Coronavirus vs Sweden, Who Will Win?

When it picking winners in the war between virus and mankind, I'll take the virus every time. For one thing, ewe are vastly outnumbered many trillions-to-one. A million exist in just a millimeter of seawater! Most of them are so small they cannot be seen by optical microscope so they are very hard to study. We knew about bacteria long before viruses were discovered in 1898, and we never would have found them except they were infecting our bacteria samples in the labs. In the last century months and even years of research has had to be chucked because it was found that viral infections took over cellular samples of entire sectors of the biotech industry, despite all their precautions.

The virus is completely alien to all other life, occupying their own Kingdom. It's even debatable whether they are alive themselves. Britannica calls them the "quintessential parasite" because they cannot even process proteins without stealing from host cells ribosomes. They mooch off the ATP of the cell for energy and all their metabolic functions are gained by use of the host cell. They are the most adaptable "creature" on the planet, surviving literally everywhere. They can even reform themselves out of random bits of DNA suspended in water and become infectious.

We are full of viruses, they are on everything we touch, inside our masks, DID YOU JUST TOUCH YOUR FACE?! Quite full of hubris is the man who thinks he can defeat a virus, if they all worked together against us, that is. You see good reader, we are very lucky to have a large contingent of viral traitors in and among us, who mean us no harm and actually fend off harmful bacteria for us. Luckily, viruses must not only compete with the pathetic humans, but also with each-other. The very adaptability of the virus works to our benefit: they are so small that they need not harm the host cell to propagate and so adaptable that the gentle strains tend to beat-out the dangerous strains. For example, being able to remain undetected in the human body for some weeks is a great boon to viral expansion. This means that the milder mutations of a given virus tend to spread wider than the virulent ones and confer protection from the more virulent strain. One of the questions that our gigantic lockdown experiment should answer (if sober heads ever prevail long-enough to study it impartially) is whether we have done ourselves more harm than good by limiting the spread of less-virulent corona strains that would have prepared the immune system to deal with the bad side of the family when they show up. In our arrogance we may have hamstrung our best defender: COVID-19 itself!

Corona is unusually dangerous because it combines the trait of a less-virulent strain, hiding undetectable for 10-14 days, but also can cause symptoms. This means it is practically impossible to contain once it has traveled far from the source, especially when the original host country lies about the spread and destroys priceless viral samples. This leads to anther danger, the fear it instills in the human populations. In this the virus has been aided and abetted by another "virus," the sensationalist and irresponsible media conglomerates (who are also infected by the CIA and other alphabet-soup agencies). Indeed, the media parasites rival the virus for insidious mooching off host population! But that for another post.

This infectious fear not only rages like wildfire through the general population, but also in the medical community. The results are catastrophic, as the Washington Post details:

At the bedside of a covid-19 patient, it’s easy to let fear take over — to feel as though nothing in our training has prepared us for this. Perhaps as a result, critical care doctors like us find themselves deviating from our proven techniques. We are regularly placing coronavirus patients on ventilators earlier than we would were it not for their diagnosis, out of fear that they might decompensate rapidly. We are starting neuromuscular blockade (paralysis) in 40% of patients, half of whom would generally not be considered sick enough to require it considering standard approaches to other viral illnesses like severe influenza, which also means these people are sedated very heavily into a coma — begetting another shortage, this one in sedative medications. Doctors typically use the precarious practice of paralysis less than 10 percent of the time, usually only in severely stiff lungs to prevent damaging them further by a ventilator. Now, reports from the field show, it’s being used to treat lungs that are not very stiff at all. Rather than turn to the protocols we know, critical care doctors are flying by the seat of our pants.

Amazingly, doctors have been treating COVID patients with more aggressive ventilation than normal pneumonia, despite lungs that are not  as stiff! This terror of COVID also deprives hospitals of many tools like CPAP machines that would be more effective than ventilation and allow patients to be mobile, but could also spread the virus faster. Information is throttled, but more and more medical professionals are coming forward all the time. We want to protect our nurses and doctors, of course, but if the virus only targets a fraction of the population we are doing more harm than good treating it like Ebola. Would the public ever have known anything of this if it were not for the heroic Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell? He worked through the peak in NYC and put his observations on YouTube, but had to quit working on the ICU floor on "moral grounds." How many more doctors have been carrying-out these new protocols in silence, knowing that any deviation from the panic narrative could result in a terrible personal backlash?

I started to realize the danger of panicked thinking pretty early-on in the game, though I do admit I was concerned when I first heard about the 2 week incubation period. So, as someone who avoids almost all network news-media, it was strange to converse with my Grandpa in the very early days of the corona panic. I called to see how he was doing and found that he had been home-bound and watching the news for days.  He proceeded to give me a long litany of terrorizing talking-points about how the virus does this and that and the other thing. It struck me that what he was describing was basically just general viral facts. Yes, some viruses are much more contagious than others. Yes, viruses do sometimes spread globally in a very short time. Yes, there is no vaccine to most viruses and many viruses arise every year that we are not immune to. But when packaged and presented by experts and worked-over by the billion-dollar medical PR agencies, these basic facts instill a crippling terror. What I wanted to know was, how deadly is it? As we saw in a previous post, not very.

Some countries have not fallen victim to the fear campaign, notably Sweden.  Sweden is a Western country comparable in manner of living and social mores to the US, despite propaganda being spread that they live in some sort of Nordic Utopia that is spotlessly clean. Yes, Sweden is different from the US, but it is much closer environmentally to where I live in Syracuse NY than Syracuse is to NYC. Therefore, we can generally extrapolate from the Swedish experience, as much as we can from State-to-State comparisons (naturally, the MSM only wants to extrapolate data from NYC and other hot-spot outliers).

Sweden has not responded with lockdown, but rather taken the sensible approach that has worked time and again throughout history: protect the elderly and frail and take some minor precautions. They did restrict large gatherings, but life for them has mostly gone on as normal. As a result of this prudence Sweden is only about a week or two away from herd immunity  These days herd-immunity is characterized as related to vaccination, but it also works just fine for every virus that does not have a vaccine (almost all of them). Exceptions to this rule like Spanish Flu do exist and have been devastating, but they are very rare.

When comparing vaccines to natural her-immunity we see there are positives and negatives. Vaccines contain compounds designed to agitate the immune-system and guarantee antibody formation, so they can make herd immunity happen faster. But if a virus is so weak that the body can shrug it off without even forming antibodies, is that really cause for alarm? On the other hand, vaccines do not last as long as natural immunity. Either way, herd immunity is established when enough people are not friendly hosts to a virus whether or not they have antibodies. While Sweden is called "radical" in the current media climate, what they are doing is utterly prosaic.

In the herd-immunity debate susceptibility has to be considered also. Antibody immunity is only necessary in the portion of the population that is susceptible to infection. This could be as low as 14-18% according to data from closed environments such as the Diamond Princess and the infected aircraft carrier. This helps explain why hospitalizations are leveling-off everywhere even with relatively low antibody prevalence in populations. Keep in mind that hospitalizations are a more important metric than confirmed cases, which continue to grow on-par with testing capacity. The more we test the more we find so we have to look at hospitalizations to see where we are on the "curve" of the epidemic. Infections lags 10 or more days behind hospitalizations, so the peak of the epidemic is actually well-past.

As Sweden's chief epidemiologist says:

We are doing two major investigations. We may have those results this week or a bit later in May. We know from modeling and some data we have already – these data are a little uncertain – that we probably had a transmission peak in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, which means that we are probably hitting the peak of infections right about now. We think that up to 25% of people in Stockholm have been exposed to coronavirus and are possibly immune. A recent survey from one of our hospitals in Stockholm found that 27% of staff there are immune. We think that most of those are immune from transmission in society, not the workplace. We could reach herd immunity in Stockholm within a matter of weeks.

Because of Sweden's successful example the idea of herd-immunity is being discussed and finally some health authorities are beginning to admit what should have been apparent from the start. Sweden's Anders Tengell:

"If you can't get population immunity how can we then think a vaccine will protect us?"

I realize that doctors are duty-bound to shill for vaccines at every opportunity, but it is nice to see some actual common-sense thrown in the mix now and then! All the more so because we have never been able to develop a vaccine for a coronavirus and perhaps never will.

Yet I believe that this debating of the merits of herd-immunity is a bit of a distraction. Humans have not gone extinct despite many trillions of novel viruses showing up on the scene many thousands of years before vaccines were created. We have done this before and we will do it again. We are quite full of ourselves to think that somehow we can defeat all viruses, just because we have had some limited success in vaccinating against a few of them. The virus can always adapt to anything we throw at it. The real question is not "Can we stop the virus from spreading?" (we can't), but "Can our hospitals deal with a temporary surge?" Sweden has shown that they can even without any lockdown at all.

The death toll has not been negligible, however. According to worldometer 2,679 Swedes have lost their lives. This will likely increase by at least several hundred before the virus levels-off. But then they will be over with it, while countries in lockdown have to keep fighting a war of containment, using methods that are horribly destructive to human health. Our peak in deaths per-million is lower than  Sweden's, but the epidemic will last longer. Excepting differences in demographics the death-toll will be about the same. Many will hate to confess it, but the cure is worse than the disease.

We must not forget that the only way lockdown can save lives over the whole cycle of the virus is if it prevents hospitals from becoming over-capacity. Delaying deaths and spreading them out over a longer period does not reduce them. Data from all over the world has shown hospital systems are able to deal with the surge, so why are we pretending that lockdown does more good than harm? Perhaps we have been infected with something even more dangerous and difficult to observe than even the virus: an epidemic of fear and paranoia. This infection might prove harder to shake-off than the coronavirus. To cure this infection of paranoia we have to look at the facts with rationality and not fall into sentimentalism. We must deal rationally with the viruses among us, or we will only do more harm to ourselves than they ever could.