Saturday, August 08, 2020

Hmm …

… How bad is covid really? (A Swedish doctor’s perspective) – Sebastian Rushworth M.D.  (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… after a few months, all the covid patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more. If we assume around 0.5 percent of those infected die (which I think is very generous, more on that later), then that means that three weeks back 1,000 people were getting infected per day in the whole country, which works out to a daily risk per person of getting infected of 1 in 10,000, which is miniscule. And remember, the risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually do get infected. And that was three weeks ago. Basically, covid is in all practical senses over and done with in Sweden. After four months.

3 comments:

  1. Such a horrific failure of public health and tragedy of suffering and death in Sweden. If they encounter a second wave, hopefully they handle it better, learn from their neighbors.

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  2. Massachusetts: 8,721 deaths. Population 6.7 million.
    From the article:
    In total covid has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people. Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway. That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.

    Sweden seems to have been safer than Massachusetts.

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  3. Here are a couple of links concerning the Swedish situation:

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2020-08-08/magazine/will-sweden-be-proved-right-on-avoiding-lockdown-twn0rz8ck

    How refreshing to hear a rational, non-partisan expert speak:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=xh9wso6bEAc&feature=emb_logo

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