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“UK Lockdown One Year On: It Doesn't Work, It Never Worked, & It Wasn't Supposed To Work” – by Kit Knightly.
Published on March 25, 2021.
It shows the following chart
as evidence that lockdowns do not work. It then goes to advocate for no lockdowns, no social distancing, no masks etc. and blames such restriction as being useless and propagated by governments for ulterior motives.
However, according to the Wall Street Journal Jan 8 edition "Sweden had until recently followed a largely voluntary approach to virus precautions such as social distancing. It also avoided widespread school closures and mask mandates. However, with more than 9,200 deaths related to covid-19, Sweden has the highest per capita death rate of Scandinavian countries and is now struggling to handle a surge in cases at overstretched hospitals. January 2021, Sweden passed a law allowing COVID-19 lockdowns."
There are of course differences between the UK and Sweden including the sizes of the population, the climates
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, the strains of the virus prevalent in the country and the social environments (e.g. health systems, governance etc.).
Using the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) COVID-19 data, we compare Sweden with other Scandinavian countries and the UK.
Per Capita
If we compare the Nordic countries adjacent to Sweden with the UK there is a huge difference:
| Rank | County | Population 2021 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | UK | 67,886,011 |
| 2 | Sweden | 10,106,169 |
| 3 | Denmark | 5,813,298 |
| 4 | Finland | 5,548,369 |
| 5 | Norway | 5,465,630 |
Thus we need to normalize the cases and deaths by the per capita. We thus report the cases or deaths per million population. A comparison between the Scandinavian countries by per capita cases and deaths is shown below:
7 day Smoothed confirmed cases and deaths per million population fo Scandinavian countries | Cumulative deaths per million population |
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Sweden stands out as leading in both cases and deaths per million population. In fact, Sweden has had over three times the number deaths per capita than the follower up Denmark and over 8 times that for neighboring Finland and Norway.
Next let's look at the UK vs Sweden
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This time the charts for Sweden and the UK are very similar with the UK leading in cumulative deaths per million population, while Sweden leads in the cumulative cases per million population. The recent surge in Sweden's deaths is interesting, whether it has anything to do with the lockdown or the introduction of the UK virus, I do not hazard a guess.