indeed baron.

vaccines wane quickly and eventually we will have to face the omnicold

no big deal.

the general public are already bored with it.

its like trying to scare people with the Y2K problem in february 2000

The U.S. botched the pandemic—overprotecting kids at low risk of serious illness and under-protecting older Americans. Stockholm pursued a light touch and fared far better.

April 19, 2022

While most countries imposed draconian restrictions, there was an exception: Sweden. Early in the pandemic, Swedish schools and offices closed briefly but then reopened. Restaurants never closed. Businesses stayed open. Kids under 16 went to school.

That stood in contrast to the U.S. By April 2020, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health recommended far-reaching lockdowns that threw millions of Americans out of work. A kind of groupthink set in. In print and on social media, colleagues attacked experts who advocated a less draconian approach. Some received obscene emails and death threats.Within the scientific community, opposition to the dominant narrative was castigated and censored, cutting off what should have been vigorous debate and analysis.

In this intolerant atmosphere, Sweden’s “light touch,” as it is often referred to by scientists and policy makers, was deemed a disaster. “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale,” carped The New York Times. Reuters reported, “Sweden’s COVID Infections Among Highest in Europe, With ‘No Sign Of Decrease.’” Medical journals published equally damning reports of Sweden’s folly.

But Sweden seems to have been right. Countries that took the severe route to stem the virus might want to look at the evidence found in a little-known 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The researchers found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among individuals under 75. None, zero, zip.

That’s not to say that Sweden had no deaths from COVID. It did. But it appears to have avoided the collateral damage that lockdowns wreaked in other countries. The Kaiser study wisely looked at excess mortality, rather than the more commonly used metric of COVID deaths. This means that researchers examined mortality rates from all causes of death in the 11 countries before the pandemic and compared those rates to mortality from all causes during the pandemic. If a country averaged 1 million deaths per year before the pandemic but had 1.3 million deaths in 2020, excess mortality would be 30 percent.

There are several reasons to use excess mortality rather than COVID deaths to compare countries. The rate of COVID deaths ignores regional and national differences.For example, the desperately poor Central African Republic has a very low rate of fatalities from COVID. But that’s because it has an average life expectancy of 53. People in their 70s are3,000-fold more susceptible than children to dying of COVID, and even people in their 20s to 50s are far less likely to die than the elderly. So, it’s no surprise that the Central African Republic has a low COVID mortality rate despite its poverty and poor medical care.

Excess mortality is the smart, objective standard. It includes all deaths, whether from COVID, the indirect effects of COVID (such as people avoiding the hospital during a heart attack), or the side effects of lockdowns. And it gets rid of the problem of underlying differences among countries, allowing a direct comparison of their performance during COVID.

Sweden had zero excess mortality in 2020 among people younger than 75. In other words, COVID wasn’t all that dangerous to young people.

Even among the elderly, Sweden’s excess mortality in 2020 was lower than that in the U.S., Belgium, Switzerland, the U.K., the Netherlands, Austria, and France. Canada, Germany, and Australia had lower rates than Sweden among people over the age of 70—probably because Sweden failed to limit nursing home visits at the very beginning of the pandemic.

More here- https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/04/19/what-sweden-got-right-about-covid/