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First word
BECAUSE a Covid-19 outbreak could strike the country again, it is conceivable that the Marcos government and our health authorities will instinctively revert to the IATF (or some version of it) and impose anew community quarantines and lockdowns.
Great is the official conviction that the lockdowns and draconian controls, together with the Covid vaccines, had worked effectively to moderate the suffering wrought by the pandemic.
Today, with the pandemic largely under control, the global perspective would overwhelmingly reject the lockdown as a harmful and self-defeating policy measure. Even the seemingly benign face mask will probably be discarded as ineffectual.
It is rare for a prestigious newspaper and media organization to admit publicly an error in its reportage and editorial judgment. Most of the time, we in the news business prefer to keep this kind of news to ourselves.
Great therefore was my surprise when I read a commentary on how the New York Times has conceded that Sweden may have gotten right its response to the pandemic, and how the NYT had joined in the public condemnation of that country for its laissez faire policy toward Covid.
Jonathan Miltimore, managing editor of the Foundation for Economic Education, wrote a commentary entitled “The New York Times finally warms to Sweden’s pandemic response —three years later” (Epoch Times, April 7, 2023).
“Last week the New York Times published an article that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
‘How did no-mandate Sweden end up with such an average pandemic?’ the headline asked.
Times writer David Wallace-Wells doesn’t accept claims that Sweden — which drew intense criticism for refusing to go into lockdown in 2020 — had the lowest excess death rate in Europe, with just 3.3 percent more deaths than expected, the lowest percentage among OECD countries. But he does concede that ‘it’s hard to argue on the basis of Sweden’s epidemiological experience that its policy course was a disastrous one.’
Not much of a concession
This might not sound like much of a concession, but it is.
The Gray Lady reported in 2020 that ‘Sweden has become the world’s cautionary tale’ for its Covid response, and the NY Times was joined by a chorus of media outlets (and President Donald Trump) who alleged Sweden had ‘botched the pandemic’ and amplified the virus.
Today we know this wasn’t the case. And though Wallace-Wells seems to begrudge Anders Tegnell — the architect of Sweden’s policy — taking a ‘victory lap through the media,’ it’s worth pointing out that the epidemiologist received death threats for his pandemic response, which looks better with each passing week.
Just how successful Sweden’s approach was is still subject to debate. While Wallace-Wells is skeptical of Swedish claims that the country had the lowest excess mortality in Europe — he says the data set is imperfect and isn’t adjusted for demographics — it’s clear Sweden performed better than many lockdown nations. World Health Organization data he references show Swedes had an excess death rate average of 56 out of 100,000 — far better than Italy (133), Germany (116), Spain (111), and the UK (109).
Whatever data one chooses, one fact is undebatable: This isn’t what modelers predicted.
It’s important to remember that one of the reasons nations went into lockdown in the first place was that Imperial College London predicted as many as 40 million people would die in nine months if the virus was left unchecked.
Those same modelers predicted that Sweden would suffer 96,000 deaths by July 2020 if the nation didn’t close.
That didn’t happen. (The actual death count by July 2020 was 5,700.)
So whether one accepts claims that Sweden had the lowest excess death toll in Europe or merely performed ‘averagely,’ it’s clear modelers were horribly wrong.
While Wallace-Wells doesn’t address these modeling errors, he does highlight the ineffectiveness of government regulations, conceding that ‘mandates may matter somewhat less than social behavior and the disease itself — and surely less than we want to believe.’
People will continue to debate mandates, of course. They will point out that countries such as Finland and Norway had lower Covid mortality than Sweden, ignoring that (as Wallace-Wells also notes) these countries actually had policies less stringent than Sweden for much of 2020, according to Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker. (Neighbors were apparently quick to adopt Sweden’s ‘lighter touch’ approach.)
This doesn’t mean we don’t have clear answers, however. Early in the pandemic, I asked a proactive question: ‘Could Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus actually work?’
Though Wallace-Wells never quite says yes, he includes a telling quote from Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute and a professor of computational biology at University College London.
‘What the ‘Swedish model’ really suggests is that pandemic mitigation measures can be effectively deployed in a respectful, largely non-coercive way,’ writes Balloux.
This is as close to an admission of ‘Sorry, we were wrong’ as we’re likely to see in the New York Times.
After all, the non-coercive measures Balloux mentions are precisely what proponents of Sweden’s approach, including signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, had advocated all along. (Wallace-Wells is correct when he notes that Sweden never adopted a ‘let it rip’ approach, as many claim.)”
This story got my undivided attention because from the start of the pandemic in the country, I was skeptical about the IATF, the task force that then President Duterte organized to handle the nation’s response to the pandemic.
It was composed largely of retired and recycled military and police officials. It had no epidemiologists or scientists within its ranks. This misguided thrust was later compounded by the designation of “czars” in the recovery effort.
When I expressed interest in Sweden’s approach to the outbreak and wrote about it, I received critical comments online here in the country and from abroad, for my allegedly irresponsible approach to a health emergency.
Some columnists lambasted my position in print.
In hindsight, it’s now overwhelmingly clear that the lockdown was a policy that had the effect of making a crisis situation worse. It crippled and hobbled the national economy. It wreaked havoc on the jobs and incomes of millions of workers and families across the archipelago. The cost of the financial assistance provided by the government will take years to recover.
So much of the suffering and the cost could have been avoided if we had had in place a professional group of medical professionals and scientists to tackle the challenge of controlling Covid.
yenobserver@gmail.com
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