In March 2020, the Imperial College in London made a shocking statement that unless the countries of the world went into a dramatic lockdown, as many as 50 million people could die of COVID-19 within the next few months.
As a result, most countries went into massive and immediate lockdowns that shut down industry and commerce and forced people to essentially become prisoners in their own homes.
Sweden did not do this.
The health minister of Sweden said there was insufficient evidence at the time concerning COVID to justify such drastic actions, and Sweden kept its country and people open for business.
A most brilliant researcher, Dr. John Ioannidis, also said we did not have enough evidence to justify our dramatic actions of locking down the world.
Sweden had no mandates that people should work from home. Schools and universities did not close their doors. Life carried on mostly in a normal fashion, with a few advisements concerning large social gatherings. There was no mask mandate and no mandate to spray surfaces and people with disinfectants.
Most of the world harshly criticized this Swedish decision. Initial deaths were higher in Sweden than some other countries, but the deaths were mostly the frail and elderly with severe co-morbid conditions.
Many First World countries with restrictive lockdowns had higher per capita COVID deaths than Sweden within the first six months of the outbreak.
Now, 2 1/2 years later, a barrage of interesting facts are emerging concerning what Sweden did. One of these facts shows that all-cause mortality in Sweden did not increase at all over the past 2 1/2 years, whereas nearly all other countries noticed increases in this number.
The Swedish economy suffered much less than nearly all countries in the western world. The people were happier. Suicide and homicide rates did not increase as they did in many lockdown countries.
Only a fraction of businesses failed and people did not go bankrupt.
Virtually no people are dying from COVID today in Sweden. For them, COVID is finished — and it has been finished for some time.
By virtually every measurable indicator, Sweden is now in a better position than all other European countries and most of the other countries in the world which did participate in lockdowns.
To look at the massive devastation which occurred in Argentina, for example, because of society lockdown, it becomes evident to even the most naïve of readers that Sweden was right in their approach to COVID and the rest of the world was wrong.
So the West should begin to seek out the truth about our actions during COVID. If we do seek out the irrefutable facts then we will undoubtedly come to the humbling, but truthful, reality that we managed COVID wrong and Sweden managed it right.
This lesson must be learned, albeit with much pain and more than a little humility.
There will always be future threats caused by infectious diseases. The costs associated with COVID have been too astronomical for us to get it wrong again.
