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Sebastian Rushworth explains at Spectator USA how “Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with.” He writes (abridged):
In total COVID has killed under 6,000 people in a country of 10 million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. That makes COVID a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.
That is why it is nonsensical to compare COVID to other major pandemics, like the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. COVID will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies, stopped children going to school, and made large portions of their population unemployed in order to deal with this disease.
Sweden ripped the metaphorical band-aid off quickly and got the epidemic over and done with in a short amount of time, while the rest of the world has chosen to try to peel the band-aid off slowly
COVID has at present killed less than 6,000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. In an average year 700 people die of influenza in Sweden. Does that mean COVID is 10 times worse than influenza? No, because influenza has been around for centuries while COVID is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated. So it is quite possible, or in fact likely, that the case fatality rate for COVID is the same as for influenza, or only slightly higher, and that the entire difference we have seen is due to the complete lack of any immunity in the population at the start of this pandemic.
out with just one infected person in the country, then you will reach a point where several million are infected in just four months. If only 6,000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza.
Sebastian Rushworth
Read more here.
