While Minnesota continues its forlorn efforts to suppress the irrepressible CV-19, it is enduring what appears to be a renewed significant case surge, in which their is substantial representation by the fully vaxed population. Meanwhile, much of Europe, despite also being very heavily vaxed, is also seeing cases spike. But one country isn’t. You can probably imagine which country that is–Sweden. I strongly suspect that the policy of letting the virus run more and getting people vaccinated has that country at a point where most of the population has some form of immunity and transmission is slow, and infections don’t lead to serious illness. Great place to be, very smart long-run policy. The closest we have in the US is Florida which similarly appears done with the epidemic. The recent summer wave in the state coupled with high vaccination has led to one of the lowest if not the lowest per capita case rate in the country. This Zero Hedge post has more on the European surge. (ZH Column)
A Visual Representation of the Benefits of Rational Epidemic Policy
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The Healthy Skeptic is a website about the health care system, and is written by Kevin Roche, who has many years of experience working in the health industry. Mr. Roche is available to assist health care companies through consulting arrangements through Roche Consulting, LLC and may be reached at khroche@healthy-skeptic.com.
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“…and getting people vaccinated…”
EXPLAIN THIS PLEASE.
Does Sweden have materially higher vaccination rates than its neighbours or other European countries? Did Sweden achieve these rates materially faster than those other countries?
Support this with data. Because my understanding was they did not. And if they did not, then vaccination policy is unlikely to have any explanatory power over the difference between Sweden and any other country. Sw
Here are some rates for “administered vaccine doses per 100 people” and daily new cases per 100K people in some selected countries:
– Sweden: 145.58 doses/100, 71.61 new daily cases/100K, https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/coronavirus-vaccination-rate
– Denmark: 152.67 doses/100, 436.63 new daily cases/100K, https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/coronavirus-vaccination-rate
– Belgium: 145.65 doses/100, 862.01 new daily cases/100K, https://tradingeconomics.com/belgium/coronavirus-vaccination-rate
– United Kingdom: 157.10 doses/100, 494.01 new daily cases/100K, https://tradingeconomics.com/israel/coronavirus-vaccination-rate
– Israel: 172.27 doses/100, 52.39 new daily cases/100K (but only because it is coming out of its worst-ever case outbreak) https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/coronavirus-vaccination-rate
All per capita case numbers lifted from https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases, which is using Johns Hopkins data.
The thing that makes Sweden an outlier in policy is purely the rational “let ‘er rip” no lockdowns, no mandates policy. Sweden is not IN ANY WAY an outlier on vaccinations and in any event there’s no obvious correlation between vaccination rates and case rates. No good correlation, anyway. Indeed if the vaccines do result in a temporary case lull (Berenson’s happy vaccine valley) like Israel experienced in March, then it’s possible that Sweden is in for a nasty surprise later this winter, unless the widespread natural immunity induced by the rational “let ‘er rip” policy is able to overcome the anti-effect from the vaccines.
There’s no reason to say that vaccines positively contribute to the situation in Sweden looking good if higher vaccination rates in other countries have not produced the same effect. We have to assume the difference with Sweden comes ONLY from natural immunity. And again, let’s keep watching. Winter is coming.
Also, far be it for me to knock Ron DeSantis as he has run a very reasonable policy in the state, but is Florida really “done with” COVID? How do you know this? Or is there actually a seasonality to it? Like as in here: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F389bf6f1-cebc-4c6c-b70f-09432b48e372_1215x975.png
With discussion here: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/seasonal-expression-not-vaccine-prevalence
If there’s a seasonality to it, then isn’t it likely that COVID will come back in Florida once it comes back into season?
From what I read in the book “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe” by Niall Ferguson during the 1957 pandemic life went on normally in America. The medical world sent out information for home treatment to curb hospital stays and they worked on a vaccine but not a lot of action was taken to suppress the virus. Of special interest the president at the time also dealt with the Spanish Flu at an Army Camp near Gettysburg earlier in his life.
That Sweden info is great and I hope somewhere besides zero hedge gets it out to the public. I realize zero hedge has some good stuff (like this story apparently) but unfortunately they also spew a ton of absolute garbage.
Thanks for planting seeds of truth. People may rail at the story but later realize the nuggets.