Onthe Senate floor this morning, Rand Paul urged that the U.S. adopt the Swedishmodel for confronting Covid-19. As heputs it “I don’t think anyone is arguing that what happened in Sweden is anunacceptable result”. With thisstatement Paul is arguing for many more deaths than necessary. Now, we can all agree that the approach takenby the U.S. – Close your eyes, hope for the best, then blame China – has notserved us well. We have over 80,000deaths and will probably hit 100,000 by the end of May. So we should be lookingfor an alternative model. But whySweden, that has 328 deaths per million and an economic contraction estimatedat 9%? What is “acceptable” about thatresult, other than that they did not close schools? Why not Germany or Denmarkthat have rates of 92 per million, or Sweden’s neighbor Norway that has 41deaths per million as of today? Betteryet, we could use South Korea’s approach that has resulted in 5 deaths permillion, or Taiwan’s with a rate of .3. Consider where our death toll would be now ifwe had used some of these alternatives.
Country Deaths/Million Projected U.S Deaths Actual U.S Deaths Added Lives lost
Sweden 328 107,526 82,555 25,256
Denmark/Germany 92 30,084 82,555 -51,916
Norway 41 13,407 82,555 -68,593
South Korea 5 1,635 82,555 -80,365
Taiwan 0.3 98 82,555 -81,901
In arguing for the Swedish model Paul, the ultimate pro-life advocate, is recommending 25,000 to American deaths over our failed approach and from 50-80,000 over the available alternatives. And that is the best case. The UK and Spain tried the Herd Immunity approach used by Sweden but backed off when deaths soared. They are both now in the 480-580 range of deaths per million. The successful countries have simply reacted quickly and used standard epidemiological practices. This is what our own experts have repeatedly suggested to no avail. Rand Paul should get off the ideological band wagon and stop pretending he knows something about pandemics.