OPINION: Sweden was right not to lock down

Since it’s more dangerous for a healthy child to ride a bicycle to school than it is to be in school in this pandemic, healthy children can go to school.
But you might think the fires of hell had been unleashed if you got your cues from teachers’ unions. In mid-August they told us that the province’s plan to cap classroom size at 15 students can’t be guaranteed and that it puts students and the community in “imminent danger.”

Imminent danger of what? Healthy kids don’t get sick from COVID and every time we open up a little more there will necessarily be an increase in positive cases until a vaccine becomes available. We need to remind ourselves that there are no COVID deaths in Canada of healthy people under the age of 19. Meantime, we’ve all figured out how to wear a mask and keep our distance.

The fearmongering needs to be called out. We locked down so hard that we’ve destroyed the lives of people who don’t have COVID. Businesses are gone, jobs lost, dreams crushed and necessary non-COVID medical treatments delayed. Anxiety caused by fear is way up. Depression is up, along with suicide and drug abuse.

Could the teachers’ unions be any more self-centred? Their complete disregard for the mental health of children and the welfare of fellow Canadians is staggering.

The news media giants are not helping. They love scaring people. Thanks to a bandwagon of fear many people think that if we open up even more we will end up like Sweden. We should want to end up like Sweden. The Swedes didn’t lockdown and they are over the virus. Of course, the news media tells us that Sweden’s death toll is among the highest in the world. They don’t tell us that in one year from now this won’t be the case. A country that does not lockdown will have more COVID cases and a higher death rate early on because the virus is going to spread through the entire population more quickly.

In Sweden, non-essential businesses and schools stayed open and few people wear face masks. There was a ban on large gatherings of more than 50 people. And what happened? In mid-March, 100 people a day were dying from COVID. The news media reported a horror show. But after a few months the numbers of cases and deaths dropped like a stone.

Last month, Stockholm emergency room doctor Sebastian Rushworth conceded that he did not see one COVID patient in all of July. Dr. Rushworth argues that while most of the world removed the COVID band-aid slowly and painfully, Sweden, ripped it off quickly and got it over and done with.
Just about every mainstream publication and website expressed dismay at Sweden’s COVID death rate, which now sits at just above 6,000 people in a population of 10 million. They miss the point. The virus has run through the population of Sweden and the death toll is not likely to rise much higher.
Said Rushworth: “Considering that 70 per cent of those who have died of COVID are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway.” Why? Because they were already weakened, dying from other ailments. “That makes COVID a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality,” he said.

While the news media say that herd immunity is impossible, Dr. Rushworth asks, “If herd immunity hasn’t developed, where are all the sick people?”
He is adamant. “I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway. Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to do that.”

Thanks to Canada’s lockdown, we slaughtered restaurants and other small businesses. Some dairy farmers dumped milk, egg producers dumped eggs and temporary shutdowns of processing plants created a backlog of beef and hogs forcing many farmers to hang to their livestock after their best-before date. Grain farmers took a hit on the price of corn. Chicken farmers saw demand decline and there’s talk of Ontario farms closing down by year end.

And it’s not over. Who’s going to pay for all of the federal government emergency funding that paid people to stay home? We are. Expect higher taxes too.