Journalists around the world love to condemn the Swedes for their refusal to attend the Orthodox Church of Shutdown while instead following the false prophet (former chief scientist of the European CDC). Example: “Graph shows Sweden’s coronavirus death toll rapidly increasing compared to other countries” (Independent). (When writing this kind of story, it is best to avoid comparing Sweden with shut-down Massachusetts!)
Today’s New York Times, however, gives us the data that are least likely to be subject to variation from recording: total deaths by country. From “28,000 Missing Deaths: Tracking the True Toll of the Coronavirus Crisis”:
Sweden actually seems to over-reported their COVID-19 deaths (see “Sweden may be recording COVID-19 deaths differently than other countries”), the only country in the survey to have done so.
The reporters and editors who worked on this story somehow neglect to mention that the country with the smallest increase in deaths is still running its schools, restaurants, offices, nightclubs, gyms, etc.! (Maybe this didn’t seem significant to them, despite the 12% versus 298% discrepancy. For True Believers in the Church of Shutdown, what Sweden is doing is merely a variant form of their own religion, just as Hinduism was for the Portuguese who spent an entire summer on the west coast of India in the late 15th century. So strong was their belief in Christianity that they believed Hindu temples to be churches (and Ganesha was Jesus with a big Jewish nose?). They attended Hindu religious rituals and believed that they were observing Christian practices.)
[How did New York City get to be such an outlier? A friend’s wife’s theory is that it was the three shopping days between when the governor announced a lockdown and when the lockdown actually began (Friday morning to Sunday at 8 pm). “I have never seen stores so crowded in Manhattan,” she explained. “People were panic-buying everything that they thought they might need over the next three months. Bed, Bath, and Beyond was so jammed you could barely move. Nobody was wearing a mask. I think most of the infections in New York City happened during those three days.”]
Related:
When a second wave rolls around with a more pathogenic variant, as my have happened with the 1918 flu, the Swedes, having achieved herd immunity, will be well-positioned relative to countries under lockdown with possibly large portions of the population still naive to the virus.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20060160v1
185 reported dead in Sweden today, about 40 yesterday. Before anyone makes a big thing out of this:
1 Yes, 185 is more than 40 – but the death-dates shows that it got to do with delay in reporting during the weekend.
2 Delays in reporting? Yes, Sweden count
A/deaths in elderly homes etc – not only deaths in hospitals and
B/ deaths as Covid-deaths if you had it at the time of death – ergo
C/ death in Sweden is Covid-related, even if you you just had hours left to live because of terminal cancer.
Furthermore. Post-mortals exams are also done and that way we always will have delays in the reporting.
This was a minuscle update from the dark, socialistic nation of Sweden, where the oppression of the individual and most human rights (everyone knows this – right?), still let us use our own minds in deciding if we want to go outdoors, go to restaurants or to the library. Freedom but with care for others…
Thanks, Mattias. From an American point of view it is kind of impressive that even a person’s death from COVID-19 isn’t considered important enough for a Swede to work on a Sunday 🙂
Philg:
Haha… Most Americans work more than the average Swede, that is probably true. But I think the delays during weekends – especially for elderly homes – is mostly a logistical problem. Doctors are on duty in hospitals, but the staff, during the weekends, do not have the time to fully examine victims (outside hospitals) during weekends…
“The true toll of the coronavirus crisis” combines mock scientific objectivity while relentlessly pushing the party / religion story line. The NYT is a paragon of modern journalism!
The infidels in Georgia are about to begin their re-opening effort/experiment. Since they’re going to be, in the words of Steve Wynn, “crossing this river one stone at a time” I wish them a lot of luck. Whatever happens in Georgia, it’s going to be watched closely by the rest of the nation and the world.
Erick Erickson just did an interview with Georgia governor Brian Kemp and is offering it for free. I think Erickson is very clear-eyed about it. The virus isn’t going away. Neither are the people whose livelihoods are being destroyed every day. We have to do what we can, and adapt.
https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/post-pandemic-society-an-interview
“Many of his critics have interpreted this as back to normal, but it isn’t really. It is a new normal, at least for now, that tries to accommodate the concerns about the virus spreading and the concerns about businesses going out of business.
He may be wrong. The experts he listens to may be wrong. But we should wish Georgia well and hope they are able to chart a course to accommodate a virus that is not going away with a people increasingly desperate to get back to work.”
Superbug: Congregants in the Swedish church don’t have to wish people in Georgia well! They can shut down or not shut down. As long as they don’t host mass face-licking gatherings, nothing that they do will have any effect on their health, at least with respect to COVID-19.
And by the way, even in New York, there are some infidels that are being allowed to reopen, or at least have their facilities available for patrons: golf courses, marinas, boat businesses. So if you want to golf or take your boat out for a cruise, New York will let you do it, subject to their revised restrictions.
https://www.newsday.com/news/health/coronavirus/gov-andrew-m-cuomo-marinas-golf-courses-reopen-1.43965126
“Studies indicate annual boating and related activities account for about $4.1 billion on Long Island, and park facilities that include golf courses generate about $1 billion annually. The industries combine to produce 50,000 to 100,000 jobs, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Trust for Public Land and the Rauch Foundation.”
The tabloids used to have to make up stuff like this. While the middle class are breathing each other’s recirculated air in high-rise apartment buildings, the rich will be “locked down” in their Hamptons mansions, heading out in their luxury imported SUVs mostly to use their yachts and golf clubs?
@philg: It gets better! If you’re fortunate enough to live in Bolinas, CA (or Telluride, CO, or Fisher Island, FL) you can get tested, because they’re buying enough for the entire town! Apparently there’s no shortage of free testing if you live close enough to Silicon Valley.
“Bolinas, a wealthy beach town in Marin County, near Silicon Valley, raised funds to test all 1,680 of its residents, in partnership with University of California-San Francisco (UCSF)…the tests are being offered for free.”
https://news.trust.org/item/20200420214536-n2156
The rationale? It’s all for science. Bolinas is “uniquely situated to teach the medical community about how the disease spreads…” so they’re pairing up with testing in the Mission District in San Francisco to keep the UCSF researchers busy. That works out nicely!
Circling back around to New York, shooting ranges are still closed (like Masssachusetts) AFAIK, so you can golf and cruise around in your boat on Long Island, but don’t try to take your pistol, rifle or shotgun to a safe place like a range and practice in a controlled environment. Much better, I guess some think, to practice in one’s back yard, or not at all.
There seems to be few comments in major main-stream media about what is happening to the shutdowns in Northern Europe.
Denmark and Norway have, partly referring to Swedish experiencse, opened up schools and many other functions in soceity. Denmark will soon accept crowds up to 500 people, instead of 10. Germany opened up some stores/shops yesterday.
Sweden, on the other hand, have experts that says that a short and regional shutdown (the extended Stockholm area) might be a tool if needed. But that is an option that will be used “only if the problem and virus will ‘get worse'”
Dr. Ioannidis has a good recent video on what the scientists know & deals with Sweden around the 1 hour mark — his point of view is that the jury is still out but that it appears Sweden is doing the right thing, at least for Sweden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwPqmLoZA4s
Finland reports 43 new deaths, which is high for being Finland. The major reason is a new way of counting deaths in the Helsinki/Nyland region (Nyland is the region in which Helsinki is located). Finland does not (right now) change their numbers weeks back – but from today they count deaths in elderly homes.
(Finland have two official languages, Finnish and Swedish. As a Swede it therefore easy to follow it’s news (and as as a Swede both Norwegian and Danish is possible to read.)
Just had my father-in-law die from COVID-19 last week in Stockholm. Just a week after contracting and then he was gone. Had pre-existing conditions, lived in a nursing home. My mother-in-law has also been diagnosed with COVID-19. Titles of articles like this, “Swedish refusing to die”, before were just stupid, now they are actually painful.
Wake up, people are dying. A lot more than before. Many people in nursing homes, who are not exactly out in about town. (My father-in-law had very limited mobility.) People that didn’t really have to die from this disease, who did not go skiing or go to fancy restaurants.
Jono: I’m sorry for your loss, and I have no doubt that your government epidemiologists are also sorry for your loss. But we should hope that their feelings won’t change their analysis. We pay epidemiologists to be dispassionate. Your epidemiologists concluded, sadly, that there was not too much that Western governments, including their own, would be able to do to change the outcome. Humans don’t win every fight with a virus, whether it be coronavirus or influenza.
(At least some epidemiologists in the UK and the U.S. came to a different conclusion, but, at least here in Massachusetts, where heroic efforts were made (from which our poor and less educated citizens may never recover), the death rate remains substantially higher than in Sweden, it appears that the Swedish epidemiologists were correct.)
(Also try to remember that keeping an economy running might just as easily save an older citizen’s life. As noted in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/04/20/stayhomesavelives-or-stayhometradelives-clinical-trials-for-new-drugs-are-on-hold/ , putting non-urgent care and clinical trials for improved therapies can kill people just as easily as coronavirus.)
There is so much focus on the death count. Is that really the best metric to evaluate a nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic? With a death rate of about 1% (varies between nations), the focus should be on the other 99% that are recovered/recovering. What is their health? Is the healthcare system providing the needed support for these people? Most of them were never tested for the coronavirus (since they were not admitted to the hospital). And if you are tested, but tested after the first 7 – 10 days of symptoms, the test result is most often “negative”. So, how is the Swedish healthcare system treating people that were never tested or tested giving “false negatives”? It is often cited by the media that 80% have mild symptoms. If you read some of the people posting on Reddit, their symptoms can hardly be characterized as “mild”. Many have been suffering for 4 – 7 weeks.
‘Closing borders is ridiculous’: the epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial coronavirus strategy
Anders Tegnell talks to Nature about the nation’s ‘trust-based’ approach to tackling the pandemic.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x
Nevertheless, Sweden did close borders four days ago to everyone not from EU/Nordics.
https://www.oresunddirekt.dk/en/news/partial-closure-of-the-swedish-borders-due-to-coronavirus-covid-19
Also, there is a rather weak “because” in his statement.
Having said that, he very well may be right in the narrow sense of “let the fittest survive”.
Patrick: Thanks for posting the Anders Tegnell interview. Tegnell says something surprising:
I thought people are most contagious just before they start showing symptoms. Vox:
If the Supreme will tolerate this comment (who knows, it might be corrected) I would like to
A Make an (biased?) observation.
B Correct the Supreme.
Before I continue I must, because of context, clarify, that I am Atheist.
A/ Why do I come across, if I let myself to generalize, so many “engineers” with such a high self esteem, that often loosely tread into other sciencies and think they KNOW it? Is the constant bashing of Wolowitz. as an engineer, in Big Bang Theory actually based on some facts? I wonder…
B When the Portuguese eventually invaded Goa, (about 1509-10) they had already established themselfes, to some extent, there. The MYTH about them wanting see “Christianity” so badly, is by many accounts not just a myth – since they saw it and were appalled by what they found.
The Biyapuhr Sultanate was Moslem and a somewhat tolerant soceity. Many people there, that were into trading is thought to be, according to some sources, Khazars (people with Greek and/or Jewish background from around the shores of the northern Black Sea). So called “Thomas-Christians” had spread from the Mediterranian the previous 1400 years into the Indian subcontinent. According to official (Indian) records and Jesuit priests (that hated the Thomasians as heretics) there were many churches all over the Indian westcoast at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese.
BTW – you are, which I hope you already realized, also wrong in the assumption about Hindus, which you mention…
So why give life to myths like that? Ganesha etc – what is that???
And I still haven’t got an answer on my question about Trumps statements about Sweden and at the same holding another position – AND fuelling protest against lockdowns…
Maybe it is better to rage against a 16 year old who wants us to recycle? Or at the commentators here that spells worse than you, but better than Trump? I can follow a blog like this in my mother-tongue, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Danish and MAYBE English…
How about you?
My source on the Portuguese in India is https://amzn.to/3eKAcnd Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, by Roger Crowley. I think I might have read it in hardcopy because I can’t find it on my Kindle. If memory serves, the reports of Christian observance were regarding specific rulers and specific temples in specific cities that are now known to be Hindu.
I bought a Kindle copy and found one of the passages, which quotes from original sources.
Landfall at Mombasa followed the pattern they had begun to establish. There was an initial welcome from the sultan. Two men, probably convicts chosen for the role, went ashore and were well received. For the first time they met “Christians,” “who showed them a paper, an object of their adoration, on which was a sketch of the Holy Ghost.” It was to prove one of the deepest, almost comical, early misconceptions of the Portuguese that Hindus, of whom they apparently had no knowledge, with their own images of gods, were Christians of a deviant sect. The Portuguese had come into the Indian Ocean expecting to find estranged Christians; these men with their unfamiliar anthropomorphic images neatly fitted a fixed preconception.
— This section is about Vasco da Gama’s first visit to Calicut.
Entering the city, they were guided to “a large church…as large as a monastery, all built of hewn stone and covered with tiles.” There is nothing in this account to suggest that the Hindu temple they were led into was not a church of some deviant Christian sect. Outside there were two pillars, probably lingams of the god Shiva. Inside, they saw a sanctuary chapel in the center with a bronze door; “within this sanctuary stood a small image which they said represented Our Lady.” It is impossible to know what was being lost in translation: probably from the Arabic of the Portuguese to an Arabic-speaking native, who then translated into Malayalam, the language of the Malabar Coast. Gama knelt down and prayed; the priests sprinkled holy water and “gave us some white earth, which the Christians of this country are in the habit of putting on”; Gama set his to one side. The diarist noticed, as they left, the saints on the walls, wearing crowns and “painted variously, with teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms.”
… Before them sat a man they believed to be the Christian king they had come twelve thousand miles to find.
Crowley, Roger. Conquerors (p. 64). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
How nice!
I will keep this as short as I can.
1 Still no answer about your views about Trumps double-talk. (I was wrong calling him an imbecile, since he clearly – wanting people to inject themselfes with deadly chemicals and using bursts of light – is a lunatic… was way to modest.)
2 To use one source – more-so a semi-popular publication – in a field that I have studied for years, to prove a point, is by any standards close to stupidity in any area of science. IF Crawley were, for example, the Steven Hawking of history (which he is not) I, by the same logic as you are using, would be able to both claim to understand and explain for others, Black holes and parts of String-Theory, just as a result of reading Hawkings popular books. I would, by your view, be able to even contradict some of the best brains in that area…
By that statement I am not claiming “a best brain” in any area – but I know the science in this field (and it covers many areas of research) and I have studied/researched A/ loads of papers covering the question and B/ some “original” documents in Portuguese and Latin (but all transcribed in various extent). I have several full “exams” according to European standards and have spent more than 30 years in research/tutoring/educating.
Ergo. Your rant about this and the matter concerning the Portuguese arriving in India is not up to scientific standards. It is, as you Americans call it in other words, faeces from a meatproduct…
Just because a popular concept is repeated over and over again – well it must not be the truth.
But “truth” seems ALSO to be a very scary concept today. We were all used to leaders in different non-democratic nations, like Russia, China, Iran, North-Korea etc to lie. But now we got an idiot (correctly spelled, right?) in the White House doing the same… THAT is scary for the free world…
Sweden has more than twice the COVID-19 deaths of Finland, Norway and Denmark combined. These neighbors have stricter lock-down in place while having otherwise similar culture and population density. Numbers according to CSSE COVID-19 dashboard.
Janne: The main point of the NYT article cited in the original post is that we shouldn’t rely on the officially reported numbers! Even if we could, the Swedish epidemiology priesthood would say that Sweden has had a higher death rate over the first two months of this pandemic. Denmark cracked and reopened its schools this week (they are not as virtuous as we are here in Massachusetts, where we’ll be shut down until September). The Danes also opened tattoo parlors, hair salons, etc. So the Swedes would say that the Danes, now that they’re emerging from their bunkers, will catch up to whatever infection rate they were going to have with only the most basic interventions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/04/17/europes-comeback-tracker-you-can-now-get-a-tattoo-in-denmark-and-buy-books-in-italy-as-countries-gradually-reopen/#5f927bc5601f
talks about how you can now get the Chinese characters for “I am a white idiot” inked onto your skin while in Copenhagen.