Sweden avoiding lockdown

You characterised what he said as "Icelands chief epidemiologist has said the way to herd immunity is through infections, not vaccinations."

You added "not vaccinations" yourself when it was clear that vaccinations and even boosters are a major part of the strategy proposed.

The poster who called you out on it was very clear about what you were lying about so I don't understand why you would claim that it was about something else now.

While Icelandic epidemiologist may be saying the way to achieve herd immunity is to allow the virus to spread throughout the community, I'm sure he'd also agree that that is only an option once vaccinations have reached a certain level which will avoid over-running hospitals and huge numbers of unnecessary deaths which would happen without the vaccines. Vaccines work with the herd immunity through community spread strategy, not against it.

What do I know? I only quoted a news article. Not looking for an argument, tired of it. You apparently know more than anyone else.

fair enough

Herd immunity is not about achieving zero Covid. Zero Covid will not be achieved by either vaccination or naturally acquired immunity through contacting the virus, as in both cases there have been re-infections. It is the principle of having a high percentage of the population immunised from infection to protect those that cannot become so due to them either by age or medically being immunocompromised.

The vaccines were never promised as sterilizing vaccines that would 100% prevent those vaccinated from becoming infected or infecting others, although when developed against the the then know variants they had a very high efficacy rating for doing so. That efficacy has dropped somewhat against the present Delta variant, but now from the easing of restrictions and the country opened up I would have thought, not only are the vaccines working by keeping the numbers of hospitalisations those in ICU and deaths low, it is obvious they are also keeping the numbers of infections low. None of which are possible with naturally acquired immunity.

That has been shown in Sweden, who like everywhere else is now reliant on vaccines to control this virus rather than achieving naturally acquired immunity. Even more-so than Sweden, both Amazonia and India, who both believed they had achieved naturally acquired herd immunity, have shown that in terms of deaths alone it is not a viable option.

I don't think they were ever promoted (approved) as preventing transmission. That was something the UK discovered as an added benefit with the wild strain. Not so much with Delta though.

Why not Iceland ? The title of this thread is Sewden avoiding lockdown so I cannot see how there could be a discussion on that without comparisons to other countries that did use lockdown, and the most obvious comparisons are Sweden`s neighbours.

It`s not as simple to explain away Sweden`s much higher deaths in comparison to those countries as just being due to care homes or the elderly percentage of it`s neighbours. The percentage of eldrly is the same for it`s direct neighbours Norway, Finland and Denmark where all three used lockdown. Care homes in Sweden, similar to Ireland and practically everywhere else, were poorly protected during the initial stages of this pandemic, but I do not see how no lockdowns would have improved on that.

Even if that neglect in safegaurding care homes was the cause of large numbers of deaths in Sweden initially, it does not explain subsequent large numbers of deaths much later in Sweden compared to the other three neighbouring countries. For the three months 1st. November 2020 until the 31st January 2021 Swden`s deaths were 6,234. The other three countries, with a combined population over 1.5 times greater for the same period had a total of 2,051 deaths. Over one and a half times the population of Sweden, yet less than one third of the deaths.

It's also not completely fair to compare Sweden directly to Norway or Finland for instance, Sweden is way more urbanized with more people living in large apartment complexes (á la "miljonprogrammet").

A number worth noting is average age of death in Sweden in 2019 was 81.34 for men and 84.73 for women, and sure it did drop in 2020: to 80.6 for men and 84.29 for women (https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/manniskorna-i-sverige/medellivslangd-i-sverige/) which means that for men we went back to the number of 2016 and for women 2018 (see previous link).

If Sweden's strategy was so devastating you'd think, as Jacdaniel2014 mentions, that with no lockdown we'd expect dead bodies everywhere and misery.. Instead we have good mental health with a slight setback in average age of death (-0.5 years).

Every loss of life is a tragedy of course but so is every minute of a human life spent in lockdown for no good reason. The mental health toll is not to be ignored.

Problem is that any government who went with the lockdown route now has to save face: If the general population finds out that they were locked in to their homes for months for no reason, that's not a very good situation.

You have to question the decision to close down small business and lock people in to their home... Wouldn't it be better if the government promoted a healthy lifestyle (exercising, hiking, getting plenty of sun) rather than putting a 5km restriction in place. An approach damaging not only physical but also mental health.

Also at current pace some tightly locked down countries are bound to catch up with Sweden's death counts eventually with a fifth wave sweeping over them (but not Sweden).

I'm going through covid statistics out of boredom here, and I've noticed that Sweden has no new wave of cases like their neighbours have. Are they not testing/reporting or what is it?

Good article about Sweden here. Guess we'll have to see if they can keep it up

@99nsr125. wrote

When there is no present medical treatment available for a virus you mitigate to prevent the spread. Not encourage it as Tegnell & Co. did with their herd immunity strategy. If that is the strategy you favour then why not do the same for the Ebola virus which has a case fatality rate of 50%.

There are a few misconceptions with Sweden and lockdown. Swedish authorities did not introduce as strict a lockdown as some others, but if you dig a bit into the figures people imposed their own lockdowns. consumer spending fell to the same level as Denmark who did, and while they may like a few others attempted to disguise their unemployment figures by putting workers on furlough, the reality is the numbers unemployed were no better than practically anywhere else in Europe. Their GDP figures also show that. Thankfully in October when Tegnell was in denial of another wave already happening and looking to drop restrictions on care home visits, telling the vulnerable it was safe to mingle with the general public and increase numbers at public events the local authorities had enough, called a halt and put their own measures in place to finally begin to get control to reduce the numbers.

Vaccines greatly reduce the chances of severe illness or ICU care. Natural immunity does not. Neither is their any proof that natural immunity is lifelong. To the contrary, it wanes as well.

If people wish to hold up Sweden`s neighbours to bash them with, then it is not difficult to do. Sweden`s deaths are adjusted for population size 8 times greater than Norway, 3 times greater than Denmark and 6.5 times greater than Finland. When Sweden were following their herd immunity strategy for 2020 they had excess deaths of over 10%.

Austria, like many others in Europe, Ireland included, are seeing that the inability to provide life saving treatments and diagnostics are being driven by the pressures being put on their health systems by Covid-19. In particular by the vastly disproportionate numbers of unvaccinated occupying hospital and ICU beds. The unvaccinated at 10% of the population eligible for a vaccine are presently taking up 66% of ICU Covid beds and 25% of all ICU beds. Life saving transplant surgeries this week have had to be postponed due to that disproportion of unvaccinated taking up ICU beds due to their choices not to receive a perfectly safe and free vaccine.

Austria like everywhere else is getting sick and tired of people shouting about their bodily integrity, while they blatantly show the could care less if they tried about anybody else other than themselves. They can still refuse to get vaccinated, (mandatory vaccination is not a new concept, it`s been around as long as vaccines), but if there are consequences for doing that, then that is a free choice they made while knowing what the consequences would be. Nobody to blame for that other than themselves.

It's being discussed on the main vaccine thread.

the [CDC] found that both infection-induced and vaccine-induced immunity are durable for at least six months — but that vaccines are more consistent in their protection and offer a huge boost in antibodies for people previously infected.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118199877/#Comment_118199877

For Covid deaths, not well.

This study suggests more protection from vaccines - seems like more research needed. To suggest that natural immunity is lifelong is without foundation at this point.

"Among hospitalized adults with COVID-19-like illness whose previous infection or vaccination occurred 90–179 days earlier, vaccine-induced immunity was more protective than infection-induced immunity against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19.”

Recommends a vaccine booster for those with previous infection. That might be the strongest protection.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-do-vaccines-protect-better-than-infection-induced-immunity