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    COVID-19: The Case Against Herd Immunity Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on October 16, 2020, 8:04 pm

    (quote)
    Marcello Ferrada de Noli has studied Sweden's response to the virus
    and advises countries elsewhere to reject the neoliberal model and
    survive instead.

    The elderly have comprised the vast majority of Covid-19 fatalities in
    Sweden, either dying in care homes or their own residence, often
    alone.

    By mid-May 2020, only 13 percent of the care home victims had received
    treatment at Swedish hospitals. In August 2020, only five percent of
    the Covid-19 patients admitted for treatment at Swedish hospitals came
    from care home facilities.

    Sweden has by far the highest proportion of deaths among confirmed
    Corona cases in the Nordic countries. Let's look into the possible
    reasons.

    Herd Immunity
    International comparisons of the Covid-19 situation may help to assess
    the efficacy of the different strategies used by developed countries'
    health authorities.

    Such strategies may have been assimilated by some countries formerly
    known as "Third World" because of continued economic dependency; the
    praxis of attributing superior technical know-how in matters of public
    health to countries seen as more economically developed still exists
    in some governing circles.

    For this reason, populations in Latin America and Africa and other
    regions have been ruthlessly targeted with propaganda by developed
    countries promoting their epidemiological methods.

    In Europe, Italy was the first country to apply the "lockdown"
    approach. At the start of the "second wave" it had one of the lowest
    incidences of new Covid-19 cases.

    The model presented as alternative is "herd immunity," most associated
    with Sweden's neoliberal interpretation of it.

    Economy First
    The idea here is to prioritize the economy: no closing factories,
    schools, or restaurants. Sweden's Public Health Agency's chief
    epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell said, "if we close the schools we would
    lose 25 percent of the labour force" (parents would have to stay at
    home).

    He has also stated, "herd immunity is the one thing which eventually
    will stop the spread of this virus." In the words of Johan Giesecke,
    the agency's senior adviser, herd immunity strategy would consist of
    "letting the virus pass through the population."

    In response to the international criticism that ensued, the Swedish
    government tried to distance itself from the term but in practice the
    strategy has not changed.

    Sweden's ambassador to the U.S. declared that "Stockholm could reach
    herd immunity by May." However, five months' later this has not been
    achieved, and Sweden's economy has suffered just as much, if not more,
    than its neighbors who used lockdown measures.

    The epidemiological indicators I present below expose the flawed, not
    to say macabre, effects of the Swedish exporting model.

    The message to other nations is: Don't buy it. Survive instead.

    Based on current international data, I have carried out a comparison
    of mortality indicators among Nordic countries that applied forms of
    lockdown, and Sweden.

    There certainly are multiple models for such international
    epidemiological comparisons. However, I start with the simple method
    to determine whether there is a statistical significance in the
    reported differences regarding total number, number per capita, etc.

    (As we know, not all differences in mortality rates are
    epidemiologically/statistically significant, although they can appear
    as such in media reports).

    Results found through comparisons between the number of Covid-19
    deaths in Sweden (n = 5,883) and ditto the total numbers in Denmark,
    Finland and Norway (n = 1,284), give a significant overrepresentation
    of the Swedish deaths (X2 = 3023.3239, p = <0.00001). The difference
    is thus highly statistically significant.

    Another method is the Case Fatality Rate (hereinafter referred to as
    CFR). CFR intends to estimate the proportion of deaths among confirmed
    cases. It shows the proportion of those who were ill and who
    eventually died; the World Health Organization considers it "a measure
    of severity among detected cases."

    Among more than 200 countries included in the international tables on
    Coronavirus, Sweden is currently ranked 14th out of the 15 countries
    with the highest Covid-19 death rate per 1 M population.

    However, when CFR is taken into account, Sweden increases to sixth
    place in that group, illustrating the significance of the CFR method.
    This ranking position has remained rather even for Sweden. My
    calculation (as of Oct. 7, 2020) indicates the same results
    established in a research paper from May 2020.
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/16/covid-19-the-case-against-herd-immunity/

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