If you were to believe the mainstream media and the bootlickers of the Covid dictators, Sweden is an irresponsible mire of death and disease.
Sweden has steadfastly resisted bringing down the Covid jackboot. For that, it has been painted as crazy and irresponsible. We’re lectured that Sweden has reaped the whirlwind of not slavishly following the Chinese Communist Party model of placing its entire population under virtual house arrest.
Except that the facts tell a very different story.
Sweden, which has shunned the strict lockdowns that have choked much of the global economy, emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries, an analysis of official data sources showed.
Unlike the nascent authoritarians nearly everywhere else, Sweden chose to take the shocking — to “public health” Little Hitler bureaucrats — policy of trusting its own people to manage their health risks for themselves.
While many Europeans have accepted lockdowns as a last resort given the failure to get the pandemic under control […] Sweden, meanwhile, has mostly relied on voluntary measures focused on social distancing, good hygiene and targeted rules that have kept schools, restaurants and shops largely open – an approach that has sharply polarised Swedes but spared the economy from much of the hit suffered elsewhere in Europe.
And highlighted, yet again, the essential uselessness of lockdowns and mask mandates.
Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.
Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden. However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.
We’ll deal with the misleading comparison to Sweden’s “Nordic neighbours” in a moment, but the fact remains that, if lockdowns and mask mandates really are as effective as proponents claim, Sweden’s excess mortality should have soared beyond, for example, Britain and France.
Sweden’s Chief Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, a largely unknown figure before the pandemic who became internationally known as the figurehead of the Swedish response, told Reuters he believed the data raised doubts about the use of lockdowns.
“I think people will probably think very carefully about these total shutdowns, how good they really were,” he said.
Even compared to isolated Australia, Sweden’s performance is notable. Australia’s excess mortality for 2020 is calculated at 5.6%. Yet Australia is hailed as one of the world’s best performers in the Wuhan pandemic, while Sweden is supposedly “Covid ravaged”.
Who knew that the difference between “world leading” and “Covid ravaged” is a mere 2.1%?
As for that comparison to “Nordic neighbours”…
Sweden’s proportion of people aged over 80 was 5.1% at the start of 2019, lower than the EU average of 5.8% but on par with United Kingdom and higher than Norway and Denmark.
So Sweden, with a higher percentage of people over 80, was always going to do slightly worse than its “Nordic neighbours” when it came to a disease which overwhelmingly kills the very old.
Sweden’s strategy has been heavily criticised by some at home and abroad for being reckless and not enough to protect vulnerable groups from the disease.
However, 43% of Swedes have high or very high confidence in how the pandemic is being handled, while 30% have low or very low confidence, according to a recent survey.
Reuters
So while the lockdown fanatics are dealing with a tsunami of mental health issues, growing civil unrest and economic havoc caused by lockdowns, Sweden is happily getting on with life without lockdowns or masks — and with little sign of being “Covid ravaged”.
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