Has Sweden Found the Right Solution to the Coronavirus?

'This is, in fact, the first time we have quarantined healthy people rather than quarantining the sick and vulnerable. 

As Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, wrote in The Spectator (U.K.) last week: 

“The theory of lockdown, after all, is pretty niche, deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested. It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”' 

Lots of people are rushing to discredit Sweden’s approach, which relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown. 

While gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited and high schools and colleges are closed, Sweden has kept its borders open as well as its preschools, grade schools, bars, restaurants, parks, and shops. President Trump has no use for Sweden’s nuanced approach. 

Last Wednesday, he smeared it in a spectacular fashion by saying he’d heard that Sweden “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.” 

He and the public-health experts who told him this were wrong on both counts and would do better to question their approach. 

Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist and now adviser to the Swedish Health Agency, says that other nations “have taken political, unconsidered actions” that are not justified by the facts. In the rush to lock down nations and, as a result, crater their economies, no one has addressed this simple yet critical question: 

How do we know social-isolation controls actually work? And even if they do work for some infectious epidemics, do they work for COVID-19? And even if they work for this novel coronavirus, do they have to be implemented by a certain point in the epidemic? Or are they locking down the barn door after the horses are long gone? 

In theory, less physical interaction might slow the rate of new infections. But without a good understanding of how long COVID-19 viral particles survive in air, in water, and on contact surfaces, even that is speculative. 

Without reliable information on what proportion of the population has already been exposed and successfully fought off the coronavirus, it’s worth questioning the value of social-isolation controls. 

It is possible that the fastest and safest way to “flatten the curve” is to allow young people to mix normally while requiring only the frail and sick to remain isolated.

GO READ THE WHOLE THING.

A commenter adds:

It is worth noting that IHME has again revised down their projected number of deaths in the U.S. The "model" is now guessing about 60,000 total deaths. Two weeks ago, it was guessing about 90k to 100k. 

We operating on lousy advice and projections when we decided to commit economic suicide.