Media angry more Swedes aren’t dying; the cost of lockdowns, social distancing

IN response to readers who want an update on the pandemic situation in Sweden (because of its contrarian no-lockdown strategy in fighting the coronavirus disease 2019 or Covid-19), I want to publish the latest post of an attorney-journalist who has written several times on the Swedish situation.

I refer to Michael Fumento, who has been writing on epidemic hysterias for 35 years.

On June 4, he contributed an article to Issues and Insights titled “Media enraged more Swedes aren’t’ dying.” (He also published on May 19 an article on Sweden in the Just the News website titled “The Swedish alternative: Coping with a virus while preserving livelihoods and liberties.”)

I reproduce below his article on Sweden and the media because the Swedish people are doing fine, much to the chagrin of some media organizations:

‘Swedenfreude’

“Ever since most of the world, including almost all of Europe, locked down to reduce the spread of Covid-19, but Sweden largely refused to go along, the country has been the subject of ‘ Swede shaming’ and reports that the (wolf) is finally at the door.

Thus, on April 29 CNN published ‘Deaths soar in country that didn’t lock down. Officials identify big reason why.’ They didn’t; hence there was no reason, big or otherwise. Now there’s a new round of Swedenfreude. ‘Sweden steadfast in strategy as virus toll continues rising,’ booms one source. ‘Sweden’s coronavirus strategy drives up infection rate,’ claims the BBC. And yet another blasts: ‘Sweden has the highest daily coronavirus death rate in the world — and it’s getting worse.” That’s from Yahoo Sports. Sports?

Yes, everyone wants in on the game. But they don’t like playing by the rules. As the data chart from Worldometers shows, Sweden now, as was true on April 29 and long before, has fewer deaths per million than five major countries in Europe, much less the world: Belgium, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom, plus some tiny European city-states. It’s tied with France.

So, is there any truth in the latest faintly obscene rubbing of hands together in glee?

Yes, the death (and case) toll keeps rising in Sweden because only in Hollywood does anyone become undead. But it’s rising everywhere because no nation has eliminated or will eliminate Covid-19 through quarantines any more than any airborne pathogen has been so eliminated. In terms of infections (which are labeled ‘cases’) you have to go down to No. 24 to find Sweden.

To the extent lockdowns work at all it’s logical that Sweden has essentially ‘front-loaded’ its deaths, while other countries have merely kept them temporarily dammed up. Thus any current comparison between death rates in lockdown nations versus Sweden would be false.

As to the ‘ highest death rate in the world,’ that’s true. But in a useless limited sense and the sense that has driven many of the recent Swedelash articles.

You see, it was over only a oneweek period. During those few days, Sweden did indeed have the world’s highest death rate. But to use an analogy Yahoo Sports would appreciate, if the winningest baseball team suddenly lost seven games in a row, Yahoo Sports would (presumably) not suddenly declare it the worst. It’s just a streak that, in fairness, may actually have an underlying explanation (five top players suddenly injured in the same accident) or none at all except sheer luck.

Farr’s Law

The usually ignored Farr’s Law, promulgated in 1840, does state that epidemics follow regular patterns of rising most quickly at first, then more slowly, then peaking and declining in a somewhat symmetrical shape. This is not because of outside interventions ( there were no public health agencies in 1840), but because a disease grabs the ‘low hanging fruit’ first and then slows as the fruit becomes harder and harder to pick.

Farr’s Law, however, does not guarantee that this pattern will occur for any given short time period, anymore than flipping a coin 10 times guarantees five heads and five tails. Rather, given enough flips the odds do eventually even out.

These spikes and dips are readily seen in the European Center for Disease Control chart. There is no explanation needed; it’s just like a coin toss. With massive numbers of deaths you would see a more even pattern; but Covid-19, with a US Centers for Disease Controlestimated mortality rate of just 0.26 percent, just isn’t providing that many. You can pick a given week, in sports or epidemiology, to drive home a point. But it’s fake news nonetheless.

Indeed, in the last week as of this writing, Sweden has again dropped below all the aforementioned countries. Yes, it was just a fluke; and the media have what appears to be shaving foam coming out the mouth…It’s been a really tough week for the lockdown lovers. Remember how Liberty University was going to be blindsided with Covid- 19 cases for keeping its campus open? Well, it just ended its semester with…let’s try to count the coronavirus cases…zero!

Meanwhile, during that same ‘ fatal week,’ the public health authority of Sweden’s neighbor, Norway, published a report with the striking conclusion that coronavirus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the Farr’s Law downward slope when the lockdown was ordered.

Camille Stoltenberg, director general of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, told state broadcaster NRK: ‘Our assessment now…is that we could possibly have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down, but by instead keeping open but with infection control measures.’

Which can be inferred as saying Sweden committed no error. Sweden

was right; meaning practically the rest of the world was wrong — at a terrible, terrible price.”

Value of lockdowns overestimated

I want to publish next an article on the findings of economists who have studied the cost of lockdowns and social distancing.

The published on June 15 the article “The data are in: It’s time for major reopening” by economists David Henderson and Jonathan Lipow, who wrote how four new analyses show how the initial projections overestimated the value of lockdowns. They wrote:

“Early in the Covid- 19 pandemic, an influential economic analysis from the University of Chicago concluded that the likely benefits of moderate social distancing would greatly exceed the resultant costs.

The

and the recently cited that study as evidence that the use of strict lockdowns to control the virus’ spread has been justified, and that current efforts to ‘open up’ social and economic activity around the US are dangerous and irresponsible. That is seriously misleading; the Chicago study is already out of date. More recent research supports the idea that the lockdowns should end.

The Chicago study came out in early March and was the first truly rigorous economic analysis of the pandemic. It estimated that a three-to-four-month regime of mitigation, ‘ combining home isolation of suspect cases, home quarantine of those living in the same household as suspect cases, and social distancing of the elderly and others at most risk of severe disease,’ would save 1.76 million lives between March 1 and October 1, resulting in benefits of $7.9 trillion, a number that far exceeds any conceivable cost of the mitigation strategy.

They reached the $7.9-trillion figure by assuming that each life saved was worth $4.5 million on average. That number is an example of what economists call the value of a statistical life or VSL. Used often by government agencies to evaluate proposals and projects, VSL is estimated by observing how much extra pay workers require to accept dangerous jobs.

But as the Chicago team carefully noted in their paper, ‘ the particular benefits estimates are only as reliable…as projections on Covid-19’s spread and health risks.’ Unfortunately, their analysis relied on projections for Covid-19 from Imperial College of London that by now have been shown to be full of analytical and even coding errors…Inevitably, this meant that the Chicago estimates were also way off.

Flawed projections

Fortunately, economists no longer have to rely on inherently flawed projections. We can use real data. In what might turn out to be the best paper on the economics of Covid-19, a team of economists from the University of California, Berkeley carefully evaluated empirical data on social distancing, shelter- in- place orders, and lives saved.

Their findings? Social distancing measures reduced person-to-person contact by about 50 percent, while harsher shelter- in- place rules reduced contact by only an additional 5 percent. Then, using data on Covid-19 infection and mortality, they estimated that these measures saved 74,000 lives. Finally, after using demographic data to adjust the VSL — which is lower for older people, who have fewer years to live — the study found that the gross benefit of social distancing has been a mere $250 billion.

That finding casts major doubt on the value of lockdowns and even social distancing as a method of reducing the spread of Covid- 19. While we can’t yet estimate a specific figure, the economic cost of social distancing and lockdowns will likely be more than $1 trillion. And that’s an understatement of the costs...

An even more recent study from economists affiliated with Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics suggests that the Berkeley estimate of 74,000 lives saved over the past four months is best understood as an upper bound. The reason is that shelter-at-home policies don’t so much reduce Covid-19 deaths as delay them. Delaying deaths will reduce them if a vaccine or cure is found in time. But we can’t be sure that an effective vaccine will be produced and available any time soon.

Rather than validating draconian lockdown orders, the latest economic research on Covid-19 suggests that social distancing efforts in general, and shelter-inplace measures in particular, have done more harm than good. That doesn’t mean that all such measures should be abandoned. ‘To socially distance or not to socially distance’ is not the question. The question should be, what policies actually make sense?

To address that, a team of economists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published the results of a study that compared various alternative strategies for limiting the spread of Covid-19. They concluded that twice as many lives could be saved if governments focused limited resources on protecting the most vulnerable people rather than squandering them on those who seem to face almost no risk such as children.

These four analyses honestly capture the evolution of economists’ understanding of Covid-19 and public responses to it. The emerging consensus on costs and benefits supports the view that population-wide lockdowns should end.”