In a count not seen since an infamous famine in 1869.
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Norway and Denmark drop mutual border controls – but exclude Sweden.
Norway and Denmark are to drop border controls between the two countries but have excluded their Scandinavian neighbor Sweden, which has taken a lighter-touch approach to the Covid-19 pandemic and suffered a far higher death toll.
The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, told a news conference in Copenhagen on Friday that restrictions on Norwegian nationals entering the country, as well as on citizens of Iceland and Germany,
would be lifted from 15 June.
“Denmark and Sweden have a close relationship and that will continue in the future,” Frederiksen said.
There was “a strong desire to find a solution with our neighbor, Sweden”, she added, but Denmark and Sweden “are in different places when it comes to the coronavirus, and this affects what we can decide on the border”.
Norway’s prime minister, Erna Solberg, said at a simultaneous Oslo event that Norway would
admit only Danish citizens for now, but that her government was talking to Sweden,
Finland and Iceland about including them at a later date.
Solberg said she had twice spoken to the Swedish prime minister, Stefan Löfven, but had entered a bilateral agreement with Denmark “because we have a similar infection situation …
The infection situation looks different in Sweden”.
While her objective was “a common Nordic regulatory framework”, she said,
“it is going to be hardest to find a solution for Sweden. But there are regions in Sweden with a low level of infection where we might be able to find a solution.”
The decision by Denmark and Norway to exclude Sweden from an early Nordic
“travel bubble” is a blow to Stockholm. The Swedish foreign minister, Ann Linde,
said this week that such a move would be “a political decision” and not justifiable on health grounds.
Dr. Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the main architect of the country’s coronavirus strategy, said dialogue between the Nordic neighbors was “continuous.
We can certainly find good solutions to this.”
Sweden’s Coronavirus Experiment: What you need to know?
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sweden&FORM=HDRSC3
An MP from the Swedish border city of Malmö, Niels Paarup-Petersen, told the Local website
he had “hoped that we wouldn’t be treated differently. The numbers are a bit different on a national level,
but I’d hoped they’d look more at a regional level.”
Sweden has closed schools for the over-16s and banned gatherings of more than 50, but has only asked –
rather than ordered – people to avoid non-essential travel and not go out if they are elderly or ill.
Shops, restaurants and gyms have remained open.
Polls show a large majority of Swedes support and have generally complied with the government’s
less coercive strategy, which starkly contrasts with the mandatory lockdowns in many countries,
including Norway and Denmark.
But the policy, which Dr. Tegnell has said aimed to slow the spread of the virus enough for health services to cope, has been heavily criticized by some Swedish experts, and the country has recorded a death toll many times higher than its neighbors’.
Sweden’s 4,350 deaths represent a toll of 419 per million inhabitants, compared with 44 in Norway,
98 in Denmark and 57 in Finland. Its per million tally is, however, lower than the corresponding figures
of 548, 570 and 580 in Italy, the UK and Spain.
Frederiksen, who placed Denmark in strict lockdown as early as 11 March, said she hoped solutions might be found to allow travel between Denmark and certain Swedish regions. A decision on travel from other countries in Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone would be taken later, she said.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
Source: Lockdowns Never Again: Sweden Was Right, and We Were Wrong
Sweden, which has stood out among European countries for its low-key approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, has recorded its highest tally of deaths in the first half of 2020 for 150 years, the Statistics Office said. Covid-19 claimed about 4,500 lives in the period to the end of June – a number that has now risen to 5,800 – a much higher percentage of the population than in other Nordic nations, though lower than in some others, including Britain and Spain.
In total, 51,405 Swedes died in the six-month period, a higher number than in any year since 1869,
when 55,431 people died, partly as a result of a famine. The population of Sweden was about 4.1 million then,
compared with 10.3 million now.
Covid-19 meant that deaths were about 10% higher than the average for the period over the last five years,
the office said on Wednesday. In April the number of deaths was almost 40% higher than average due
to a surge in Covid-19 related fatalities.
Sweden has taken a different approach to most European countries in dealing with the pandemic,
relying to a greater extent on voluntary measures focused on social distancing & opting against a strict lockdown. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/25/why-do-female-leaders-seem-to-be-more-successful-at-managing-the-coronavirus-crisis Most schools have remained open and many businesses
have continued to operate to some extent, meaning the economy has fared better than many others.
However, the death toll has been higher than in its Nordic neighbors, which opted for tougher lockdown measures. Norway, with about half Sweden’s population, has had only about 260 Covid-19 deaths in total.
The economy of Finland also outperformed its larger neighbor in the second quarter,
despite a tougher lockdown. Finland’s gross domestic product shrank by 5% against an
8.6% contraction in Sweden from the previous three-month period.
Swedes rapidly losing trust in Covid-19 strategy, poll finds!!!
Naysayers may point to Sweden’s mortality rate to discount its success.
But the virus has taken nearly 6,000 people in a country of 10 million, and one that tallies about 100,000 annual deaths each year. Given that 70 percent of those who died with COVID were over the age of 80 and very unhealthy, he argues, “quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway,” making COVID a “mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.”
And while Sweden will likely continue to see deaths from COVID, it will likely never see anything close to those numbers again.
The large number of deaths can be clearly attributed to a “complete lack of any immunity”
to this novel coronavirus. A few months ago, Dr. Rushworth said, “practically everyone who was tested had COVID,” even if the presenting symptom was a “nose bleed” or “stomach pain.”
Today, he reports that he hasn’t seen a COVID patient in over a month, and even when he tests patients with fever or cough, the “tests invariably come back as negative.”
To be clear, Sweden’s economy is wide open. No one is social distancing or wearing a ridiculous mask.
Life is back to normal, and the infection rate is still falling.
It’s pretty safe to say the population in Sweden has now built some level of immunity to the virus,
and all signs indeed point to the pandemic being over in Sweden.
To answer that, we’ll look to Alex Berenson, who is nothing short of a national hero for his honest reporting throughout the pandemic. It often serves as a counterbalance to the panic porn preferred by the media, and I could not more highly recommend following his wonderful Twitter feed.
In Part 2 of his book series, Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and Lockdowns, he reminds his readers that lockdowns, complete with the economic disruption and social distancing required, aren’t some tried and true means of slowing the spread of a virus in a pandemic.
“The idea of using lockdowns to slow epidemics took off in 2006,” Berenson writes.
In the aftermath of an avian flu scare in 2005, President Bush “asked for research on slowing epidemics.”
I wish what follows were a joke or some conspiracy theory, but it’s not. The idea was the brainchild of
the 14-year-old daughter of a computer scientist named Robert Glass. She “created a model of the way social distancing might slow the spread of the flu,” and this was expanded upon by her father in a “simulation “proving” lockdowns could reduce an influenza epidemic in a hypothetical
town of 10,000 people by 90 percent.
In 2007, predicated upon the strength of the simulated results, the CDC issued new guidance to
“reduce transmission, from “voluntary isolation of ill adults” to “reducing density in public transit.”
This was the moment, according to the New York Times, when Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions, or NPIs, became “official US policy,” thus presenting the 2020 lockdowns as just an example of long-standing procedures, and totally understandable policymaking.
Crucially, [the 2007 CDC paper] also contained a “Pandemic Severity Index” that included five categories.
On the low end, Category 1 represented a normal flu season, which might kill up to 90,000 Americans.
On the high end, a Category 5 pandemic, like the Spanish flu, would kill at least 1.8 million Americans.
Based on the CDC’s scale, Sars-Cov-2 almost certainly should be classified as a Category 2 epidemic,
meaning it will cause between 90,000 and 450,000 deaths.
For an epidemic like that, the CDC merely said governments should consider school closures of less than four weeks, along with moderate efforts to reduce contacts among adults, such as telecommuting.
The prospect of closing all retail stores or offices is not even mentioned in the paper, not even for the most severe epidemics (emphasis added.) In short, it was a high school sophomore who initially dreamed up the modern notion of lockdowns and social distancing. Her computer scientist father then created a compelling simulation involving 10,000 hypothetical people enduring a pandemic, and the CDC applied the hypothesis by creating some new interventions, though even those interventions certainly did not include recommendations for an economic lockdown, stay-at-home orders, or mask mandates.
In other words, economic and social lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and mask mandates had all only worked in theory before 2020 but had never been shown to be effective in practice. And we are enduring all of this because of a belief that it is theoretically possible to achieve what Sweden has achieved by
enduring none of it in reality.
Very likely, America will join Sweden in building immunities and being past COVID-19 sometime in the coming months, though we will have paid a much, much higher price to have achieved that goal. We should all hope and pray that Americans will look back to the public policy reaction to this pandemic and recognize it as the colossal mistake that it has been. And, if we are wise, we will commit to never, ever doing anything like it again.
Basically, Sweden did the exact opposite of what most Americans tragically still believe are the necessary requirements to reach the outcome that Sweden has achieved — In life, we encounter things that may work in theory but not in practice. Communism is famously one of those things. Time travel is another.
With any luck, Americans will soon come to realize that strict social distancing, economic lockdowns,
and mask-wearing all belong in that category of supposedly sound ideas that simply don’t work in reality.
For evidence, let’s look to Sweden.
As Dr. Sebastian Rushworth, an E.R. doctor at a hospital in Stockholm, writes on his blog,
“COVID is over in Sweden. He argues what should now be obvious to any rational, thinking person,
which is that “the size of the response in most of the world (not including Sweden)
has been totally disproportionate to the threat.”
People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected anymore.”
Unlike so many other countries, “Sweden never went into complete lockdown,”
Dr. Rushworth writes. Non-essential businesses remained open, people continued frequenting restaurants,
the kids stayed in school, and “very few people bothered with face masks.”
What is the obvious takeaway from this? Perhaps Dr. Rushworth sums it up best, saying he is
“willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up.
If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place.”
In other words, all of the lockdowns will have been meaningless.
But we were assured that the lockdowns, the distancing, the masks, all of it would absolutely work,
because science (Science!) suggested that these are the only things that could work.
But how strong was the scientific evidence to support our government making us lab rats in its experimental and unprecedentedly oppressive response to this virus.
Are female leaders more successful at managing the coronavirus crisis?
How women have led the way in the coronavirus crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg0dYHCHsaQ