News from the country we do not speak of
Well, as things stand now, I haven’t seen a single covid patient in the Emergency Room in over two and a half months. People have continued to become ever more relaxed in their behavior, which is noticeable in increasing volumes in the Emergency Room. At the peak of the pandemic in April, I was seeing about half as many patients per shift as usual, probably because lots of people were afraid to go the ER for fear of catching covid. Now volumes are back to normal.
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In spite of this relaxed attitude, the death rate has continued to drop. When I wrote the first article, I wrote that covid had killed under 6,000 people. How many people have died now, six weeks later? Actually, we’re still at under 6,000 deaths. On average, one to two people per day are dying of covid in [NAME REMOVED TO NOT TRIGGER SNOWFLAKES] at present, and that number continues to drop.
In the hospital where I work, there isn’t a single person currently being treated for covid. In fact, in the whole of Stockholm, a county with 2,4 million inhabitants, there are currently only 28 people being treated for covid in all the hospitals combined. At the peak, in April, that number was over 1,000. If 28 people are currently in hospital, out of 2,4 million who live in Stockholm, that means the odds of having a case of covid so severe that it requires in-hospital treatment are at the moment about one in 86,000.
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What about the vaccine? Will it arrive in time to make a difference? As I mentioned in my first article, lockdown only makes sense if you are willing to stay in lockdown until there is an effective vaccine. Otherwise you are merely postponing the inevitable. At the earliest, a vaccine will be widely available at some point in the middle of next year. How many governments are willing to keep their populations in lockdown until then? And what if the vaccine is only 30% effective? Or 50%? Will governments decide that is good enough for them to end lockdown? Or will they want to stay in lockdown until there is a vaccine that is at least 90% effective? How many years will that take?
So, to conclude: Covid is over in [NAME REMOVED TO NOT TRIGGER SNOWFLAKES]. We have herd immunity. Most likely, many other parts of the world do too, including England, Italy, and parts of the US, like New York. And the countries that have successfully contained the spread of the disease, like Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, and Australia, are going to have to stay in lockdown for at least another year, and possibly several years, if they don’t want to develop herd immunity the natural way.