We Need to Talk About Sweden

 Tue 10:08 am +01:00, 8 Dec 2020  

posted by Weaver

The country which bucked the trend against the coercive measures we have come to loathe has been subject to an increasing amount of unfavourable coverage suggesting that its recent change of tack – bringing in greater restrictions – are proof of abject failure. The Daily Mail reports that “lockdowns loom” for the country:

Lockdown is finally looming in Sweden with coronavirus infection rates now more than double that of Britain, Germany or Spain and its death rate once again the highest among Nordic nations.

Some parts of Sweden have infection rates similar to the worst hotspots in Europe, and cases have yet to start falling after the second wave as they have in Britain, France and many other European countries.

After Sweden’s death rate fell to similar levels to Denmark, Norway and Finland over the summer, it is now once again the highest of the four, with 1,000 new deaths recorded in the last month.

After insisting that ‘cases’ are very high, and making invidious comparisons with Sweden’s Nordic neighbours , the article continues:

Sweden’s current average is 55 deaths per day, up from 12 only a month ago although still lower than the peak of 107 at the height of the crisis in April.

When adjusted for population, Sweden’s overall death rate is no worse than in the major countries of Western Europe such as Britain and France.

 

Not much is made of that last point, even though it essentially admits that there’s no correlation between economic shutdowns and death rates across Europe.

Ivor Cummins’s latest video update, “The Last Word on Sweden Viral Issue – Understanding the Reality“, digs deeper into the data. Despite avoiding draconian measures so far, the statistics still show nothing particularly remarkable going on in Swedish mortality rates:

Cummins also addresses the current plateau in ICU admissions as well as the ‘dry-tinder’ explanation for some of the variation in Nordic death rates – essentially those countries that suffered relatively low excess mortality during the last one or two winters were hit harder this time.

Kathy Gyngell at Conservative Woman today implored her readers to watch Ivor’s video, adding:

Ivor Cummins has produced another of his crystal-clear videos on lockdown, the science and the critics. This one… certainly ought to be the last word on evidence that neither lockdown nor testing mitigate Covid mortality rates.

That doesn’t mean it should be parked. The argument with the politicians is far from being won. It needs presenting and re-presenting until the whole country is made aware that the lockdown policies of Britain and many other Western countries have been based on a false premise. It is even more relevant now that we are being told the double lie that a vaccine is the key to ending the lockdown and the only way that we can return to a semblance of normality.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. A voluntary vaccine, if and when proved safe, might be a good thing. A vaccine in which vast swathes of the population understandably lack confidence, as the deus ex machina solution to the already misguided lockdown policy, is not. In answer to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times, if you think a rushed-through vaccine about which there are credible doubts has vindicated the Government’s strategy, it is you who are not examining the evidence dispassionately. It is wishful thinking at best. And the idea that it might be made a condition of freedom surely should give you, once an open-minded critic of the intrusive and ever more authoritarian state, some serious doubts.

For confirmation that Sweden’s current death rate is nothing out of the ordinary, see Statista’s total mortality graph for the country for the last 10 years. It only runs up to November 27th of this year so far, but it seems implausible that in the remaining month and four days of this year it is likely to climb above normal levels.

Can you spot the pandemic?

Similarly, the Euromomo data show no excess deaths outside the initial peak, up to the end of November, with the rate for large parts of the year actually running near the lower end of the ‘normal’ range, and now on a downward curve, despite much more lax restrictions than most European countries even now.