From state-sponsored media, “Africa may have reached the pandemic’s holy grail”:
So to fill in the true picture, Jambo and his collaborators turned to another potential source of information: a repository of blood samples that had been collected from Malawians month after month by the national blood bank. And they checked how many of those samples had antibodies for the coronavirus. Their finding: By the start of Malawi’s third COVID-19 wave with the delta variant last summer, as much as 80% of the population had already been infected with some strain of the coronavirus.
Similar studies have been done in other African countries, including Kenya, Madagascar and South Africa, adds Jambo. “And practically in every place they’ve done this, the results are exactly the same” — very high prevalence of infection detected well before the arrival of the omicron variant.
(note that the NPR article is free of the hate speech term “herd immunity”)
By summer of 2021, in other words, 80 percent of Malawians had been infected by SARS-CoV-2. Is that because they were Church of Sweden “experimenters” who failed to close schools, wear masks, and lock down citizens? No. Children lost a year of education. Residents were subject to lockdowns (example). People were ordered to wear masks (VOA).
The central tenet of the Church of Sweden is that, at least for a non-island non-Chinese country, lockdowns, mask orders, school closures, and other government actions have a minimal effect on a respiratory virus.
Is it fair to say that Malawi and other African nations that flexed their public health technocratic muscles have proved Anders Tegnell and colleagues correct?
Some Malawians who escaped the lockdowns… (source)
Related:
A fascinating article that supports the left’s gradual opinion reversal theory. All of Sweden’s policies (which were universal prior to 2020) have been proven correct. Since Sweden is a white country with only 25% descended from immigrants (the figure will improve rapidly though), it cannot be cited as an example. So NPR searched for a Black country, whose policies cannot be contradicted.
Now the left can no longer ignore the facts — they would be racist if they did.
Sweden does have some restrictions, though. Did they elect a new Prime Minister to curb some corona-freedom?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2022/01/10/sweden-introduces-new-covid-19-rules-the-situation-requires-it/?sh=652bb128505e
It looks that way (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59473070). So the new Swedish PM, like the recently elected German Chancellor Scholz, needs a victory and “gets tough on COVID-19”.
Sadly the virus is unmoved by politics.
I find it a little strange that we don’t know, at all, what % of the US population has already had Covid or the vaccine. This is pretty important information.
Estimates I’ve seen range from 10% – 97%. How is it we don’t know this yet?
Every estimate I’ve seen so far seems to suffer from selection bias. For example, % of official tests (excludes home tests) which are positive. People who feel well or have gotten over a case of Covid don’t go in to get tested, right?