Has Sweden Found the Right Solution to the Coronavirus?

If the COVID-19 pandemic tails off in a few weeks, months before the alarmists claim it will, they will probably pivot immediately and pat themselves on the back for the brilliant social-distancing controls that they imposed on the world. They will claim that their heroic recommendations averted total calamity. Unfortunately, they will be wrong; and Sweden, which has done almost no mandated social distancing, will probably prove them wrong.Lots of people are rushing to discredit Sweden’s approach, which relies more on calibrated precautions and isolating only the most vulnerable than on imposing a full lockdown. While gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited and high schools and colleges are closed, Sweden has kept its borders open as well as its preschools, grade schools, bars, restaurants, parks, and shops.President Trump has no use for Sweden’s nuanced approach. Last Wednesday, he smeared it in a spectacular fashion by saying he’d heard that Sweden “gave it a shot, and they saw things that were really frightening, and they went immediately to shutting down the country.” He and the public-health experts who told him this were wrong on both counts and would do better to question their approach. Johan Giesecke, Sweden’s former chief epidemiologist and now adviser to the Swedish Health Agency, says that other nations “have taken political, unconsidered actions” that are not justified by the facts.In the rush to lock down nations and, as a result, crater their economies, no one has addressed this simple yet critical question: How do we know social-isolation controls actually work? And even if they do work for some infectious epidemics, do they work for COVID-19? And even if they work for this novel coronavirus, do they have to be implemented by a certain point in the epidemic? Or are they locking down the barn door after the horses are long gone?In theory, less physical interaction might slow the rate of new infections. But without a good understanding of how long COVID-19 viral particles survive in air, in water, and on contact surfaces, even that is speculative. Without reliable information on what proportion of the population has already been exposed and successfully fought off the coronavirus, it’s worth questioning the value of social-isolation controls. It is possible that the fastest and safest way to “flatten the curve” is to allow young people to mix normally while requiring only the frail and sick to remain isolated.This is, in fact, the first time we have quarantined healthy people rather than quarantining the sick and vulnerable. As Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, wrote in The Spectator (U.K.) last week: “The theory of lockdown, after all, is pretty niche, deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested. It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”We’ve posed these simple questions to many highly trained infectious-disease doctors, epidemiologists, mathematical disease-modelers, and other smart, educated professionals. It turns out that, while you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict a person of theft and throw them in jail, you don’t need any actual evidence (much less proof) to put millions of people into a highly invasive and burdensome lockdown with no end in sight and nothing to prevent the lockdown from being reimposed at the whim of public-health officials. Is this rational?When we asked what evidence is available to support the utility of quarantine and social isolation, academics point to the Diamond Princess cruise ship, with 700 COVID-19 passenger cases and eight deaths. But the ship is an artificially engineered, densely packed container of humans that bears little resemblance to living conditions in most countries.The other major evidence academics often cite is the course run by the 1918 swine flu, which swept the globe 102 years ago and was not a coronavirus. Philadelphia did not practice social distancing during the 1918 pandemic, but St. Louis did and had a death rate lower than Philadelphia’s. But how is that relevant to today’s crisis? Apart from the post hoc, ergo propter hoc nature of the argument, a key difference was that the GIs returning from World War I Europe who were carrying the swine-flu virus couldn’t fly nonstop from Paris to St. Louis. They had to land at East Coast ports such as Philadelphia. It’s therefore not surprising that the sick GIs rested and convalesced while spreading the virus on the East Coast, and they got better before continuing to St. Louis and other interior cities.Basing the entire architecture of social distancing on the evidence from the 1918 swine flu makes no sense, especially when that architecture causes significant destruction in the lives and livelihoods of most of the American population.But the social-isolation advocates frantically grasp at straws to support shutting down the world. It bothers them that there is one country in the world that hasn’t shut down and that hasn’t socially isolated its population. It bothers them because when this coronavirus epidemic is over, they would probably love to conclude that social isolation worked.Sweden has courageously decided not to endorse a harsh quarantine, and consequently it hasn’t forced its residents into lockdown. “The strategy in Sweden is to focus on social distancing among the known risk groups, like the elderly. We try to use evidence-based measurements,” Emma Frans, a doctor in epidemiology at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, told Euronews. “We try to adjust everyday life. The Swedish plan is to implement measurements that you can practice for a long time.”The problem with lockdowns is that “you tire the system out,” Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, told the Guardian. “You can’t keep a lockdown going for months -- it’s impossible.” He told Britain’s Daily Mail: “We can’t kill all our services. And unemployed people are a great threat to public health. It’s a factor you need to think about.”If social isolation worked, wouldn’t Sweden, a Nordic country of 10.1 million people, be seeing the number of COVID-19 cases skyrocket into the tens of thousands, blowing past the numbers in Italy or New York City? As of today, there are 401 reported COVID-19 deaths in Sweden.The really good news is that in Sweden’s ICU census, which is updated every 30 minutes nationwide, admissions to every ICU in the country are flat or declining, and they have been for a week. As of this writing (based on currently available data), most of Sweden’s ICU cases today are elderly, and 77 percent have underlying conditions such as heart disease, respiratory disease, kidney disease, and diabetes. Moreover, there hasn’t been a single pediatric ICU case or death in Sweden — so much for the benefits of shutting down schools everywhere else. There are only 25 COVID-19 ICU admissions among all Swedes under the age of 30.Sweden is developing herd immunity by refusing to panic. By not requiring social isolation, Sweden’s young people spread the virus, mostly asymptomatically, as is supposed to happen in a normal flu season. They will generate protective antibodies that make it harder and harder for the Wuhan virus to reach and infect the frail and elderly who have serious underlying conditions. For perspective, the current COVID-19 death rate in Sweden (40 deaths per million of population) is substantially lower than the Swedish death rate in a normal flu season (in 2018, for instance, about 80 per million of population).Compare that with the situation to Switzerland, a similar small European country, which has 8.5 million people. Switzerland is practicing strict social isolation. Yet Switzerland reports 715 cumulative Wuhan-virus deaths as of today, for a death rate nearly double the number in Sweden. What about Norway, another Nordic country that shares a 1,000-mile open border with Sweden, with a language and culture very similar to Sweden’s? Norway (population 5.4 million) has fewer reported COVID-19 deaths (71) than Sweden but a substantially higher rate of coronavirus ICU admissions.On Friday, one of us spoke with Ulf Persson in his office at the Swedish Institute for Health Economics. He said that everyone he knows is calm and steady, behaving with more caution than normal, following such government-mandated social controls as a 50-person limit on gatherings and only sit-down service at bars and restaurants. Persson estimates that the Swedish economy will drop about 4 percent because of the global economic shutdowns. But that’s nothing compared with the Great Depression unemployment levels of 32 percent that the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of St. Louis recently forecast for the United States.Nature’s got this one, folks. We’ve been coping with new viruses for untold generations. The best way is to allow the young and healthy -- those for whom the virus is rarely fatal -- to develop antibodies and herd immunity to protect the frail and sick. As time passes, it will become clearer that social-isolation measures like those in Switzerland and Norway accomplish very little in terms of reducing fatalities or disease, though they crater local and national economies -- increasing misery, pain, death, and disease from other causes as people’s lives are upended and futures are destroyed.John Fund is a columnist for National Review and has reported frequently from Sweden. Joel Hay is a professor in the department of Pharmaceutical Economics and Policy at the University of Southern California. The author of more than 600 peer-reviewed scientific articles and reports, he has collaborated with the Swedish Institute for Health Economics for nearly 40 years.

How Tall Is Barron Trump? A Very Serious Investigation

The journalistic tradition of determining the height of a public figure is a long and storied one. While we can’t be certain that fledgling New York Times reporters hunted down clues in 1860 about the comparative heights of presidential candidates Abraham Lincoln (6’4”) and Stephen A. Douglas (5’4”), there’s no doubt that the men’s relative stature was of great interest to the electorate at large. (After all, Douglas’s nickname was “Little Giant” and, some 160 years later, Lincoln remains famous for his height — among, you know, other things.)In more recent years, similar investigations have been launched to determine the heights of everyone from Tom Cruise (5’7”) to Jake Gyllenhaal (5’11”) to Adam Driver (6’3” aka So Big). There’s even a website, the estimable CelebHeights, devoted to the topic. (Which, by the way, the only better place on the entire internet is FamousBirthdays, which affords a really generous interpretation of the word “famous.”)But, it isn’t only celebrities whose heights are of interest today, politicians’ heights are still a topic of conversation; the myth that the taller of any two presidential candidates is the one who always wins is still pervasive, if demonstrably false. However, while some people might be interested in the respective heights of Bernie Sanders (6’0”) and Joe Biden (also 6’0”), or are perhaps invested in the height of President Donald Trump (either 6’ ½”, down from 6’2” at his peak, or 6’3”), we are only interested in the height of one of the other current residents of the White House: Barron Trump. At 14 years old, Barron is the president’s youngest child, but he’s also, possibly, his tallest. As a recent photo of Barron revealed, the teenager is now towering over his parents, with whom he is currently sheltering in place, despite being not “as happy as he could be.” We can only hope that Barron’s Oedipus complex one day brings this national nightmare to an end. pic.twitter.com/jbO6BcULuF — Daniel Denvir (@DanielDenvir) April 6, 2020But, “towering over his parents” is not a height. So, how tall is Barron Trump?Interestingly, the internet has no definitive answers. A quick Google of “how tall is Barron Trump” simply confirms the fact that Barron is, indeed, tall, and then offers up the information that Donald Trump is 6’3” — though that is almost certainly not true, as the President has, in the past, said his height was 6’2” and, as is the case with many septuagenarians, is presumed to have shrunk a bit in stature. Still, though, Barron is taller than his father, so is 6’1” — at least.  Barron is also taller than his mother, Melania, whose height is said to be 5’11”; Melania is most frequently photographed wearing heels, which would make her appear to be closer to 6’1” or 6’2,” making Barron even taller than that.As is the case with pretty much all 14-year-olds, Barron wasn’t always as tall as he is now. (Obviously!) But because Barron has been not infrequently photographed during the precise years when most people experience significant growth spurts, his suddenly looming stature has become a point of interest. Where once it was possible to just say about Barron, “wow, he’s tall,” as compared to his notably tall parents, now there are calls for NBA scouts to visit 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, because, wow, he’s tall.Barron and his parents are not the only tall people in the Trump family. Don Jr. (6’1”), Eric (6’4”), and Ivanka (5’11”) are also objectively tall. Tiffany is not particularly tall (5’8”), but that’s not really so surprising, is it? Another prominent member of the Trump clan, Jared Kushner, is also tall (6’3”), and is one of those people whose height can be measured beyond mere inches, and verges into emotional measurement territory. (Kushner has been described as being “Slenderman-tall,” by me, to a friend. Slenderman is a cool 8’.)Unfortunately, there are virtually no recent photos of Barron with any of his siblings or sibling-in-laws that we could use to determine if Barron is definitively taller than either Eric (6’4”) or Kushner (6’3” or 8’, depending). But, that’s fine anyway, since the one thing of which we can be certain is that no matter how tall Barron is now, he’ll be taller soon, since most boys don’t finish growing until they’re 16, which is almost a full two years from now for Barron. And, according to one internet height predictor tool, by then, Barron might be 6’7″. To which we say, good for you, Barron. Good for you. Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?Was This Barron Trump Joke Okay?Alicia Keys, Billie Eilish, & Ali Wong Team UpTrailer For Beware The Slenderman Is Terrifying

Time to put China on lockdown for its dishonesty amid coronavirus crisis

China’s response was inept, dishonest and utterly inconsiderate of the world. We need to teach the Chinese government a lesson.

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  China says no new deaths in coronavirus milestone
  AFP
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  U.S. reports 1,200 coronavirus deaths in one day as China lifts lockdown
  NBC News

Nebraska man breaks into UFC contender's house, somehow lasts five minutes in ensuing fight

UFC's Anthony Smith said the alleged home invader more than held his own in a subsequent fight.

The US government has possibly millions of chickens in secret locations laying eggs year round for flu vaccines. The exact number and location are a matter of national security. Here's what we know about the chickens.

In the most recent flu season, 140 million eggs could have been used for vaccines. And hens only lay a single egg each day.

Older sibling sparks debate over ‘innocent’ gift for younger sister: ‘Your parents are insane’

A Reddit user is sparking a big debate about parenting after sharing the “privilege” they secretly gave their younger sister.

Police Look For Woman Who Says She’s ‘COVID-19 Positive’ And ‘Willfully Spreading’ It

The Carrollton Police Department in Texas wants to charge 18-year-old Lorraine Maradiaga with "terroristic threat."