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Post by Admin on May 15, 2020 19:27:40 GMT
Several European countries have now made face masks compulsory on public transport. Why is Sweden not following suit? Following the newly presented EU guidelines, stipulating that face masks should be worn while travelling, the Scandinavian airline SAS was quick to announce that, from now on, all air travellers over the age of six are required to wear a face mask throughout their flight.
Information about the protection face masks provide is ambiguous. Many countries promote the use of face masks in public spaces. Yet Sweden still does not, even after the latest advice from the European Commission. You're allowed to wear one, but the guidelines state they are "not needed in everyday life".
"Face masks in public spaces do not provide any greater protection to the population," Johan Carlson from the Swedish Public Health Agency Folkhälsomyndigheten said at a press conference on May 13th.
Swedish health authorities argue that keeping a distance, washing your hands, not touching your face, and staying at home if you experience any symptoms are still the best ways to halt the spread of the coronavirus. There is a concern that wearing face masks would make people follow these guidelines less strictly.
Prime minister Stefan Löfven told reporters at the same press conference: "There is a risk of a false sense of security, that you believe that you can't be infected if you wear a face mask."
How to wear your coronavirus face mask In addition, the Public Health Agency states on its website that wearing a mask could increase the chances of you touching your face, because of itchiness or as you adjust the cloth. Every time your hands touch your eyes, nose or mouth, the risk of being infected with the coronavirus increases.
"The virus can gather in the mask and when you take it off, the virus can be transferred to your hands and thereby spread further," state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell told SVT.
Healthcare staff use face masks as to prevent bacteria from transferring to their patients. But face masks used in hospitals are generally of a different kind than single-use, lightweight masks bought at pharmacies.
"Face masks can be effective against larger free floating particles [connected to air pollution], but nothing suggests that they help protect you from air-borne viruses," Tegnell said to SVT.
Why is Denmark not recommending face masks to the public? So why are other countries recommending face masks? Well, one reason is to increase people's feeling of safety. Another is as a precaution, to protect your surroundings in case you are, unknowingly, contagious.
As recently as February, the World Health Organisation stated that viral transmission from asymptomatic people was rare, based on information available at the time. But a growing body of data now suggests that a significant number of infected people who don't have symptoms can still transmit the virus.
It is these 'silent carriers' that have prompted some countries, such as France, to shift their guidelines from being in line with Sweden's, to even making them compulsory in some circumstances in public places.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the EU's infectious disease agency, at the start of April advised EU governments that masks could be helpful in reducing transmission. "A face mask may help reduce the spread of infection in the community by minimising the excretion of respiratory droplets from infected individuals who may not even know they are infected and before they develop any symptoms," it reported. It added, though, that it was not currently recommending that people who do not feel ill, or who are not working in healthcare or other care roles, wear masks. This came despite its acknowledgement that worn properly, non-medical and even home-made masks might reduce the spread of infection if worn by those with asymptomatic infections, even if they might not protect the wearer themselves.
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Post by Admin on May 16, 2020 0:31:29 GMT
Herd immunity has emerged in recent weeks as a popular talking point among people who argue that coronavirus lockdowns have been too stringent.
Herd immunity is a concept in epidemiology that describes how people can collectively stave off infections if some percentage of the population has immunity to a disease.
But herd immunity in relation to the coronavirus is far from a reality, particularly without a vaccine. Ryan said the term "herd immunity" emerged from veterinary epidemiology, typically involving business decisions of whether to let animals die for the overall health of a herd.
"An individual animal in that sense doesn't matter, from the perspective of the brutal economics of that decision-making," Ryan said.
"So I think we need to be really careful when we use terms in this way around natural infection in humans, because it can lead to a very brutal arithmetic which does not put people and life and suffering at the center of that equation," he said.
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Health professionals and officials continue to warn that there is no easy way out of the coronavirus pandemic, particularly with parts of the U.S. beginning to ease lockdowns. Herd immunity remains out of reach, even in the places hardest hit by the pandemic.
There are two main ways to achieve high levels of immunity in a population: Either enough people have already been infected and their immune systems have developed antibodies to protect against future infections — at least for the short term — or there is a vaccine. Without herd immunity or effective treatments — and in the absence of social distancing measures — it's expected that countries will need to prepare for periodic and unpredictable spikes of new infections until a vaccine is widely available.
For COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, it's estimated that 50 percent to 70 percent of the population will need to be immune to achieve herd immunity.
Despite more than 4.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, no country is even approaching the levels of immunity needed to collectively slow transmissions.
In Wuhan, China, thousands of people returning to work in April were tested for antibodies, and preliminary results found that only 2 percent to 3 percent had developed them. Early results from a nationwide study in Spain found that about 5 percent of the roughly 90,000 people tested were positive for antibodies. And even in hard-hit regions, such as New York City, preliminary testing of 1,300 people found that 21.2 percent were positive for antibodies.
"That means 80 percent of the population would appear to still be susceptible," said Dr. Robert Atmar, an infectious disease specialist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "So even in an area that has been highly affected, we're not seeing the levels that you would expect for herd immunity."
Herd immunity, which varies depending on the pathogen, is calculated based on the transmissibility of a disease — the number of people one infected person will then go on to infect. In general, a disease that is more transmissible needs a higher proportion of the population to be immune for herd immunity to be effective.
"For a disease like measles, it's necessary for more than 95 percent of the population to be immune, but for other pathogens, the number of people required to be immune can be lower," Atmar said.
That raises concerns for any country trying to lift lockdown restrictions, said Dr. David Dowdy, an associate professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
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Post by Admin on May 16, 2020 19:25:52 GMT
Preliminary results from a nationwide coronavirus antibody study show that about 5% of the overall Spanish population has been affected, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday, adding that results varied widely from region to region.
The study, carried out by the Carlos III institute for health and the National Statistics Institute, began on April 27 and aimed to test 90,000 people across 36,000 households for the presence of antibodies generated to fight off the virus.
Even Spain is far from “herd immunity” The study was carried out by the Carlos III Institute for Health and Spain’s National Statistics Institute, and thanks to that official backing, researchers were able to obtain samples from more than 36,000 randomly selected households across the country. (They tested nearly 70,000 people in total, meaning it’s a robust sample.) And precisely because the outbreak in Spain has been very bad, there was a much lower risk of the preliminary results being twisted by false positives.
What they found was that about 10-14 percent of the population in and around Madrid has antibodies, along with about 7 percent of the population of Barcelona and smaller numbers outside of Spain’s two major cities. Across the country, it averages out to roughly 5 percent.
This means that even if the news is good and people with antibodies have a strong and long-lasting form of protection against reinfection, “there is no herd immunity” in the Spanish population, according to the country’s health minister.
Cases in Spain have dropped dramatically over the past month, and the country is moving to lift some restrictions on activities (its lockdown orders were much stricter than anything that has been done anywhere in America). But the vast majority of the population remains vulnerable to new waves of outbreaks. Spain has had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks to afflict a sizable country, but there’s no reason to think things couldn’t get much worse elsewhere if a region has bad luck and bad policy.
That is the fundamentally sobering lesson for America.
The US’s case volumes and daily death tolls have fallen over the course of May, which has generated lots of talk of bent curves and peaks. But there’s no mechanical reason that caseloads can’t rise as people start to travel again, as businesses reopen, and as even basic precautions like wearing a mask become fodder for culture wars.
Spain has suffered more than double America’s per-capita death toll, but that’s based on just 5 percent of the population becoming infected. If the US reaches infection rates of 10-20 percent — to say nothing of the 60 percent threshold some scientists think is necessary for herd immunity to kick in — there will likely be many more deaths.
The Spanish data suggests about 1.15 percent of those who got infected in Spain ended up dying. Spain has a significantly older age profile than the US, so Americans might be better off. But the fact remains that if the virus fully blows through our population, the US could end up with millions of deaths — there’s no secret pool of hidden infections to indicate the virus is much less deadly than assumed.
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Post by Admin on May 20, 2020 21:20:25 GMT
Sweden has taken a soft approach to virus restrictions and although its rules are likely to be in place longer than in other countries, officials are adamant their strategy is a winner in the long term. "This fight against COVID-19 is a marathon," Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said recently, adding that his officials "strongly believe" their measures are viable for the long haul. While people in other European countries have gradually begun returning to their workplaces in recent weeks, Swedes have been strongly advised to continue working from home, and possibly not just for weeks, but for months to come. The European Union has started planning for a phased restart of travel this summer but Sweden has told its residents they will have to holiday at home, extending a non-essential travel advisory until at least July 15 -- the middle of the country's main holiday month. Other restrictions on travel, sport and care-home visits are also likely to remain in place even while other countries try to re-emerge from lockdowns. However, Sweden never imposed full lockdown measures -- under-16s have continued to go to school, patrons have not been stopped from going to cafes, bars and restaurants. Although people have been urged to limit contacts and practise social distancing, the restrictions are advisory. "It's apparently reasonably easy to start a lockdown, but stopping it is much more difficult," state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell of the Public Health Agency told AFP. He noted the difficulty of getting people to follow recommendations when "one day you're supposed to do this and the next you're supposed to do something else". - 'Future model' - Some have accused Sweden of playing Russian roulette with citizens' lives by allowing the virus to circulate slowly in society, with the main goal being to ensure the public healthcare system can keep pace. The consequences are difficult to miss -- Sweden's death rate stood at 371 per million inhabitants on Tuesday, roughly eight times the rate in Norway and Finland, according to the Worldometer website.
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Post by Admin on May 23, 2020 21:07:28 GMT
No one, however, would have predicted this news item from last week: “Covid-19 deaths in Sweden were the highest in Europe per capita in a rolling seven-day average between 12 and 19 May.” It confirmed that Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell’s “mitigation” strategy of allowing shops, restaurants, gyms, schools and workplaces to remain open was a deadly folly. It does not even seem to have produced herd immunity. Just 7.3% of Stockholm’s inhabitants had developed Covid-19 antibodies by the end of April.
All those deaths for so little point. In Sweden of all places. A country where the need to protect society from harm is knitted into the national consensus, and whose supposed moderation produced the spectacularly inoffensive music of Abba and the furniture of Ikea. Sweden’s position may be graver than the weekly figure implies, Lena Einhorn, a Swedish virologist and author, told me. Recorded cases of Covid-19 follow a bell curve. All severely infected countries, including the UK, are seeing infections fall as they move down the far side of the curve, apart from Trump’s America and Sweden. In both instances, they have declined slightly then hit a plateau.
The Swedish sickness is a political as well as a medical disaster. Professor Johan Giesecke, an adviser to the Swedish government alongside Tegnell, became a star of the rightwing web as he lectured other governments on the futility of their tough measures. British Conservative commentators have boomed out claims that Sweden showed there was no need to close the UK economy. Sweden had “held its nerve”, they gushed, in much the same way communists once gushed about the Soviet Union. They praised Johnson for holding his nerve for a few weeks while he let the virus run amok, but damned him as a “scaredy cat” and “pant-wetter” as he U-turned and locked Britain down. Don’t be too quick to scoff at pundits who never made it out of the prep-school playground. They may talk like prepubescents but their readers are running and wrecking the country.
Every foreign visitor notices Sweden's respect for institutions and the faintly stultifying conformity The right should not be our first concern, however, and not only because Sweden’s dead deserve better. The tragedy of the Swedish outbreak is that it is a warning of what happens to countries that trust too much. We are not used to thinking about such dangers of too much deference. Across the world, strongmen have successfully undermined it in country after country. The media are biased against the leader. The civil service is filled with saboteurs. The judges aren’t impartial. As they suspend parliaments and persuade their supporters that bad news is fake news, they leave them with nothing left to believe in except the leader and his party.
Sweden has resisted the global turn towards demagoguery. Every foreign visitor notices the respect for institutions and the faintly stultifying conformity. Richard Orange, our correspondent in Stockholm, offered me the wonderful word åsiktskorridoren, “opinion corridor”: the narrow range of views that respectable people hold. They are not constant. They can pass from social democracy to neoliberal conservatism. But while Swedes are trapped in a corridor, it seems as if they can never change. And then, all of a sudden, and with no debate, they shift to a new corridor and carry on as if nothing has happened. Anyone who has seen Labour switch from Corbynism to Starmerism without blinking an eye will recognise the phenomenon. Swedish journalists tend to see themselves as having a duty to prop up society as well as report on it. Such is their deference that last week, Frode Forland, Norway’s state epidemiologist, complained that there had been almost no critical media coverage of the high death rate in Sweden. It is with a rare twinge of patriotic pride that I say that no one could level this charge at the British media.
The Swedish public and press have trusted Tegnell. Sticking by him has become a nationalist badge of honour, and not because politicians are urging voters to believe in Swedish exceptionalism. A half-mad tub-thumper, like Trump, or blustering second-rater, like Johnson, does not lead Sweden’s government. It is a respectable coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals. If Tegnell had said Sweden should have locked down rather than remain open, the politicians and public would have obeyed his orders as faithfully.
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