We shared a link to a popular essay on Friday, in Part One of this editorial series — an essay by a Swedish doctor named Sebastian Rushworth, entitled, “How Bad is COVID Really? (A Swedish doctor’s perspective)”. A Google search reveals that this essay has been quoted, and shared on dozens of websites since it was first posted on Dr. Rushworth’s blog on August 4.
I had posted Dr. Rushworth’s photo on the Daily Post home page, underscored with this short excerpt from Part One:
“…If only 6000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no one is the least bit frightened of, and which we don’t shut down our societies for…”
A 46-word excerpt, quoting a small part of Dr. Rushworth’s original essay. A Daily Post reader had the option to click on the photo, or the editorial title, and read the full editorial, which totals 1,007 words. But of course, a visitor to the Daily Post also had the option to form an opinion about my editorial by merely viewing the photo and 46-word excerpt on the home page… if that’s what they wished to do.
A few hours after posting Part One on Friday, I received an email from Pagosa resident Bill Hubbard.
Mr. Hubbard is perhaps best known as the proprietor of the Law Offices of William L. Hubbard. I had the opportunity, once, to review a rather impressive court filing that Mr. Hubbard had submitted to District Court, and had determined that Mr. Hubbard is capable of paying very close attention to detail, when he wanted to.
His email to me, on August 14, was concise and to the point:
Surely, you are not taking the position that Covid patients should be allowed to die with no treatment or care. As Governor Cuomo said, “My mother is not [expendable].” Neither are my friends — one died yesterday.
You may publish this letter. Hopefully, with a clarification of your position, which appears on its face to be both thoughtless and cruel.
Bill Hubbard
I’m proposing in this editorial series that anecdotal events — personal experiences, and the stories and opinions that arise from personal experiences — can be incredibly powerful. They can also be incredibly disconnected from reality… and we might have no idea how disconnected they are…
I wrote to Mr. Hubbard asking him to please let me know what I’d written that caused him to suspect me of thoughtless cruelty — so that I could correct my editorial. Mr. Hubbard responded.
This quote is the second item on your web [home] page: “…If only 6000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no one is the least bit frightened of, and which we don’t shut down our societies for…” with the picture of a physician.
It would seem that Mr. Hubbard had come to conclusions about my thoughtless and cruel COVID position, based on the 46-word excerpt offered on the Daily Post home page. A gross misunderstanding, in the midst of a frightening pandemic? Apparently, Mr. Hubbard had not bothered to read my editorial, but had nevertheless come to the conclusion that I am advocating the practice of allowing COVID patients to die without treatment or care.
We note that Dr. Rushworth himself — the person I was in fact quoting on the Daily Post home page — has been engaged in saving the lives of COVID patients for the past several months, and had definitely not suggested that patients “be allowed to die with no treatment or care.” He was proposing, rather, that national economies did not need to shut themselves down, for a disease he views as similar to “regular old influenza.”
In his essay, Dr. Rushworth — who apparently graduated from a Swedish medical school in January 2020 — proposes that the country of Sweden has essentially developed ‘herd immunity’ from COVID-19, thanks to the government decision to leave its economy open during the pandemic. The good doctor notes, anecdotally, that his emergency room was packed with COVID patients a few months ago, but now, he hardly sees any serious cases. He connects the government-data dots, anecdotally, and suggests that countries that have locked down their economies will ultimately see the very same rate of COVID fatalities that Sweden has experienced — it will simply take them longer to develop that ‘herd immunity’.
He writes:
COVID hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the usual things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was COVID. Practically everyone who was tested had COVID, regardless of what the presenting symptom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had COVID. They came in with stomach pain and they had COVID.
Then, after a few months, all the COVID patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single COVID patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of COVID in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no one is getting infected any more…
This anecdotal story successfully blends Dr. Rushworth’s personal experience in the emergency room at Danderyds Sjukhus, a hospital in Stockholm, with a bit of Swedish government data on COVID cases and fatalities, to produce a statement about the apparent seriousness of the pandemic.
…If only 6,000 are dead out of five million infected, that works out to a case fatality rate of 0.12 percent, roughly the same as regular old influenza, which no one is the least bit frightened of, and which we don’t shut down our societies for.
The quoted fatality rate of 0.12, “roughly the same as regular old influenza”, comes not from scientific data, but from Dr. Rushworth’s personal conjecture about why he’s no longer seeing COVID cases in his emergency room in Stockholm.
Powerful stuff, even if it’s “entirely anecdotal”…