We're publishing a critique in the Daily Sceptic of the new paper in Nature by Neil Ferguson et al making the laughable claim that a lockdown in Sweden would have resulted in a two- to four-fold reduction in mortality.
“Nobody really knows what’s going on”, says the epidemiologist John Edmunds, commenting on the recent decline in cases. But there are at least nine previous examples where cases fell in the absence of restrictions.
Christopher Snowdon misfires repeatedly as he unloads another volley against lockdown sceptics. But does he have more in common with the sceptics he lampoons than he'd like to admit?
A reader of the Daily Sceptic has written a guest post comparing the U.K.'s enthusiastic, money-no-object embrace of a contact-tracing app with the much more cautious approach of Sweden. Result? No 'pingdemic' in Sweden.
A new paper claims that lockdowns do not cause more health harms than they prevent. But the harmful long-term effects of lockdown are yet to be quantified, so the authors have little basis for their conclusion.
A recent study determined that only 25 people aged under 18 died of COVID-19 in England up to February of this year. 76% had a serious underlying health condition. The survival rate in this age-group was 99.995%.
The prolific blogger Scott Alexander has written a long post about lockdowns. He claims that "Sweden comes out looking very bad". Yet Sweden saw age-adjusted excess mortality up to week 51 of just 1.7%.
A recent study found that keeping schools open had only a minor impact on the spread of COVID-19 in Sweden. The results suggest that "school closure is not an effective way to contain SARS-CoV-2".
Last year, the UK's age-standardised mortality rate returned to the level of 2008. People claim it would have risen far more in the absence of lockdowns. Yet Sweden's rate only returned to the level of 2015.
Sweden saw particularly low mortality in 2019, which may partly explain why its mortality rate rose in 2020. Taking the average of 2019 and 2020, Sweden had lower mortality than both Denmark and Finland.
