Sweden: 250,000 confirmed COVID cases last week to end all COVID restrictions tomorrow

On 9 February, Sweden will end all COVID restrictions. The government will also officially declare that the virus is not a threat to public health.

This is despite the Swedish department of health estimating 500,000 Swedes were infected with COVID last week, with 250,000 confirmed cases. The total population of Sweden is some 10.4 million. Sweden has also stopped the COVID jab roll-out for 5-11 year olds.

For New Zealanders, living in paranoid fear for two years because of corrupt government and legacy media fear propaganda, the Swedish approach seems counter-intuitive. After all, Ardern plunged the country into Level 4 lockdown last year on just one confirmed case of Delta.

But even more importantly, Sweden did not impose lockdowns, close schools or force everyone to wear face masks, or impose vaccine mandates. Vaccine passes were imposed to attend certain events and venues and to enter the country.

Sweden is also an integral part of the European continent, sharing borders with two other countries. Around two hundred million people live within 2 hours flying time. Quite a different scenario than our fair land at the bottom of the globe, 2000 miles from anywhere.

In May 2020, Labour’s Associate Minister of Health Ayehsa Verrall tweeted that if the Swedish approach was wrong, future Nobel Prizes in medicine should be awarded by New Zealand. I guess now Sweden would be well within its rights in banning New Zealanders from consideration for future medicine prizes, given her government’s abyssmal and divisive ‘jab jab jab’ mentality, which still has us living scared like trembling snowflakes, with friends, families and loved-ones divided, medical apartheid and, as we shall see, excess mortality directly linked to the Verrall’s jab.

Supporters of Verrall will point out that New Zealand’s lower death rate was worth it – the lockdowns, masks and mandates ‘saved lives’, as this person claimed:

Currently Sweden on 314 deaths per million, NZ 4 per million…we’ll see…

— May Day (@Kiwilova) May 10, 2020

So, with the benefit of two more years of policy implementation, how has Sweden fared, compared to New Zealand, particularly in the number of COVID deaths?

According to Sebastian Rushworth, a physician working in Sweden, the most reliable statistic to look at is overall mortality, because:

It is the only metric that cannot easily be manipulated. “Covid deaths” is not a good metric, because it is open to interpretation. Different doctors, different hospitals, and different countries define covid deaths differently. And often in official statistics “deaths with covid” (i.e. deaths from other causes but where the person happened to have covid or at least a positive covid test) are defined as “covid deaths”, which makes it hard to determine how deadly the disease actually is.

Rushworth’s assessment makes sense when you consider the ludicrous example last year of a homicide victim shot dead in his driveway in New Lynn being counted as a COVID death because he was COVID positive at the time of his death. If the government count this as a ‘COVID death’, how many other similarly questionable ‘COVID deaths’ are included in our ‘official tally’? This is a clear example of the manipulation Rushworth is describing.

What Rushworth found when investigating this metric is that in 2020 there was a slight bump in mortality in Sweden. This could be explained either by COVID or by the fact that in 2019 the mortality rate was unusually low and therefore 2020 was ‘ripe for a slightly higher rate.’ However, in 2021 in the midst of a so-called ‘deadly pandemic’ the overall mortality rate was the second-lowest in Swedish history.

Rushworth concludes:

When we look at the overall mortality statistics, and see the number of people that actually died, it’s clear that Sweden was probably the country that reacted most sensibly of all to the pandemic, with measures that were largely proportionate to the size of the threat. The rest of the world instead went around swatting flies with sledge hammers.

He then analyses Sweden v USA, noting that the latter, which imposed lockdowns, jabathons and mask wearing like us, had 18 times more excess deaths than Sweden, which ‘clearly’ could not be attributable to COVID, but were, in his opinion, the result of the draconian lockdowns.

Rushworth doesn’t talk about the New Zealand experience, but two very important videos, one by Grant Dixon and the other by Chris Martensen have come out recently showing excess mortality, particularly in kiwis aged 60 and over, coinciding exactly with the government’s Pfizer jab roll-out.

A regular columnist for DTNZ, Guy Hatchard, pointed this out back in December 2020.

Having linked up to 2,000 excess deaths to the vaccine roll-out, Dixon says:

I think this research is really important because it tells governments there’s real collateral damage associated with vaccine roll-outs. There’s no other logical reason why so many people died during the nine months here in New Zealand. Total deaths (all causes) went up steeply when vaccinations started, it peaked and then went down when vaccinations rolled off. New Zealand is unique, because we have next to no COVID here. So we have clean data, and not clouded, like overseas.

This is of real concern. Our government, in fact all governments, need to consider this, that the vaccines themselves appear to be very dangerous, that they have caused a lot of extra deaths.

A full public enquiry is now required.

What the Swedish example shows is that a targetted response to COVID is necessary, as opposed to our government’s authoritarian sledgehammer approach, which has only served to divide our country and unnecessarily cause death to many innocent people.