Herd immunity: Swedish model comes at steep price

Re: “Don’t burn down our own barn,” (TNT letter, 5/15).

The letter writer suggests the Swedish model for dealing with this pandemic.

This has been proposed by some well-respected public health experts, and is more attractive when a disease has a very low complication or fatality rate.

Let most people get sick, be prepared to lose some lives and build up herd immunity, while sparing massive social and economic disruption.

Most governors did see that model and decided against it. As of May 15, Sweden had lost 3,646 lives while its neighbors, Norway, Finland and Denmark, which did practice mass confinement, had lost 232, 293 and 537, respectively.

Expressed as deaths per 100,000 population, these same numbers become 36 for Sweden and 4.2, 5.3 and 9.8 for the others.

In Washington, we recently reached 1,000 deaths. Should we have used a strategy that would have kept the economy going at the cost of perhaps an additional 4,000 of our fellow Washingtonians’ lives?

Could one of them be a member of one’s own family? This is the price we need to prepare to pay.

This story was originally published May 21, 2020 at 2:33 PM with the headline "Herd immunity: Swedish model comes at steep price."