Daniel Hannan – The Daily Telegraph.co.uk April 25, 2020
Sweden has taken a much more relaxed approach to Coronavirus and in the process limited its economic impact. Click to enlarge
When foreign commentators discuss Sweden’s light-touch response to Covid-19, they tend to adopt an affronted tone. Which is, on the surface, surprising. You’d think everyone would be willing the Nordic country to succeed. After all, if Sweden can come through the epidemic without leaving a smoking crater where its economy used to be, there is hope for the rest of the world. So far, many signs appear encouraging. The disease seems to be following the same basic trajectory in Sweden as elsewhere.
Although we must wait for complete data, modelling by country’s authorities suggests that the infection rate in Stockholm peaked on 8 April. If so, we need to consider the implication, namely that, once basic hygiene and distancing measures are in place, tightening the screw further perhaps makes little difference. Which would be good news for the rest of us. Adopting Sweden’s more laissez-faire response might not restore our economies to full health, but it would at least allow us to bring them out of their induced comas.
Sweden is, broadly speaking, sticking to the approach that Britain followed in the week before the lockdown – the approach, indeed, that our strategists had wargamed in cooler-headed times. On 23 March, in an abrupt shift, Britain’s shops were closed and its people told to stay at home.
What had changed? Was it the hysterical media demand for a Continental-style crackdown? Or the furious reaction to people visiting beauty spots on Mothering Sunday? Or was it the Imperial College model, published a few days earlier, which warned of hundreds of thousands of deaths unless there was a mass quarantine? Whatever the explanation, the lockdown soon took on a momentum of its own, with every new death turned into an argument for tighter restrictions.
It is important to stress that Sweden is not being insouciant. Its people have been told to work from home if they can and to avoid unnecessary contact. Sports fixtures and meetings of more than 50 people are banned. Cafés can serve customers at tables, but not at the bar. Many Swedes, especially the elderly, are isolating themselves by choice. Personal spending, measured by bank card transactions, is down 30 per cent – though, by comparison, the fall in Norway is 66 per cent and in Finland 70 per cent.
“I was sceptical at first”, a friend in the southern county of Blekinge tells me. “But every day I feel more confident. Our public health people look like they made the right call”.
Most Swedes agree with her. According to the pollster Novus, 76 per cent support the public health agency.
“It’s bad news for us politically,” a Rightist MP admits. “The socialist government is up 21 points. But I am a patriot, and I want what is best for my country. I criticise ministers for not helping small businesses. But I don’t criticise them for sticking to the science when other countries gave in to populism.”
Sweden’s domestic consensus is not reflected internationally. “We fear that Sweden has picked the worst possible time to experiment with national chauvinism,” chides the Washington Post.
Donald Trump, justifying his own retreat from openness, claimed that Sweden “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.”
The Guardian now purses its lips when it mentions its erstwhile pin-up. Its recent headlines have included “Critics question Swedish approach as coronavirus death toll reaches 1,000,” and “Anger in Sweden as elderly pay price for coronavirus strategy”.
True, Sweden has had more deaths, proportionately, than its Nordic neighbours (though fewer than Spain, France or Britain. This is partly because the virus tragically found its way into care homes. But it is worth bearing in mind that the Swedish strategy always allowed for the possibility of a higher initial death rate.
Britain, remember, closed its economy in order to “squash the sombrero” – that is, to spread out the number of infections and, avoid crippling the NHS. The policy seems to have succeeded: there are more spare critical care beds available than before the pandemic started. The Swedish authorities calculated that their hospitals did not need a delay, and believe they have been vindicated. Sweden’s public health agency says that a third of Stockholm residents will have been infected by May 1. If having had the disease leaves a measure of immunity, Sweden will emerge from the crisis much earlier than the countries that are dragging things out.
That is still a big “if”. But public policy should rest on the principle of proportionality. It should not be up to me to prove that lockdowns definitely don’t work. The burden of proof lies on those who propose to remove our freedoms, not on defenders of the status quo ante.
When Britain’s closures were announced, they had a clear goal: to buy time for the NHS. It worked: we were spared the horror that overtook parts of Italy. The government believes that fatalities peaked on 8 April, suggesting that the rate of infection peaked around 18 March – in other words, when Britain was still pursuing a Swedish-style policy of maintaining distance and hand-washing.
So why not return to that policy? How did “flattening the curve” morph into “avoiding a second peak”? It is hard to see how ending a mass quarantine won’t lead to some uptick – just as it will lead to an uptick in common colds and traffic accidents. Our goal, surely, should be to ensure that this uptick does not overwhelm the system. In other words, we should aim to prevent people dying for want of medical attention, not to prevent all deaths – which, in the absence of a cure, is impossible.
One of the most dangerous human biases is the sunk costs fallacy, the idea that we have sacrificed too much to give up now. That notion can lead to disaster. Every belligerent nation in the First World War, for example, suffered more than any conceivable war aims could justify; but, once the slaughter had begun, it became its own justification. Agreeing terms would mean that all those young men had died in vain. Nothing less than total victory would honour them.
Listen to the phrases we hear at the 5pm daily briefings. We must not take our foot off the pedal, we keep being told, or everything we have achieved so far will have been for nothing. We have, as Matt Hancock put it on Thursday, “travelled too far together to go back now”.
But what if the harshness of a lockdown has little bearing on the overall rate of mortality? In Europe, France, Spain and Italy, all of which imposed heavy restrictions, have suffered worse than, say, Sweden. There may, of course, be other explanations: demographics, population density, cultural habits. But, to repeat, it is for proponents of unprecedented state coercion to prove their case, not for their opponents to prove a negative.
Could it be, as Isaac Ben-Israel argues, that the disease traces a similar arc however strict the lockdown? According to the Israeli scientist: “It turns out that a similar pattern – rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth week and declines from the eighth week – is common to all countries in which the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies.”
He may be wrong, obviously. But it will not do to respond by saying: “Let’s keep the lockdown going a little longer, just to be sure”. The default position should be to retain our freedoms unless there is solid evidence that abandoning them will make a significant difference. In any case, at £2.4 billion a day, time is a luxury we don’t have.
The resentment aimed at Sweden reflects an uneasy sense that the rest of us may be condemning ourselves to years of needless poverty. Sweden is like the control in an experiment. If it succeeds, the lockdown enthusiasts will never be able to claim that, but for their measures, things would have been even worse. No wonder they sound so tetchy.
I get a feeling that The Cabal might just be planning something nasty for Sweden which will turn this on its head. Could be wrong, will just have to wait and see!
There are really two conclusions to this article and all articles by msm journalists on Covid-19. Either they are all incredibly ignorant, lacking all prescience and critical thinking capability, or they’re lying through their teeth and KNOWINGLY deceiving the public.
There is no danger from Covid-19, well, there is to old people and those who have respiratory problems, but then so is flu and that’s precisely what Covid-19 is, another strain of flu. What this is, all about, is social conditioning. ‘Small steps’ as the saying goes. The government WILL NOT relinquish the ground gained in this and expect to see even more lockdowns, when the government talks about ‘another’ more deadly strain of Covid-19. People will ultimately change. Where we saw people stop smoking in bars, we will see people keep distances from others. We will see arguments ensue about “getting too close”. We will also see do-gooders tell other people to check their ‘distance’.
Again, as I’ve stated before. All of this, this social conditioning, was written in the book by Sir Bertrand Russell named ‘The Impact of Science on Society’ published in 1952, collected from a series of essays and speeches he gave.
The New World Order is here.
The Old World Order is rapidly being destroyed and once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. Another, oligarch, planned change of society is again happening, just as all previous changes, again, instituted by the ‘change’ agents. They have brought people to their knees, as their vassals and we’re moving into ‘willful’ slavery, where people will be happy to be so. As long as they have their phones, their technology, their Marvel and celebrity, they’re happy as a pig in sh*t.
People are no longer living. They’re just, simply, existing and hence all the zombie movies and video games of late. It’s simply mirroring society.
Sweden couldn’t lock down their country to deal with all the immigrant bombings, grenade attacks and no-go-zones, so how could they possibly deal with an invisible boogeyman ? They are achieving much better social engineering with the former, there was no need to ramp it up for cov-19. It was their turn to thumb their nose at the rest of the world. Divide and conquer, remember. Maybe they got a pass for being the first to have implanted chips, who knows ? Ours will be injected or ingested without consent, more than likely.
Please don’t say that if Sweden succeeds lockdowns will have been for nothing. All you are doing is helping to keep the psyop going. Oh sure it is a real flu virus affecting people to varying degrees, but Swedish numbers are not going to change unless people induce their central banking cartel owners to force their leaders to fudge them to protect the lockdowns elsewhere. They have done that in the US and it appears so in Italy as well, and therefore fudging in any vulnerable nation, like Sweden, is still a distinct possibility.
Also, it has been clearly established from even the initial Whuan numbers that in order to protect that tiny segment of the population with a significant risk of dying, like 10% chance if they got it, which was that “clearly defined” segment with significant or serious pre-morbidity conditions or diseases, of whom well over 90% in that segment were the very aged and mostly in nursing homes. It was clear from the start to all of our health care officials, our political leaders, etc. that in order to protect this “clearly defined” group you did not have to lock down anything in the public or the private sectors. You could do your testing all you wanted to and look till dooms day for the perfect numerator and the perfect denominator to try to get a mortality rate to compare to other years (which still they have not been able to do) and it will have nothing to do with the issue of closing everything down which is CLEARLY not necessary for nay risk group in this mess. If it is not a psyop then it is the biggest fiasco in history, and it should mean to every decent person on the planet that the time has come fire all those in control of things.
Also, it is not helpful for the authorities, being confronted with the above facts, to then scrounge around coming up with a fake death of child outside of that risk group as was done by a number of health officials in various nations with photos of the same child under different names. With any viral infection there are always going to be people outside the main risk category who will have more severe symptoms than others and who may even die. What this alleged pandemic should reveal to anyone with a shred of honesty is how very very dishonest are the people who run things in our nations, and how most people knowing that do not seem to mind in the least. The real disease goes a lot deeper than any flu virus.
I was going to wait until later for this, but speaking of what I regard as evil, this psyop is a globalist one and it is being mainly sustained by the international banking cartel mostly out of England together with their globalist minions. Many groups and stakeholders are involved. It is necessary for them to bring the world economy to a stall, making people first dependent on government handouts, until the IMF has to be brought in to save the day, which bank is run by that cartel and backs all the banks even in the US, There is great globalist method to the madness of lockdowns and killing the economy. The March crash was no accident. They plan everything years and years in advance. The cartel has always obtained power and control through debt rigging and dependency. Once we are totally at their mercy, our objections or say will matter in the least for the UN Agendas they have announced and have promised to impose.
Notice the historical pattern of the cartel ever since Waterloo – always deception and debt rigging all the way to giving the okay to 9/11 along with American and Israeli gangs, and now we have the pandemic. But some nations are breaking ranks and are resolved to make the best of the financial mess the cartel has given us with over 100 years of plundering.