jan
Started reading The Swedish Covid-19 response: From poorly judged utilitarianism to history revisionism and the tragedy of the commons by Emil J. Bergholtz https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003289364-6/swedish-covid-19-response-emil-bergholtz #covid19
The Swedish Covid-19 response | 6 | From poorly judged utilitarianism

The Swedish Covid-19 response - 1 - From poorly judged utilitarianism to history revisionism and the tragedy of the commons

Taylor & Francis
Feb 4, 2023 at 7:22amWeb
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
…theoretical physicist Emil J. Bergholtz critically explores the underlying assumptions of the Swedish Covid-19 response. The focus is on how simple back-of-the-envelope estimates using the knowledge available already well before the pandemic reached Sweden. Such elementary considerations should have alarmed any analytically minded observer. These calculations show that the Swedish goal of not overwhelming the health care system while allowing the infection spread at a controlled rate in order to achieve herd immunity in the population was unrealistic.
—Sigurd Bergmann & Martin Lindström, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
There are many possible ways of explaining…Swedish response to the pandemic, and it will likely remain a controversial topic… Perhaps the simplest plausible explanation involves lack of relevant competence, normalcy bias, and an inability to admit errors…
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 106 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
From the start, FHM [Folkhälsomyndigheten (The Public Health Agency of Sweden)] did much to downplay the threats posed by the pandemic. … On March 2, FHM General Director Johan Carlson claimed that, in the worst-case scenario, Sweden could get 10 000–15 000 cases.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 107 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
Just a few days later, a remarkably abrupt change of attitude occurred. On March 13,…instead of almost no infections, almost the entire population was suddenly expected to get infected. In fact, this became the strategy…
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 107 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
Thus, it seems that at some point in time between March 8 and 13, 2020, a decision was made that the best option was to let the disease spread throughout the society in a “controlled manner” only aiming to “flatten the curve” so that health care would not be overwhelmed.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 107 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
…we now know that “flattening the curve” has been a disastrous strategy. It led to worse outcomes in all regards, as compared to pursuing a strategy aiming to eliminate the disease: for health, for the economy, and for the civil liberties.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 108 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
To illuminate this, we will now critically revisit the basic assumptions of the Swedish strategy in the light of what was known in February 2020 about the original strain of the virus.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 108 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
…corona viruses generally have short-lived immunity lasting months rather than decades, which has now been confirmed for SARS-CoV-2… Even worse, as we will return to later in this chapter, the virus is mutating. SARS-CoV-2 has become increasingly more infectious…
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 109 #sarscov2 #covid19 #herdimmunity
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
Without physical examination and without consulting the sick or their relatives, many elderly were routinely directed to palliative care and provided, for example, morphine instead of life-saving care and oxygen.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 109 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
While at the same time temporarily doubling the number of ICU beds, it was proclaimed that Sweden had managed to retain sufficient health care capacity at all times.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 109 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
…inadequate non-pharmaceutical interventions…accelerated the pandemic in Sweden, yet after the first wave was over, the number of infected was only about a tenth of what would have been necessary for hypothetical herd immunity.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 109 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
At a press conference in January 2021, Tegnell answered that post Covid “is primarily a healthcare issue” to the question of whether post Covid (a.k.a. long-Covid or long-hauler Covid) is a public health issue.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 109 #covid19 #longcovid
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
The [Great Barrington] Declaration and the Swedish approach are incredibly similar in both ideology and policy. The Declaration calls for, and Sweden delivered, a strategy which selectively puts in place strong restrictions only for at-risk groups, in particular people above 70 years of age and in long-term residential care homes.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
In practice, this failed to prevent the infection spread in the risk groups, as is evident from Sweden’s much higher death toll compared to its Scandinavian neighbours. In fact, the death toll in care homes has closely followed the overall spread of the disease in society, as has been shown in detailed studies of many countries around the world.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 110 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
…the outcome of the Swedish strategy was the worst possible for our most vulnerable: they were forced into isolation but did not benefit from a reduced spread of infection that such measures would have entailed if done in solidarity by society at large. Instead they perished, often alone.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 110 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
It should have been clear to almost anyone, and particularly Swedish public health officials, that this outcome was inevitable, as any basic understanding of the dynamics of epidemic spread makes clear…
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 120 #covid19
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
It is worth noticing that while the “experts” were enthusiastically calculating overly optimistic herd immunity thresholds and immune population percentages, it was left to “hobby epidemiologists” such as the author of this chapter to clarify this undeniable mathematics of why the GBD and the Swedish approach could never work as advertised.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 110 #covid19 #herdimmunity
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
It is furthermore important to point out that, while age and pre-existing health conditions fairly reliably predict the risk of acute life-threatening illness, there is no easy way to predict risk of long-Covid, a suffering which also affects the previously young and healthy, even children, to a significant extent.
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 110 #covid19 #longcovid
Show threadjanFeb 4, 2023
…neither in theory nor in practice is there any dichotomy between freedom on the one hand and proactive infection control measures on the other. Acting early, keeping levels low at all times, is beneficial in all respects…
—Emil J. Bergholtz, Sweden’s Pandemic Experiment, 112 #covid19
Show threadWolfgang HagenFeb 5, 2023
@jan
Thank you for this great thread!