https://www.telegraph.co.

uk/news/2020/08/09/lockdown-supporters-cannot-bear-

/
thought-sweden-has-got-right

Lockdown supporters cannot bear the

thought that Sweden has got it right
An honest appraisal of how the Scandinavian country has fared raises plenty of
awkward questions for politicians in the rest of Europe

ROSS CLARK9 August 2020 • 3:44pm

Sweden has fulfilled the same role during the Covid-19 crisis as Argentina fulfils
in every World Cup. It’s the team which everyone – apart from the natives
themselves, naturally – wants to get beaten. This has been especially true in the
liberal US press, which has taken time off from berating Donald Trump to
publish lengthy pieces on the supposed failure of the Swedish approach. “The
Swedish government didn’t enforce social distancing,” began the Washington
Monthly, for example, in May when Sweden briefly had the world’s highest
death rate from the disease. “It’s now paying the price – in lives and GDP.”
Even neighbouring Nordic countries – normally peas in a pod – have taken
against Sweden. When Denmark and Norway re-opened their borders to the
world they initially left out Sweden. Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders
Tegnell, who has acquired a rock star image among some of his countrymen, is
seen as a maverick by many abroad.
It’s not hard to see why politicians, officials and many others around the world
need Sweden to fail and to fail spectacularly. If the Scandinavian country is not
seen to suffer for its failure to lock down its population and close down much of
its economy then citizens in other countries are going to start asking awkward
questions.

For a while it looked as if Sweden might well fail spectacularly. While other,
locked-down countries saw their rates of new infection plummet and gradually
unlocked, infections in Sweden remained stubbornly high. Economic
projections suggested that Sweden was going to suffer a deep recession anyway.
All those needless deaths, it seemed, and Swedes were still going to lose their
jobs.

Then came July, and a reminder that lockdown is no long-term solution to a

pandemic. Infection rates began to creep up in countries which had locked down
– first Spain, then Germany, France, Belgium. Some have been going to into
selective second lockdowns. All they had really done by incarcerating their
populations for weeks is sweep the virus under the carpet for another day.
Sweden, by contrast, has as yet seen no second wave.
Meanwhile, the Swedish economy has surprised on the upside. Last week, its
economy was revealed to have shrunk by 8.6 per cent in the second quarter –
cataclysmic by normal standards, of course, yet in the circumstances it counts as
a triumph. GDP across the Eurozone shrank by 12 per cent, with Spain’s
economy plunging by 18 per cent quarter on quarter. Britain’s GDP figures
won’t be out until next Wednesday, but we will be doing very well if we don’t
out-shrink Spain. At one point the Office of Budgetary Responsibility was
penciling in a 35 per cent plunge for the UK in the second quarter.      
There was no way that Sweden, with many of its neighbours’ economies closed,
was going to escape without a sharp contraction. Volvo, for example, suffered a
38 per cent fall in sales as showrooms across Europe were closed. Nevertheless,
there is an intriguing possibility that Sweden could be just about the only
developed country to manage to get through the Covid-19 crisis without
technically suffering a recession – defined as two consecutive quarters of
negative growth.

Alone in Europe, it managed to grow its economy by 0.4 percent in the first
quarter. One after another, Swedish companies have produced results which
have exceeded expectations. There have been few bankruptcies. What’s more,
having kept factories and other workplaces open throughout the crisis, the
Swedes have an advantage in the recovery. They don’t have a workforce which
has lost the habit of working, which enjoyed weeks off in the spring sunshine
and is now reluctant to return.

But was it worth all those deaths? The case against Sweden rests on
comparisons with its neighbours, Denmark and Norway. On that basis, Sweden
looks to have come off badly – its 571 deaths per million residents seems
reckless compared with that of Denmark (106) or Norway (47). But then are
Denmark and Norway the right comparators?

Sweden has much more significant urban areas compared with Norway, and it
has a high number people who take skiing holidays in the Alps – which seems to
have been the seat, or one of the main seats, of Covid-19 in Europe.
Significantly, Sweden has a lower death rate than many European countries
which did go into full lockdown, such as Italy (582), Spain (610), the UK (683)
and Belgium (850).

Show more

But even if Sweden has suffered a relatively high number of deaths to date, that
is not the end of the story. As John Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief
epidemiologist and adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO), argued in
April we won’t really be able to judge how different countries have performed
until the crisis has reached some kind of conclusion, either through a vaccine or
the natural decline of the virus. His belief is that, eventually, comparable
countries will have similar death rates, but the misery – both health and
economic – will be spread out far longer in some than others.
Were an effective vaccine to become available this autumn, then the suppression
strategy proposed in Professor Neil Ferguson’s paper of March 16 and followed
by most developed countries, will seem wise. But just how long are governments
prepared to suppress their economies? The longer a vaccine takes to arrive –
and there is no guarantee that a vaccine will ever be approved, even if early
trials have been promising – then the more that the Swedish approach will seem
appealing.

The disappointing news from Sweden’s point of view is that antibody tests
suggest that the country is still far from achieving herd immunity. The country’s
Public Health Agency revealed in June that even in Stockholm, the worst-
affected place in the country, only 10 percent of the population had antibodies –
way short of the 60 to 80 percent which our own chief scientific adviser, Sir
Patrick Vallance, suggested would be needed for herd immunity.
Not all scientists are agreed on this, however. Last week, modelling in a yet-to-
be published paper by an international group of scientists led by Gabriella
Gomes of Strathclyde University claimed that the 60 percent is only applicable
where herd immunity is gained through a vaccine programme given randomly
to a population. If a virus is allowed to spread naturally, on the other hand, it
will affect the more susceptible people first (people who either have fewer
natural defences or who have more contacts).

Once this group has been infected, the virus finds it much harder to spread and
herd immunity will be reached at a much lower level – when between 10 and 20
percent of the population have been infected. If that is right, Sweden might be
far closer to herd immunity than previously believed.      
In the meantime, Sweden finds itself with unfamiliar friends and unfamiliar
enemies. Thanks to its generous welfare policies it is more often a country
praised on the left and condemned by economic liberals. Now it is now the other
way around. Ultimately Sweden might just end up pleasing both groups – if,
thanks to a less-damaged economy, it emerges as the only country able to avoid
deep welfare cuts.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/04/swedens-
coronavirus-strategy-finally-silencing-doubters/

Is Sweden's coronavirus strategy finally silencing the doubters? 

Sweden's Covid-19 case rate has dropped below both Norway and Denmark in a
boost for its 'no-lockdown' approach
ByRichard Orange MALMÖ4 September 2020 • 12:58pm

Sweden's approach to the Covid-19 pandemic, which avoided a full lockdown,

has been incredibly controversial CREDIT: AFP
Sweden, whose Covid-19 death rate soared above its locked-down Scandinavian
neighbours at the peak of the pandemic, now has a case rate lower than those of
Denmark and Norway for the first time since March.

"Sweden has gone from being one of the countries with the most infection in
Europe, to one of those with the least infection in Europe, while many other
countries have seen a rather dramatic increase,” Anders Tegnell, the country's
state epidemiologist, said at a press conference earlier this week.
According to numbers submitted to the European Centre for Disease Prevention
and Contol (ECDC), Sweden registered an average of 12 new cases per million
people over the past week, compared to 18 for Denmark and 14 for Norway.

The number of deaths is currently averaging at two to three per day, down from
the peak of over a hundred a day it suffered in mid-April.

Stockholm, the centre of Sweden's pandemic in April and May, registered the

lowest number of new cases since March last week.
Denmark, meanwhile, registered 179 new cases on Friday, the highest daily
number for more than four months. 

Moreover, a test last week of 2,500 randomly selected people found that not one
had an active Covid-19 infection, compared to 0.9 per cent at the end of April
and 0.3 per cent at the end of May.

"We interpret this as meaning there is not currently a widespread infection

among people who do not have symptoms,"  Dr Tegnell's deputy at the Public
Health Agency of Sweden, Karin Tegmark Wisell, said as she announced the
results on Thursday. 

The improved outlook will come as a relief to advocates of Sweden's less

restrictive coronavirus strategy - who were forced onto the defensive in May as
the country for a period suffered the highest per capita death rate in the world.
Unlike Denmark and Norway, Sweden never instituted a lockdown, keeping
kindergartens, most schools, bars, restaurants, shops and offices open
throughout the pandemic. The Public Health Agency of Sweden, which sets the
strategy, judged that it was better to rely on voluntary social distancing and self-
isolation measures that could be kept in place for a long period.
"What we see now is that the sustainable policy might be slower in getting
results, but it will get results eventually," Dr Tegnell said. "And then we also
hope that the result will be more stable."

Sweden's decline in cases comes as many of the European countries who used
strict lockdowns to control the pandemic are now struggling to prevent cases
rising now they have been lifted.

At the same time, the growing protests seen across Europe against even those
few restrictions still in place will make reimposing lockdown measures
politically difficult.  

Speaking on Swedish television, Dr Tegnell said that he believed that

grandparents in Sweden, who have been advised to stay isolated and avoid close
contact with their grandchildren and children, should now be able to celebrate
Christmas with their families.

"I think its probably possible that we can celebrate a little more of a normal
Christmas than we would have thought otherwise," he said, although he advised
families to "think it through properly", and make sure they had "sensible
arrangements" for keeping distance, even going so far as to hire a more spacious
venue if necessary.  

Sweden has so far reported 5,832 deaths due to coronavirus, more than six
times as many as reported in Denmark (264) and Norway (626) combined. This
means Denmark and Norway would need to suffer a series of quite severe
outbreaks for their per capita death rate to begin to rival that of Sweden.

Sweden has so far reported 5,832 deaths due to coronavirus CREDIT: AFP

Sweden is also still carrying out fewer tests per capita than Denmark and
Norway, with an average of 1.2 per 1000 people at the end of last month,
compared to 2.2 in Norway and 5.9 in Denmark.

Søren Riis Paludan, a professor at Denmark's Aarhus University specialising in

viral infections, said he thought the recent rise in cases in Denmark had been
amplified by the country's high level of testing. It was too early, he added, to
judge the extent to which immunity was bringing advantages to Sweden. 

"If immunity is still in the lower percentages, then it will not help that much," he
said. "But compared to Norway and Denmark - where we have very few cases - it
may help. We can only wait and see whether the hard times that Sweden went
through will help them through the coming period."  

There are also still questions over Sweden's initial hope that a less restrictive
policy would give its population greater immunity to the virus faster will be
borne out. 

On Thursday, the Public Health Agency of Sweden published new studies of the
antibody levels among blood donors, which showed that the proportion
nationally with antibodies had slowly risen since March, reaching about seven
percent of the population by the end of June, and close to twelve percent in
Stockholm. 

In Rinkeby-Kista, the worst-hit Stockholm suburb, as many as 18 percent of the

530 16- to 69-year-olds who agreed to be tested had antibodies.

Dr Tegnell said that the difficulty in finding a representative group to test for
antibodies made judging immunity in the population "extremely complicated".

"The most important thing we see right now is the continued fall in the number
of infected, and part of the explanation for the continued fall that we see is fairly
certain to be that we have quite a large proportion of the population who are
immune," he said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/12/swedens-success-
shows-true-cost-arrogant-failed-establishment/
Sweden’s success shows the true cost of our arrogant, failed
establishment
Shocking incompetence has unnecessarily wiped billions of pounds from the UK
economy

ALLISTER HEATH12 August 2020 • 9:30pm

So now we know: Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment
catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-king, has
pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain,
a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and,
most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.

Our arrogant quangocrats and state “experts” should hang their heads in shame:
their reaction to coronavirus was one of the greatest public policy blunders in
modern history, more severe even than Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis,
Suez or the ERM fiasco. Millions will lose their jobs when furlough ends; tens of
thousands of small businesses are failing; schooling is in chaos, with A-level
grades all over the place; vast numbers are likely to die from untreated or
undetected illnesses; and we have seen the first exodus of foreigners in years,
with the labour market survey suggesting a decline in non-UK born adults.

Pandemics always come with large economic and social costs, for reasons of
altruism as well as of self-interest. The only way to contain the spread of a
deadly, contagious disease, in the absence of a cure or vaccine, is to social
distance; fear and panic inevitably kick in, as the public desperately seeks to
avoid catching the virus. A “voluntary” recession is almost guaranteed.

But if a drop in GDP is unavoidable, governments can influence its size and
scale. Politicians can react in one of three ways to a pandemic. They can do
nothing, and allow the disease to rip until herd immunity is reached. Quite
rightly, no government has pursued this policy, out of fear of mass deaths and
total social and economic collapse.

The second approach involves imposing proportionate restrictions to facilitate

social distancing, banning certain sorts of gatherings while encouraging and
informing the public. The Swedes pursued a version of this centrist strategy:
there was a fair bit of compulsion, but also a focus on retaining normal life and
keeping schools open. The virus was taken very seriously, but there was no
formal lockdown. Tegnell is one of the few genuine heroes of this crisis: he
identified the correct trade-offs.

The third option is the full-on statist approach, which imposes a legally binding
lockdown and shuts down society. Such a blunderbuss approach may be right
under certain circumstances – if a vaccine is imminent – or for some viruses –
for example, if we are ever hit with one that targets children and comes with a
much higher fatality rate – but the latest economic and mortality statistics
suggest this wasn’t so for Covid-19.

Almost all economists thought that Sweden’s economy would suffer hugely from
its idiosyncratic strategy. They were wrong. Sweden’s GDP fell by just 8.6 per
cent in the first half of the year, all in the second quarter, and its excess deaths
jumped 24 per cent. A big part of Sweden’s recession was caused by a slump in
demand for its exports from its fully locked-down neighbours. One could
speculate that had all countries pursued a Swedish-style strategy, the economic
hit could have been worth no more than 3-4 per cent of GDP. That could be seen
as the core cost of the virus under a sensible policy reaction.

By contrast, Britain’s economy slumped by 22.2 per cent in the first half of the
year, a performance almost three times as bad as Sweden’s, and its excess
deaths shot up by 45 per cent. Spain’s national income slumped even more (22.7
per cent), and France’s (down 18.9 per cent) and Italy’s (down 17.1 per cent)
slightly less, but all three also suffered far greater per capita excess deaths than
Sweden. The Swedes allowed the virus to spread in care homes, so if that major
failure had been fixed, their death rate could have been a lot lower still.

My guess is that only half of our first-half collapse in GDP would have happened
under a variant of the Swedish model. This means that the other half – some
£250 billion – was an unnecessary cost caused directly by the lockdown itself.
The decision to shut everything down, rather than to impose and promulgate
extensive social distancing, hygiene measures, ubiquitous PPE and testing,
means that we have wasted a quarter of a trillion pounds worth of GDP, as well
as needlessly ruined the education of millions of children and cancelled the
health care of hundreds of thousands of adults. I suspect that this immense,
unbearable additional cost saved very few additional lives, and that almost all of
the gains came from social distancing, not the lockdown.

Some of the lost GDP will be recovered; the intangible costs of lockdown – the
cancelled weddings and sporting events, the failed IVF cycles, the time not spent
with family – will remain with us forever.

This is a catastrophically high price tag for the British state’s systemic
incompetence, the uselessness of Public Health England, the deep, structural
failings of the NHS, the influence of modelers rather than proper scientists, the
complacency, the delusion, the refusal to acknowledge that the quality of the
British state and bureaucracy are abysmally poor.
Even more depressingly, a Swedish approach was always unrealistic in Britain.
Panic and hysteria were the only possible outcome when the failure of the
system became apparent. I’m not seeking to absolve Boris Johnson of blame,
but he would have found himself in an impossible situation had he sought to
ignore the official advice, and he inherited few, if any, working levers to pull.

So what now? How should Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, reboot the economy?
Sweden, once again, is a role model. After decades of socialist decline from the
early Seventies, the Swedes slashed the size of their state (though it remains too
big), liberalised their economy, reformed their schools along market principles
and scrapped their counter-productive wealth tax.
They learnt that the state cannot drive prosperity: only the private sector can do
that. The Tories used to understand this: Sunak needs to take inspiration from
Tegnell, and push for a Swedish, liberal approach to saving our economy,
trusting individual initiative, not resorting to a top down, Whitehall-knows-best
attitude. HS2 and green projects are not the answer. The Conservatives will only
survive their handling of Covid if they don’t also botch the recovery.

https://www.lavanguardia.com/opinion/20200906/483329103542/la-pregunta-que-da-
miedo.html

La pregunta que da miedo

 0

JOHN CARLIN

JOHN CARLIN

06/09/2020 00:07Actualizado a06/09/2020 00:54

El fetichismo por la mascarilla es lo que nos distingue aquí en España del

resto de Europa. Camino por las calles de Barcelona, o por los patios de la
Alhambra, o por el campo en la provincia de Cádiz y todo el mundo va
enmascarado. Solo muy de vez en cuando veo a un disidente. El jueves por la
tarde estaba esperando que cambiase el semáforo para cruzar la avenida
Diagonal cuando detecté a mi lado a un joven con la cara totalmente desnuda.
Le miré con rabia.
Unos días antes había estado comiendo con un amigo catalán que acababa de
estar en Suecia. En las calles nadie llevaba mascarillas, me dijo. Ni siquiera en
el transporte público. En el tren él era el único que se cubría la cara. La gente
lo miraba y pensaba: un rarito, un loco o, quizá, un dentista despistado.

Rabia también es lo que nos provocan los suecos en España, en este caso la
rabia de la envidia. Suecia es el país más libre de Europa; España, el que tiene
más restricciones en cuanto a la respuesta al virus, pero hoy las cifras suecas
de nuevos contagios están muy por debajo de las españolas; las muertes por
habitante son más bajas también, y la economía no se va a la mierda como la
nuestra.

Hubo un momento de esperanza a finales de junio cuando los herejes suecos,

tan repudiados casi en el resto de Europa como los luteranos por la Iglesia
católica en el siglo XVI, sufrieron durante unos días las peores cifras de
coronamortalidad del mundo. ¡Ja! pensamos. Están pagando el precio de sus
pecados.

No se confinaron en marzo y abril como nosotros. Casi todos los colegios

siguieron abiertos, la gente iba al trabajo, los bares estaban llenos. Los suecos
creían, como dicen en México, que nos estaban viendo la cara de pendejos.
Pues no. Se equivocaron—estaba clarísimo– y a lo grande. Leí artículos en
diarios no solo españoles sino británicos y estadounidenses que celebraban la
caída del orgullo sueco. Normal. Los escritores lo llevan diciendo desde
tiempos de la antigua Grecia: hay algo en la mala fortuna de los otros que nos
ocasiona placer. Y más si los otros se sienten superiores a nosotros.

El regocijo, como vemos, fue pasajero. Hoy el país con más ciudadanos
disfrazados de ladrones de bancos de Europa es el que más infecciones
padece. Se me ocurre la terrible posibilidad de que aquel chico que vi en el
semáforo no es un asesino, ni siquiera un irresponsable. Que quizá su único
demérito hay sido la falta de cortesía. Se estaba riendo del rebaño español,
como se ríen hoy los suecos—y los holandeses, y los daneses, y los
alemanes–.
Los nuevos contagios en Suecia, el país más

libre de Europa, están muy por debajo de los de

España
Oriol Malet (Oriol Malet)
El posible consuelo es que a la larga nosotros salgamos ganando, que cuando
se acabe la temporada viral estaremos mejor que los demás, más sanos, más
inmunes. Y que no solo los del norte volverán en manada a las playas
españolas, sino que querrán quedarse a vivir aquí. Lo que el brote sueco en
junio nos ayudó a entender fue que la liga es larga y no tiene mucho valor
sacar conclusiones en cuanto a la clasificación final cuando apenas hemos
jugado la mitad o la tercera parte de los partidos. Sí, vivieron su semana negra
los suecos, perdieron 8 a 2, pero han remontado. Los italianos, recordemos,
empezaron la temporada fatal, pero hoy van mucho mejor que los colistas
españoles, y sin verse obligados a usar mascarillas cuando salen al aire libre.

La diferencia con el fútbol es que, a diferencia del virus, podemos hacer

pronósticos más o menos informados. El Real Madrid seguro que será un serio
candidato para ganar el campeonato español, también el Liverpool en
Inglaterra. Casi lo único realmente importante que sabemos del virus que no
supimos a principios de año es que afecta muchísimo más a los viejos que a
los jóvenes. Pero ni idea de qué pasará de aquí en adelante. Ahora que dentro
de poco llega el otoño nos preocupa, con o sin motivo, la posibilidad de una
segunda ola igual a la que vivimos en el invierno. La ansiedad asola a toda
Europa, aunque quizá más a España, donde no solo somos más dóciles, sino –
da la impresión– más miedosos. Puede ser, claro, que con razón.

Sigue habiendo más preguntas que respuestas. ¿Por qué en Italia han vivido
un agosto mucho más tranquilo que en España cuando allí la densidad de
población es el doble de la de acá y tienen las mismas costumbres familiares,
gregarias y besuconas que nosotros? (No me digan que la juventud italiana es
más responsable que la española.) ¿Por qué tanta intranquilidad en España, e
intranquilidad respecto a visitar España en los países europeos, cuando
comparado con marzo se ha demostrado que ha habido un descenso
importante en la proporción entre infectados y muertos u hospitalizados?

Un ejemplo que podría ser más o menos aplicable a los demás países
europeos: en Inglaterra y Gales, en los siete días anteriores al 21 de agosto
murieron 9.631 personas, según las cifras oficiales. De estos, 138 murieron
oficialmente del coronavirus, un 1,4 por ciento del total. El 13,4 por ciento
murió durante este período de neumonía o de gripe normal.

¿Será entonces, como algunos proponen, que el virus ha mutado y pierde gas?
¿Será, como otros científicos creen, que la mayoría de los infectados no son
contagiosos porque aunque los tests salgan positivos las cantidades de
coronavirus que cargan en sus cuerpos son relativamente insignificantes? ¿O
será que ahora se están haciendo muchos más tests y resulta que el porcentaje
real de número de muertes o enfermedades graves por número de infectados
es bastante inferior al que se creía inicialmente?

¿Será verdad, entonces, lo que dijo esta semana un médico español de

reputación mundial, Pedro Cavadas? ¿Que “es más nocivo el resultado del mal
manejo de las medidas para combatirlo que el virus en sí mismo, ya que es de
baja mortalidad” y que “no ha sido el virus sino la respuesta lo que ha
provocado un empobrecimiento en España”?

Una cuestión tan incómoda como válida es si

ha habido una desproporción letal en la

respuesta al virus
La pregunta que sobrevuela el planeta, pero que pocos se atreven siquiera a
contemplar, es si ha habido una desproporción letal en la respuesta al virus, si
se hubiesen logrado los mismos resultados médicos con medidas, bueno, más
medidas y menos dañinas para la economía. Es una pregunta tan incómoda
como válida. Como lo es si el chico que vi sin mascarilla en el semáforo es no
un irresponsable, sino un valiente por atreverse implícitamente a cuestionar si
el emperador está desnudo. O si mi amigo el catalán que acaba de volver de
vacaciones en Suecia ha hecho bien en tomar la repentina decisión de sacar a
su hija mayor de España y mandarla al colegio en Estocolmo.

La respuesta: ni idea. Solo la sabremos al final de la temporada.