Let's check in on Nordic COVID champion Sweden

Still the leader lol!

Drill for oil and eat your King Oscar sardines, folks.

 

Now your garden is evil: Privileged Swedish communists from Uppsala University say elites' use of water must be altered and redistributed to the poor

 What a shock, right?

From the story "From swimming pools to gardening, the rich’s privileged lifestyles are driving urban water crises, study says":

The study, which was led by Elisa Savelli at Uppsala University in Sweden, proposes a new approach to preserving water resources centered around “altering privileged lifestyles, limiting water use for amenities and redistributing income and water resources more equally.”     

Meanwhile lol:

The entire (100%) population of Sweden has access to a safe-drinking water source. 

GUILTY MUCH? The place is still 60% Lutheran.

But a lot of this is just far-north-garden-deprived envy:

 We English are often caricatured as garden fanatics but we have nothing on the northern Swedes. This gardening obsession is not uncommon up here. In the summer our local snowmobile dealership majors in ride-on lawnmowers. Locals fondle Husqvarnas the same way petrolheads caress Ferraris. Coachloads of northern Swedish townies criss-cross the countryside each summer visiting gardens.

Sweden is still the Nordic COVID-19 death leader and has been since the early days of the pandemic

Recent upticks in deaths in both Sweden but especially Finland must have something to do with an influx of refugees from the Russia-Ukraine War.

 

Turkey's Erdogan is back at it, trying to stop Sweden's entry into NATO

Finland Floats Solo NATO Entry After Erdogan Rejects Sweden

. . . on Monday, Erdogan ruled out supporting Sweden’s bid after a far-right activist burned Islam’s holy book in Stockholm.

 Erdogan has an election coming up, and needs the Koran crowd's vote.

Sweden: Still not the model

 

LOL, would be Immanentizer of The Eschaton Josh Hawley is lone No vote in US Senate to admit Sweden and Finland to NATO

 Rand Paul votes Present!

Hawley had a perfect chance to vote for global thermonuclear war, and missed it!

Story.

The price of NATO membership for Sweden and Finland is for them to throw the Kurds under the bus to please Turkey

 Same as it ever was.

The Kurds have been pretty much voiceless in the West since Winston Churchill first threw them under the bus in 1919 and used British air forces to attack them, advocating eventually that Turkey be given control of northern Iraq.

 

 

 

NATO members once more are ignoring Turkey’s role against the Kurds. This concerns internal Kurdish oppression in Turkey, bombing the PKK and Yazidis in Northern Iraq and killing and cleansing Kurds in Northern Syria. ...

NATO, the European Union, and the G7 anti-Russian Federation alliance ignore human rights in Turkey and the fact that this nation is occupying two nations (Northern Cyprus and Northern Syria) – while also bombing Kurds and Yazidis in another nation (Iraq). At the same time, the EU and G7 seek Saudi Arabia to increase energy production. Therefore, ignoring the conflict in Yemen: the Saudi Arabia-led war that has been bombing this nation for many years (weapons bought from America, France, and the United Kingdom).

The Kurds are perennially thrown under the American and NATO bus. Hence, Finland and Sweden are set to join the anti-Kurdish power plays of NATO before even being accepted. 

More.

LOL, Sweden quits while it's ahead

Sweden joins others in announcing end of virus restrictions

LOL, Sweden now locking down in all but name, imposes social distancing at restaurants and bars, remote learning, work from home, and vaccination passes

 

The Sweden cheerleaders like Ann Coulter keep at it, but Sweden just keeps outperforming at least 7 other fellow European neighbors in the deaths per million category

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can't unkill all the old people killed in Sweden early in the pandemic, who early on laid the foundation of Sweden's present ignominy. They were killed in institutions by workers, many of whom are immigrants and not native Swedes, who spread the disease to them. Sweden got out front early with these deaths, and only kept going.

So-called conservatives don't seem too interested in that story, because it doesn't fit their anti-lockdown, anti-mask narrative, for which they think Sweden is the model, never mind Sweden's immediate neighbors to this day have done much better. The immigrant angle should be right up their alley, too, but nope. Conservatives seem little interested in learning about that, or about what has worked better and why. 

Meanwhile Ex-Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo oversaw a similar massacre by transferring COVID-19 patients into nursing homes full of vulnerable elderly people who caught the disease and died. But he had to resign not because of that, but because he felt-up some ladies uninvited.

Connecticut is embarking just now as we speak on the same nursing home policy as New York.

If you are an old person in America, you probably think they are out to get you.

And you would be right.

I'm getting really sick of hearing about what a great success Sweden's C19 experience has been: It's not a success

 

Denmark suspends use of Moderna for those 18 and under

Sweden has suspended the use of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine for under 30s following reports of rare side effects, while Denmark has said it will no longer offer the shot to under 18s. ...

Denmark’s health agency also blamed concerns over myocarditis for its decision to suspend the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under 18 years.

In April it became the first European country to cease using the AstraZeneca vaccine over concerns about rare cases of blood clots.

More.

Sweden suspends use of Moderna in ages 30 and under

Swedish health authorities on Wednesday suspended the use of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for those ages 30 and under, saying the move was done out of precaution.

The reason for the pausing is “signals of an increased risk of side effects such as inflammation of the heart muscle or the pericardium” — the double-walled sac containing the heart and the roots of the main vessels, Sweden’s Public Health Agency said in a statement. “The risk of being affected is very small.” ...

U.S. and European regulators caution, however, that both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines appear linked to a rare reaction in teenagers and young adults — chest pain and heart inflammation. ...

New preliminary Nordic analyzes indicate that the connection is especially clear when it comes to Moderna’s vaccine, especially after the second dose, the agency said. ...

The Swedish agency said the vaccine from Pfizer is recommended for these age groups instead. 

More.

US COVID-19 update through Feb 2021

Daily new cases have dropped dramatically in February 2021, but still average 85,863 per day and remain higher than for any month before last November when the country was still in a fit of hysteria about the pandemic.

Daily new deaths had their third worst month in February 2021 and are still higher than in April last.

Hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in February to 48,871 on Saturday 2/27. Peak Saturday level was January 9th at 130,781. The Saturday peak last summer occurred on 7/25 with 59,301 hospitalized. The Saturday peak last April occurred on 4/18 with 57,761 hospitalized. 

The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic will unaccountably stop collecting such data on March 7th. I say unaccountably because the absolute low in Saturday hospitalizations after the April outbreak was 27,967 on June 20th and the October lows never matched that.  We're not even close to those levels yet. It's WAY too early to conclude that data collection should cease when the previous lows haven't yet been taken out. 

Meanwhile, the hospitalization data collected by the University of Minnesota continues to show the second wave still in decline at the end of February. The worst states (NY in gray, CA in blue, TX in pink, and FL in green) for hospitalizations are shown in the graphs. The declines are welcome, but levels remain elevated.

Daily new case data in a number of countries, e.g. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, France, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, in recent weeks has turned upward to one degree or another. This could be a harbinger of a coming seasonal surge.

Meanwhile about 7.5% of the US is fully vaccinated, and 15% partially vaccinated. 

It remains to be seen how effective the vaccines will be against mutations, and how durable the vaccines will be over time.

  

The Sweden apologists are still ridiculous: Sweden deaths per million of population might as well be Mexico

Hey, let's hear it for Moldova, huh?

It doesn't follow that rigorous measures against coronavirus fail to produce low new daily cases, unless you are an asshat who thinks 10x more cases or 22x more deaths on the way there is preferable

Finland: 7,443 cases; 329 deaths from COVID; 4.4% case fatality rate

Norway: 9,249 cases; 255 deaths from COVID; 2.75% case fatality rate

Sweden: 80,422 cases; 5,743 deaths from COVID; 7.1% case fatality rate

Sweden remains among the very worst states for deaths per million of population from COVID-19

Rush Limbaugh the idiot: Sweden Proves the Lockdown Was Unnecessary

"RUSH: This guy, Neil Ferguson's predictions at the outset said 90,000 people in Sweden would die because they weren't gonna lock down, and 4,000 people died."

Rush Limbaugh's standard of expert opinion is always the guy who gets it wrong the worst.

That's called cherry picking, which is what idiots do.

Let's try to do it the right way.

Sweden deaths to date (no lockdown): 4,542 (18th in the world).

Deaths among fellow Nordics to date (with lockdowns):

Norway: 237
Finland: 321
Denmark: 580.

Sweden also has nearly 41,000 cases and rising. Daily new cases there are near record highs. Sweden is still feeding the beast. The other Nordics have 75% fewer total cases and even fewer than that. The other Nordics are doing enormously better than Sweden.

19 times better, 14 times better, 8 times better.

Rush can pretend this is over all he wants. This isn't over by a longshot, there or anywhere else, until new cases come down and fall to zero.

Sweden's fatality rate is more than twice as high as America's at 11%+. Expect 4,000 more deaths in Sweden at the minimum.

Sad to listen to Mark Steyn give know-nothings the golden EIB microphone today to blanket the country with bilge

We had a lawyer call in from Michigan, where I live, to complain about the governor's tyranny, failing to mention the 1905 Supreme Court precedent her lawyer cites which permits her actions to protect the citizenry. The lawyer must have gone to the same school as convicted Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

Then we had a caller from Georgia tell us coronavirus infections are much more widespread according to results from several states using antibody tests, never mentioning that all of these antibody tests are unreliable and NONE of them are approved by the FDA.

That caller also said everything was improving in Sweden when the truth is quite the opposite. Sweden embarked on herd immunity early and is now reaping the whirlwind with 2,355 deaths and a mortality rate of 12%, more than twice that of the United States.

But yeah, let Georgia be Sweden.

I guess the Rush Limbaugh supporters in Georgia must know coronavirus will ravage the black enclaves of Atlanta, decreasing the surplus population.

Coronavirus data update for Sun Apr 26, 2020

Johns Hopkins reports right now 5,184,635 tests completed in the US with 940,797 confirmed cases of infection.

That's an infection rate of 18.1%, after stay-at-home has been observed more or less nationwide since mid-March. Average flu infection in the US, without stay-at-home, is 8%. So imagine how bad this could have been, and still might be.

Reports of infection rates as high as 31.5% in Chelsea, MA, are problematic. These are antibody tests, and so far have high false positive rates, meaning all the positives could be false, test populations which are much too small, and test populations which are not representative. People on the streets right now and people in grocery stores right now are not representative of the whole population. What's more, the antibodies detected by these tests could well be for non-COVID-19 coronaviruses, which means you've learned nothing about exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

There have been 54,001 deaths according to Johns Hopkins data right now, for a mortality rate of 5.74%.

Flu mortality averages 0.1%.

Therefore we are dealing with something at least 2.3 times more infectious than flu, and 57 times more deadly.

Global data indicates as of 0730 hours a mortality rate of 6.98%. Test data is too uneven globally to draw firm general conclusions. Mortality data from places like Iran at 6.31%, China at 5.53% and Russia at 0.92% just looks like lies in comparison to open, free societies, as follows.

The European big five, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the UK have an average mortality rate of 11%, 1.9 times worse than for the US. Germany remains a standout with mortality of only 3.75%, however, which is 35% lower than in the US. Belgium has the most liberal counts of deaths, and so a very high mortality rate of 15.38%.

Norway is at 2.68%, Sweden 12.06% (oops, they followed herd immunity, and are now paying the price), Finland 4.15%, and Denmark 4.84%.

Switzerland 5.56% and Austria 3.56% really stand out relative to Hungary at 10.88%.

Canada reports in at 5.6% with Mexico at 9.43%.

Japan and South Korea come in at 2.72% and 2.26% respectively.

It's obvious to me right now that if America wants to return to some sense of normalcy after this debacle has been allowed to reach the stage that it has, the only plausible way forward is to ramp up testing for the disease massively, and provide masks to the general population which protect it while in public. Instead our president and lawmakers have been busy with other things, like bailing out businesses. They are not serious people, anymore than the people they represent, a minority of which is clamoring for herd immunity, and therefore massive casualties.

The pro-life anti-abortion party is infected with a pro-death coronavirus party. The real division in the Republican Party between the actual conservatives and the libertarian ideologues has been laid bare by SARS-CoV-2. The former want to save you, as do many liberals. The latter believe only in survival of the fittest.  

The idea that immunity will be built up for this disease in the US population so that this will be over once and for all strikes me as completely speculative at this point.

America has to prepare to live with this disease indefinitely.