As a reminder that a few of us has been posting about Sweden's Lockdown Lite approach and now the recent increasing restrictions in Sweden to fight the growing threat from mutations (variants) of Covid-19... It's pure madness. Citizens of Sweden need to do what it takes to prevent going into a lockdown as their infection cases has slowly begun to rise again due to the mutations (variants) of Covid-19 although recent articles about the rise in the numbers do not specifically blame it all on the variants. Essentially, more people need to be vaccinated and more need to follow the health guidelines involving their new restrictions. ------- Hundreds gather in illegal COVID-19 protest in Stockholm The Associated Press Staff Published Saturday, March 6, 2021 1:51PM EST Last Updated Saturday, March 6, 2021 3:31PM EST STOCKHOLM -- Swedish police on Saturday dispersed hundreds of people who had gathered in central Stockholm to protest coronavirus restrictions set by the Swedish government. Swedish authorities said the demonstration -- the first major protest against the country's coronavirus restrictions -- was illegal as it was held without permission. Stockholm police said on their website they decided to cut short the gathering just after it started when the number of participants exceeded the limits for public gatherings under Sweden's pandemic laws. Video footage on Swedish media showed a sizable number without masks gathering in Medborgarplatsen square not far from the capital's Old Town. Local media estimated 300 to 500 people attended. Swedish tabloids Aftonbladet and Expressen reported that the demonstration was dispersed largely peacefully but six police officers were injured after scuffles broke out with some protesters who didn't want to leave. Aftonbladet said the rally was organised by a group named Freedom Sweden, which it said believes that COVID-19 rules restrict human freedom. "There are so many people in Sweden who have had enough of these restrictions, which are really unfounded, and want to put their foot down and show that we don't agree to it anymore," Filip Sjostrom, an organizer from Freedom Sweden, told Expressen. According to Expressen, the protesters included far-right activists, people against vaccines and some families with children. In the beginning of the pandemic, Sweden, unlike most other European countries, opted to keep its society largely open with few restrictions but the government has taken a substantially harder stance in the past few months. Sweden has seen over 13,000 deaths in the pandemic, while its Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway and Finland, who chose to impose coronavirus restrictions much earlier, have a combined COVID-19 death toll of 3,777. https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/hundreds-gather-in-illegal-covid-19-protest-in-stockholm-1.5336705 ------- wrbtrader
Sweden like many countries...also has to deal with those spreading misinformation / disinformation about Covid-19. Just like everywhere else in the world...its really never been about a country having a lockdown. It has always been about the spread of misinformation / disinformation that makes people think there's an insidious plot to take away their rights. ------- Why Sweden had an anti-lockdown protest without having a lockdown Richard Orange richard.orange@thelocal.com @Richard_Orange 8 March 2021 11:56 CET Updated 8 March 2021 11:56 CET #coronavirus The demonstration was held in Stockholm on Saturday. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT Around 600 people descended on Stockholm's Medborgarplatsen on Saturday to demonstrate against coronavirus restrictions, the first time large-scale anti-lockdown protests common in Germany and France and the UK have been seen in Sweden. Who was behind the Stockholm march? Saturday’s march, called The Thousand-man March for Freedom and Truth, was arranged by Filip Sjöström, a former student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. On his Facebook page, Sjöström describes the Covid-19 epidemic as a “plandemic”, a reference to a pair of widely debunked viral conspiracy theory videos, which claim that Covid-19 was designed by a collaboration between labs in the US and in Wuhan, China, that the flu vaccine makes you more susceptible to coronavirus, and that wearing face masks “activates your own virus”. “We refuse to follow a whole load of laws which have been created on the back of a pandemic which in my opinion does not even exist,” he wrote on the group’s page. See also on The Local: How many people turned up and what was the atmosphere like? According to Swedish police, 600 people attended the march. They carried banners bearing slogans such as “Vaccine Experiment”, “Sweden is sick, Stop 5G”, and “The media is the virus”. Swedish public broadcaster SVT reported that there were also signs that were “critical of immigration and Louis Pasteur”, a French 19th century biologist involved in creating some of the first vaccines in history. When police broke up the demonstration, taking away 50 protesters in bus, most of those remaining refused to disperse, instead marching towards the Kungsträdgården park, with five police officers lightly injured trying to bring them under control. Another officer had to be taken to hospital. What will happen to the organisers? Sjöström risks receiving a fine of 20,000 kronor for organising an event with more than the eight allowed people, according to Helena Remnerud, who leads the inspection division at Stockholm’s country administrative board. This would make him the first person in Sweden fined under the pandemic law which came into force in January. While police removed 50 demonstrators, no one was arrested. A banner falsely claiming that coronavirus is a ‘made-up plandemic’. Photo: Henrik Montgomery/TT How have the authorities in Sweden reacted? Sweden’s interior minister, Mikael Damberg, told the TT newswire that the attack on police was “not only unacceptable but also a serious crime that can lead to a prison sentence”. He said it was irresponsible for the protesters to break the eight-person limit. “This is not the time for big gatherings. Following the public order law is not voluntary. The eight-person maximum for demonstrations is there for an important reason, which is to reduce the spread of infection.” Johan Styrud, the chief physician at Stockholm’s Danderyd Hospital attacked the protests as “totally crazy”. “Right now, there are a whole load of movements on the internet which don’t believe in either coronavirus or the vaccine,” he told the Aftonbladet newspaper. “All I can really say is: “Come here to out hospital and see what life is like. It won’t take long to convince you that this is a dangerous, deadly disease.” How does the Stockholm march compare to others in Europe? There have been other demonstrations in Sweden before, focusing on specific measures – such as restaurant owners or theatre workers calling for financial aid following tougher rules – but none on the scale of Saturday’s protest, or those seen in many other countries. There have also been demonstrations calling for further pandemic restrictions. Germany has been the hardest hit by anti-lockdown protests, with more than a dozen major protests so far, with the largest taking place in November when more than 20,000 protesters attended a rally in Leipzig and 10,000 in Berlin. A joint study by ZEW and HU Berlin, published in February, concluded that between 16,000 and 21,000 infections could have been prevented if the rallies had not taken place. In Denmark, a group called Men in Black has held demonstrations of about 1,000 people in February, and in The Netherlands, 180 people were arrested at the end of January after three nights of consecutive violent protests. Why is it significant? Sweden’s government and public health agency have frequently cited the low level of public resistance in Sweden as evidence that the country’s relatively light-touch restrictions are more sustainable than the tougher lockdown approach taken by other countries. What’s the state of Sweden’s coronavirus restrictions? Sweden long relied on more voluntary measures than many other countries, coupled with binding restrictions on specific parts of society, for example the limit on public gatherings, and closures of non-essential public services. In recent months it has been stepping up its binding rules, and plans to extend its pandemic law which would give the government increased powers to order private businesses to shut down. https://www.thelocal.se/20210308/ex...i-lockdown-protest-without-having-a-lockdown/ ------- wrbtrader
Swedish author of paper about COVID in schools deliberately left out key data that contradicted his conclusion. The author's attempt to downplay the risks of COVID in schools align with his political agenda as staunch defender of his country’s unorthodox (and failed) coronavirus policies. Critics slam letter in prestigious journal that downplayed COVID-19 risks to Swedish schoolchildren https://www.sciencemag.org/news/202...ous-journal-downplayed-covid-19-risks-swedish Pediatrician and epidemiologist Jonas Ludvigsson of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute has been a staunch defender of his country’s unorthodox coronavirus policies. Among them was the decision in the spring of 2020 to keep preschools and schools open for children through grade nine, despite limited understanding of the virus and with few precautions to prevent school outbreaks. But Ludvigsson’s research, which suggested that policy was relatively safe—and has been widely cited in arguments against school closures—has repeatedly come under fire from critics of Sweden’s approach. The latest example is a research letter, published online by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 6 January, that looked at severe disease and deaths among children and teachers in Sweden between March and June 2020. Critics—including the authors of two letters NEJM published on 1 March—have said the study was beside the point and a distraction. It’s well known that children are less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19; instead, schools worldwide have shut down to slow the spread of the virus in the wider community. But Science has learned that another complaint sent to NEJM makes a more serious allegation: that the authors deliberately left out key data that contradicted their conclusion. The complaint comes from Bodil Malmberg, a private citizen in Vårgårda, Sweden. She used the country’s open records law to obtain email correspondence between Ludvigsson and Swedish chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, the architect of the country’s pandemic policies, that shed light on how the paper came about. Malmberg says she requested the emails because the data in the NEJM paper “did not add up.” Ludvigsson does not dispute the content of the emails, but stands by the study’s conclusions. However, he says the barrage of criticism and personal attacks has made him decide to quit COVID-19 research. Ludvigsson, whose prepandemic research focused on gastroenterology, was one of the 47 original signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial document published in October 2020 that argued that pandemic policies should focus on protecting the vulnerable while the rest of the population builds up immunity through natural infection. Ludvigsson’s research seemed to support those ideas. In a review about children’s role in the pandemic, published in Acta Paediatrica in May 2020, he reported there had been “no major school outbreaks in Sweden,” which he attributed to “personal communication” from Tegnell. But as critics noted, Swedish media had reported several school outbreaks by then, including one in which at least 18 of 76 staff were infected and one teacher died. (Children were not tested.) His NEJM letter sounded another reassuring note. It reported that in all of Sweden, only 15 children, 10 preschool teachers, and 20 school teachers were admitted to intensive care units for COVID-19 complications between March and June 2020. The authors noted that 69 children ages 1 to 16 died of any cause in Sweden during that same period, compared with 65 between November 2019 and February 2020, suggesting the pandemic had not led to an increase in child deaths. But the emails obtained by Malmberg show that in July 2020, Ludvigsson wrote to Tegnell that “unfortunately we see a clear indication of excess mortality among children ages 7-16 old, the ages where ‘kids went to school.’” For the years 2015 through 2019, an average of 30.4 children in that age group died in the four spring months; in 2020, 51 children in that age group died, “= excess mortality +68%,” Ludvigsson wrote. The increase could be a fluke, he wrote, especially because the numbers are small. Deaths in 1- to 6-year-olds were below average during the same period, so combining the age groups helped even out the increase, he noted. It wasn’t clear what caused the jump in mortality in 2020; Ludvigsson asked whether Tegnell could help track down the causes of death, which Ludvigsson said would take too long for him to do because of ethical restrictions. Ludvigsson told Science he and his colleagues still have not been able to determine how most children died in the spring of 2020; he says those data were requested from the National Board of Health and Welfare but aren’t available yet. He says a peer reviewer for NEJM suggested the comparison to deaths in November through February, and that he combined the numbers for preschool and school children because of NEJM’s length requirements. As part of his 1 March response to the published critiques, he updated the paper’s supplementary data with the monthly deaths from 2015 through 2020, but did not flag the 68% increase in school-aged children. The emails “cast a serious shadow” on the research letter, Malmberg wrote in an email to NEJM. (The journal declined to comment on her complaint.) Epidemiologist Jonas Björk of Lund University agrees that the time comparison used in the paper was unusual. “I can see no good reason to compare with previous months,” he says. “It is standard to compare with the same period in previous years” to account for seasonality and to decrease statistical uncertainty. The rise in mortality is unlikely to be due solely to COVID-19, Björk notes. Although Sweden tested very few children in the early months of the pandemic, fatal cases of COVID-19 would have likely shown up somewhere in the health care system. “This of course must be ruled out by looking at causes of death and medical records in more detail,” he says. And Björk agrees that the increase could be due to chance. The mortality questions aside, critics say the NEJM letter just wasn’t very helpful in the heated debate over school closures. The main concern is not that children may end up in intensive care, but that schools may accelerate community spread, says Antoine Flahault, a global health expert at the University of Geneva and a co-author on one of the critiques in NEJM. Nisha Thampi, a pediatric infectious disease physician at the CHEO pediatric health and research center in Ottawa, Canada, agrees. The paper “doesn’t really tell me much about what’s happening to kids in schools,” she says. Arguing about whether schools are “safe” has slowed down efforts to find ways to reduce the risk of viral spread in classrooms and hallways, Flahault says—which is key to keeping schools open and the virus under control.
1.95 million kids younger than age 16 attended schools in Sweden without masks between March 2020 and June 2020 15 of them (1 in 130,000) developed severe Covid-19 and none died. LOL Sweden was the model.
Where are you getting your magical figures from? The article above shows 51 students in Sweden died in 2020 demonstrating an excess mortality rate above 68%.
The number of deaths from any cause among the 1,951,905 children in Sweden (as of December 31, 2019) who were 1 to 16 years of age was 65 during the pre–Covid-19 period of November 2019 through February 2020 and 69 during 4 months of exposure to Covid-19 (March through June 2020) (see the Supplementary Appendix). From March through June 2020, a total of 15 children with Covid-19 (including those with MIS-C) were admitted to an ICU (0.77 per 100,000 children in this age group) (Table 1), 4 of whom were 1 to 6 years of age (0.54 per 100,000) and 11 of whom were 7 to 16 years of age (0.90 per 100,000). Four of the children had an underlying chronic coexisting condition (cancer in 2, chronic kidney disease in 1, and hematologic disease in 1). No child with Covid-19 died. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670
I'm not sure why Sweden would try to eliminate (remove) the upper age limit on one of their available vaccines when that particular vaccine is still in phase 3 trials and the fact other countries are still waiting for phase 3 trials to complete for that particular vaccine in question. I strongly believe what they're doing will create vaccination anxiety involving this particular vaccine especially if someone shows up for a vaccination appointment and its the only vaccine being offered at that particular city location. ------- Sweden moves towards eliminating upper age limit on AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine 12:20 p.m. ET, March 4, 2021 From CNN’s James Frater and Henrik Pettersson Syringes are loaded with the AstraZeneca Covid-19 Vaccine at the Skane University Hospital vaccination centre in Malmo, Sweden, on February 17. Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency/AFP/Getty Images The Swedish Health Authority, Folkhälsomyndigheten, recommended eliminating the upper age limit for use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. This would allow it to be used on people over age 65. “New data from the UK confirms that AstraZeneca's vaccine has a good protective effect even for people over 65 years of age,” the Health Authority said in a statement Thursday. The decision follows reversals made by Belgium and Germany, who have also changed their advice on administering the AstraZeneca vaccine in the elderly. Many European countries have set an upper limit on the age of recipients of the vaccine, citing a lack of clinical study information about its effects on older people. In February the Swedish Health Authority approved the vaccine only for use in people under age 65, saying at the time of authorization there was “too little data on the vaccine's protective effect for people over 65 years of age. “Waiting for more data was considered necessary, as the need for protection of the elderly is particularly high due to their increased risk of serious illness and death by Covid-19,” the statement said. Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said that “all vaccines offered are very effective and according to the studies have a good protective effect for anyone over 18 years.” Three vaccines are approved for use in Sweden: Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca. According to the latest data from the Swedish Health Authority, 568,031 people have received at least one vaccine dose (6.9% of the adult population) and 285,178 (3.5%) have been given both doses. https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-...s-03-04-21/h_38a5b09aa6227ebfcc048ca78024f37a ------- wrbtrader
You do realize the entire article is about Ludvigsson using fake data in the NEJM article that does not represent the number of sick and dead school-age children in Sweden due to COVID. You are merely quoting his fake data. Scientists and medical researchers are demanding that the NEJM retract his paper and two letters.
Completely fake data --- that is widely criticized. With world-wide demands that the NEJM retract the paper and two letters. The paper by Ludvigsson is nothing more than a political hack job pushing false information.