Likewise, Sweden, a country that has handled the pandemic differently than most of the globe, is being chided for its looser restrictions and lack of lockdowns, even as data suggest their refusal to implement a full shutdown of their society may have been the best approach after all.
While most other countries instituted stay-at-home orders and shuttered schools and businesses, Sweden did not.
While high schools and universities closed and gatherings of more than 50 people were banned, elementary and middle schools, shops and restaurants have remained open during the pandemic.
Now, news outlets are trying to use Sweden as an example of what not to do to fight COVID-19, citing a high death toll.
“The country’s mortality rate from the coronavirus is now 30% higher than that of the United States when adjusted for population size,” CBS News reported, but this doesn’t tell the full picture of how Swedes have fared in comparison to the rest of the world.
If a novel virus is introduced to a population, eventually enough people acquire natural immunity so that the number of susceptible people declines. When the number susceptible is low enough to prevent epidemic growth, the herd immunity threshold, or HIT, has been reached.
With SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, some estimates have suggested that 60% to 70% of the population must be immune before HIT will be reached, but researchers from Oxford, Virginia Tech, and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine found that when individual variations in susceptibility and exposure are taken into account, the HIT declines to less than 10%....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...