From Deborah, March 28, 2022

It would seem that C19 has completely disappeared from the psyche of Swedes – we are now preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. We had our worst covid-worriers over for dinner last night, and C19 didn’t come up once, although a lot of time was spent on Russian troop movements. I’ve also just checked our 4 largest newspapers. There was one article, buried way down, about how cases continue to drop here, although they are spiking in the UK. Another newspaper had an article about how “anti-vaxxers are spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine”. I checked with my husband who listens to Swedish radio and he confirms that the subject rarely comes up anymore.

Wide scale testing has stopped, the Public Health Agency is no longer holding press conferences, and Tegnell looks set to work for the WHO - the C19 apparatus is slowly winding up.

So it is a little disconcerting to read that the federal government in Canada is still punishing the unvaccinated with domestic travel restrictions!!!

I agree that our deaths have been relatively high – there seems to be a remarkable lack of interest in that here – journalists have accepted the “lots of infections & lots of old people, c’est la vie” rationale. Although I wonder… is Canada hiding these numbers? Anyway, Sweden’s accounting for C19 deaths seems rather unremarkable: "Diagnoses in the cause-of-death certificate are given according to the WHO ICD10 classification system, in keeping with the rules that apply for categorising causes of death. The illness or injury that set in motion the process that culminated in the death is classified as the underlying cause of death.” (source: https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/1-globalt/covid-19-statistik/engelska-sidan/faktablad-datakallor-eng.pdf)

Yes, I’ve been seeing data from various epidemiologists I follow on Twitter – that being vaccinated increases one’s chance of getting an omicron infection…. I had read some early warnings about this - the vaccine was optimized for an older variant, so if your body is busy fighting that off via vaccination, then you are more susceptible to an infection from a new variant.. or something along those lines?