us.”
What he did not count on was how hard the virus would impact the elderly.
He says that about half of Sweden’s death toll came from the elderly in nursing homes.
“We really thought our elderly homes would be much better at keeping this disease outside of them then they have actually been.”
The surprise may well have been that younger people could be infected and contagious for 2 weeks before becoming symptomatic.
But other than that, Sweden’s herd immunity plan seemed to work as it always has, and now at least a vast swath of their population is probably immune with little impact to their economy.
This total economic lockdown idea is brand new, however. History has incidents where the sick are isolated. The first note of such a practice comes from the Old Testament in Numbers 5:2-3 when people with leprosy were isolated.
In the 14th century, the Croatian city of Dubrovnik quarantined traveling merchants outside of the city for 30 days in case they had become infected with the plague during their travels.
But in 1793 when a yellow fever plague hit Philadelphia, then the capital of the new United States, there were no quarantines. The same for the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 which infected one-third of the world’s population and killed between 17 and 100 million people – the deadliest pandemic in history.
As a result, there has not been a recurrence of Spanish Flu – herd immunity was achieved.
Social distancing, economic lockdowns and even vaccinations are seen my many as tinkering with mother nature.
One of the leading critics was Dr. D.A. Henderson, of the Center for Biosecurity at Univ. of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Baltimore, the man who led the international effort to eradicate smallpox,
In a 2006 academic paper entitled, “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza”, Dr. Henderson predicted that state-enforced social distancing would:
“… result in significant disruption of the social functioning of communities and result in possibly serious economic problems….”
Henderson’s recommendation: Let the pandemic run its course, but isolate and treat the sick.
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of American freedom. Good day.
