rage over the rights and wrongs of the Swedish approach to Covid-19 – whether the refusal to lock down helped stave off economic disaster, or whether it led to thousands of needless deaths; whether it helped Swedes gain a degree of herd immunity to Covid-19, or whether the country remains as exposed to a second wave of the disease as any other nation. The analysis in Östergötland covers a small sample of people but provides some enlightenment on the nature of the deaths recorded by Sweden during the epidemic. It confirms what has been evident elsewhere: many of those recorded as dying of the virus already had short life expectancies due to underlying health conditions, and a small percentage of those deaths had nothing to do with Covid at all – the death would have occurred anyway from another illness, whether the deceased had contracted the virus or not.
As I said at the start of all this, back in March: this isn't exactly the return of the Black Death. Though you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Meanwhile, despite it being abundantly clear that we're going to have to live with the coronavirus, vaccine or no, we hear from Devi Sridhar, the American public health professor currently Chair of Global Public health at Edinburgh, adviser to Nicola Sturgeon, and a leading figurehead of the “ZeroCovid” movement, that we should aim for the impossible: to eliminate the virus. How? More lockdown, more test and trace, more of the same….but stricter.
Opponents will say that the ZeroCovid goal ends up being fanatical, potentially consigning us to years of life-altering restrictions in pursuit of a goal we will never achieve, in response to a threat that doesn’t warrant it in the first place. Yesterday’s announcement by New Zealand that Covid-19 sufferers will be removed to a quarantine facility and Scotland’s drive to require masks in schools will only add to their concerns.
Well yes.
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