Today's episode of "Based on our wild guesses, we are close to achieving herd mentality" - says Sweden, finally winning at something. SE 3529; DK 537; FI 287; NO 232. Data at ourworldindata.org/coronavirus #coronasverige #CoronaVirusSverige #covid19 #SwedenInDenial 
How can I stress this enough? When you look at the last 7-day rolling average, Sweden is the country with the highest death rate / per million people in the world. The highest ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-…
Data from Spain suggests a spread in the country of about 5% and a fatality rate of 1%. What does that mean for our "herd immunity" fan base? english.elpais.com/society/2020-0…
The country that basically invented the "precautionary principle" is now doing the opposite and heading into the most dangerous scenarios without protecting the vulnerable from risks
While the Swedish strategists keep dismissing evidence that goes against their credo as not-proven-yet, their own assumptions never get a chance to be regularly tested and debunked, either. Great display of intellectual dishonesty
The Spanish study "does not worry" Tegnell, as he says. Tegnell and his colleagues are a fact-resistant strain
Am I being unfair? Every country has gotten a number of things wrong about the virus since March. But some did at least
1) make their assumptions explicit
2) make testable predictions
3) revisit their views based on new evidence.
I have not seen much of this in Sweden
1) make their assumptions explicit
2) make testable predictions
3) revisit their views based on new evidence.
I have not seen much of this in Sweden
A story about this apparent "herd mentality". Today during the press conference they stated that the Swedish strategy has around 60% approval rate. Are there dissenters? There is frustration and opposing views, mostly under the radar. Some of that is concerning. A story:
On April 6th I text a fellow expat and asked her how she and the family were doing. We are well, she replied, but very frustrated and scared. Her mom was working at an elderly care home where 4 people had died during the previous week. She was not allowed to use PPE
I asked if her mom wanted to talk about this to a newspaper, but she was afraid she'd lose her job if she did. Why, I asked. Because the company made her sign a paper that she was not allowed to talk to journalists about the situation at work, under threat of being fired
This is only one story, whose source I trust, and I do not know how representative of other realities in elderly care homes it is, but I find it telling and important to share
