WHO lauds Sweden as a ‘model’ going forward

Yep. It is becoming increasingly clear that the U.S. response was very badly bungled.

Bungling is basically the status quo for government. Government is all about force and when you have a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail.

 

I hope so, but even if the economy bounces back the ginormous increase in debt will hamper the nation for decades to come. It was highly irresponsible for the federal government to run deficits of more than a trillion dollars a year, before the virus panic hit, when the economy was growing.

 

The GDP numbers for this quarter are going to be like haven't been seen since the Great Depression but I think the US economy is resilient and will bounce right back - still trillions and trillions of dollars in debt, of course.

And with Sweden, hindsight is 20/20, as WHO has to know. I thought it was odd that Japan had such few cases of this, being a small island loaded with people on top of each other in the cities - they followed some of the Chinese model but not as lax as Sweden.

 

WHO is so communist.

 

Your title is correct. Sweden is a model for going forward. However if you look at Dr Ryan’s comments it is not a model to follow for what has happened so far.

The role of public trust in managing COVID-19: WHO briefing

As countries that successfully controlled the spread of covid19 come out if lockdowns, they will need to implement something like what Sweden is doing.

However, Sweden’s approach is rightly criticized for allowing the first wave there to be much worse than it would have been if they had followed their neighbours. And their economy is still projected to suffer similarly to the rest of Europe.

Monetary policy April 2020: The Riksbank is supporting an economy in crisis

Meanwhile, Sweden has the 7th most deaths per million population in the world if you exclude small island nations and city states just after Belgium, Spain, Italy, UK, France and the Netherlands at 256 per million. This is 4-6 times it’s similar neighboring countries of Denmark, Norway and Finland.

Their figures are probably severely undercounted because they are not testing people in the community and really only testing health care/aged care workers and hospitalized patients.

COVID-19 - The Public Health Agency of Sweden

 

Japan doesn't care for foreigners and doesn't tolerate immigration so they helped themselves that way.

We need N95 masks for everyone as China will unleash another virus one day.

 

Sweden made a conscious decision to have more deaths up front for less deaths later as their method was sustainable from the start. Even all this lockdown mess imposed on us in the United States wasn’t so much to limit the number of deaths overall but to spread them out so that hospitals would not be overworked.

As usual, government fouled up the U.S. response.

 

I was told by a nurse that the N95 is awful to wear and hard to breath while wearing.

 

Yep. But fear and panic don’t usually lead to good decision making and the outcomes reflect that.

 

The WHO is not saying the Sweden’s approach up until now was the right one. It is saying that Sweden’s approach is a potential model for those coming out of lockdowns for what their response going forward might look like.

I would say from the data shows that Sweden’s approach was clearly the wrong approach. Especially since we don’t know if all those infected people will be immune. Their approach is very unlikely to reduce the total number of deaths compared to their neighbours and also appears to have no improvement to their economy compared to its neighbours according to their own central bank projections. It looks like instead of taking the economic hit early to potentially save lives in the future, they let people die early based on uncertain theory that still has no evidence of being true in order to delay an inevitable economic recession.

 

Will probably be at least 2 years before a full accounting of the various paths taken will be available.

 

That was for KenH

Before you create another strawman to attack, I never said no one will be immune. Just that immunity is still an unknown.

What we do know about natural immunity from other diseases is that it often corresponds to severity of illness. So people who recover from mild illnesses often do not develop a very strong or long lasting immune response while people who recover from a severe illness are much more likely to develop a good long lasting immunity.

 

If the WHO is "lauding" Sweden's model, the most logical response according to WHO's incompetence concerning overseeing this matter would be to "condemn" such a model.

 

This is an important point. Without the guarantee of a vaccine ever working, it is even more important that we control the rate of infection. It is very possible that we will still be battling covid19 for many years and slowing it down so that we have as much time as possible to research treatment options is then even more important.

Lockdowns are one of the few tools left to control the rate of infection when our other measures are insufficient. That occurs when a highly infectious disease is not taken seriously enough by a government early on and community spread is much faster than traditional public health measures (testing, isolating cases, contact tracing and social distancing) can handle.

 

Everyone says that but the N95 also is lifesaving.