The nomination of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to head up NIH reminds me that there was one country, Sweden, that tried to follow the principles outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration. That is, it tried to protect the elderly while allowing most other people to carry out their day to day activities unimpeded.
How did that work out? I think the results were mixed. Early in the pandemic, 2020, Sweden had over 1½ times the number of excess deaths(that is, deaths from all causes, including Covid) proportionate to the population than did other Scandinavia countries (Denmark, Finland, and Norway). This is to be expected, as few measures were taken in Sweden to reduce the incidence of the disease in the general population.
However in 2022 with the introduction of vaccination, Sweden’s excess death rate was about ½ the rate in the remaining Scandinavian countries. Sweden reduced its excess death rate while the rate in the other Scandinavian countries increased. This is what the Great Barrington Declaration predicted: that lock-downs and other restrictions at the front end of the epidemic would result in additional excess deaths when the epidemic was over. It is too early to judge whether this long tail will continue.
Finally, Covid deaths in Sweden, as opposed to excess deaths from all causes, over the whole course of the epidemic from 2020 to November 2024 showed Sweden doing badly: over 1½ times as many Covid deaths, proportionate to the population, as in the other Scandinavian countries.
We should note that Scandinavia as a whole, including Sweden, did better than many other European countries and much, much better than the USA where Covid death rates were higher than those in Scandinavia (leaving out Sweden). At the height of the pandemic, states controlled by Republicans had higher excess death rates than those controlled by Democrats.
As the threat of a new pandemic (a bird flu crossover to humans) approaches, we need to decide carefully which restriction over our behavior are necessary and which can be ignored. We must follow the data painfully gained from the recent Covid pandemic.
