Lockdowns Never Again: Sweden Was Right, and We Were Wrong -- an August of 2020 assessment and reminder of the terrible foolishness of lockdown

What we learned the hard way.

A post from Chicago Newspapers — Where like newspapers, current events drive the narrative. Drive it where? That is the question.

Bold prediction:

In life, we encounter things which may work in theory, but not in practice. Communism is famously one of those things. Time travel is another.

With any luck, Americans will soon come to realize that strict social distancing, economic lockdowns, and mask-wearing all belong in that category of supposedly sound ideas that simply don’t work in reality.

Oh?

For evidence, let’s look to Sweden. As Dr. Sebastian Rushworth, an ER doctor at a hospital in Stockholm, writes on his blog, “COVID is over in Sweden. People have gone back to their normal lives and barely anyone is getting infected anymore.”

Unlike so many other countries, “Sweden never went into complete lockdown,” Dr. Rushworth writes. Non-essential businesses remained open, people continued frequenting restaurants, the kids stayed in school, and “very few people have bothered with face masks.”

Heresy!

Basically, Sweden did the exact opposite of what most Americans tragically still believe are the necessary requirements to reach the outcome that Sweden has achieved.

He argues what should now be obvious to any rational, thinking person, which is that “the size of the response in most of the world (not including Sweden) has been totally disproportionate to the threat.”

They got a hammer for the fly on baby’s nose.

Naysayers may point to Sweden’s mortality rate to discount its success. But the virus has taken nearly 6,000 people in a country of 10 million, and one which tallies about 100,000 annual deaths each year.

Given that 70 percent of those who died with COVID were over the age of 80 and very unhealthy, he argues, “quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway,” making COVID a “mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.”

And, while Sweden will likely continue to see deaths from COVID, it will likely never see anything close to those numbers again. The large number of deaths can be clearly attributed to a “complete lack of any immunity” to this novel coronavirus.

Oh. Immunity.

A few months ago, Dr. Rushworth says, “practically everyone who was tested had COVID,” even if the presenting symptom was a “nose bleed” or “stomach pain.” Today, he reports that he hasn’t seen a COVID patient in over a month, and even when he tests patients with fever or cough, the “tests invariably come back as negative.”

To be clear, Sweden’s economy is wide open. No one is social distancing or wearing a ridiculous mask. Life is back to normal, and the infection rate is still falling. It’s pretty safe to say the population in Sweden has now built some level of immunity to the virus, and all signs indeed point to the pandemic being over in Sweden.

Yes. Virus not so novel any more. Now immunity.

What is the obvious takeaway from this? Perhaps Dr. Rushworth sums it up best, saying that he is “willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place.”

In other words, all of the lockdowns will have been meaningless.

S–t!

But we were assured that the lockdowns, the distancing, the masks, all of it, would absolutely work, because science (Science!) suggested that these are the only things that could work.

Science. Oh.