Saying "you can't lock down for one to two years" is an absurd strawman as nobody would ever advocate for that
Having a gradient of social distancing and having it be enforced by government officials is the only sane way to avoid mass needless death which is what is happening in Sweden right about now
Sweden’s position is that deaths are not avoidable. At the end of the pandemic they expect the death rate across most countries (with the exception of some outliers, like Italy) to be broadly similar. As such they have decided it makes no sense to completely shutdown the economy with all the longterm implications that would entail. As long as moderate social distancing prevents their healthcare system from being overwhelmed, they believe that to be optimal.
They have around 10k tests per 1 million, that's not regarded as very little. US keeps saying it tests the most in the world and it's at 14k. Korea is known for massive testing, at 10k. Rich and well-struck countries like UK/France tests fewer cases.
They're not top testers but definitely significant testers.
In part it helps that they're one of the least dense countries in the world at around 20 people per square kilometer, compared to say 400/500 for the Netherlands and South Korea. The difference is less pronounced in cities of course but still there (when will we ever get population density figures for the median person who is weighted towards living in proximity, rather than a country-wide average)
Every media source I've come across says that Sweden is doing practically nothing compared to its neighbors.[1][2][3] They're also coincidentally suffering from far higher infection rates than their neighbors.
I've seen nothing saying they're making strong efforts aside from comments posted here and there, but I'd be interested in seeing sources.
"To start with, it’s a myth that Sweden is doing nothing about the virus. Most Swedes have changed their habits a lot. Schools for older kids are closed, as are universities. People are working from home, when they can, and the elderly are being urged to keep to themselves. Gatherings of over 50 people are prohibited, and ski resorts are closed. Restaurants and bars are allowing table service only, and grocery stores are installing glass dividers between customers and cashiers."
"Second, contrary to the claims of John Fund and Joel Hay and many others, Sweden isn’t trying to develop “herd immunity,” meaning a state of affairs in which so many people get the virus that the virus runs out of kindling. (At least, Swedish officials claim they aren’t doing this, and they would have a lot to lose by lying about it.) Instead, Sweden intends to take as loose an approach as possible that still keeps case growth down to nonexponential numbers."
"With these premises in mind, Sweden has pumped the brakes instead of slamming on them. You close school for older kids, but you keep grade school going, because evidence so far suggests that younger children are not a major cause of transmission for the novel coronavirus."
That is an amazingly naive and biased article. You seem to be very keen on accurate statistics - so how do you square the statement that:
>Sweden has a mortality rate that’s only about twice as high as that of Denmark, which has a strict lockdown
Sweden's mortality rate per million: 198.5
Denmark: 68
"about twice"?
Not to mention:
Norway: 36.5 per million
Finland: 31.2
Strictly speaking, we shouldn't even compare ourselves to Denmark, whose population is much more geographically concentrated. By far the closest demographic match is Norway - where the mortality rate is 1/6.
You are 100% wrong, Sweden is doing a lot of things to minimize the coronavirus impact.
But I'm curious why you are claiming something that is so completely wrong. Where did you get the idea from? Are you living in Sweden and strongly disagreeing with the official response, or are you living somewhere else, but "read it on the internet" ?
Not OP but: local media in Eastern Europe bash Sweden hard with TV news pieces showing open shops and restaurants, people in groups etc, while here in Serbia we’re in complete lockdown. This also makes me feel like Sweden doesn’t care, but again, I have no first hand info except what TV and Reddit tell me. This might be OPs “source”.
Ok. It is possible to cherry-pick exactly whatever view you want to show by sending a camera team to Stockholm. Some places are completely deserted that would normally be bustling with people. And some places appear to be bustling with people who seem to ignore official recommendations. And some places are bustling with people who are ignoring recommendations, because Sweden has its fair share of idiots like every other country.
I suspect that there is a strong wish for Sweden to fail among people in countries with severe lockdowns, because that would validate their decisions to lock down in the first place. Sweden must be "punished" for not following the herd, because if it isn't, it means that the herd was wrong, it means that suffering through a lockdown was for nothing. It means your local politicians over-reacted, and destroyed parts of the economy needlessly.
And then you get these hit pieces that says everyone in Sweden is out and about, hugging and licking each other, and everyone died of the zombie apocalypse Last Thursday.
My best guess is that the truth is a lot more complicated than that, and that there absolutely isn't any kind of simple linear relationship between the severity of lockdown measures and excess deaths. There are so many variables, so much random noise, and so much cultural difference between countries. If every country is doing 20-30-40-50 different measures at once, how can we even start to figure out which ones do something, and which ones don't? Is washing your hands more important than wearing a mask while you're outside? Is closing workplaces more efficient than closing schools? There's appearing evidence that kids actually are very bad transmitters of this particular virus - contrary to "common sense", which dictates that kids are filthy petri dishes that are always sick and always spreading disease.
We know so little right now. It's going to take years before we'll know which countries did the right thing and which countries did the wrong thing.
I'm sure self-validation plays a large part, but the other reason is because local critics of lockdown are using Sweden (which at least here in Southern Europe is generally associated with good governance, as opposed to ours) as an argument for their side. So even people who agree with you that it's too early to tell from the numbers, but who think the lockdown is in theory the best approach, feel forced to write stuff showing how bad things are going for them.
The "it's gonna take years to know" is the line being pushed very hard by Swedish authorities locally. Makes the massive difference in deaths-per-million here compared to our Nordic neighbors much easier to swallow.
The policy will look extremely unfortunate if one of the vaccines that's already being trialled actually works...
I feel like a broken record at this point, so I'll just copy-paste from a comment I wrote yesterday:
"Universities are closed, high schools are closed, elementary schools are half-empty, people that can work from home do so, a lot of employees have been furloughed, restaurants have switched to mostly take-out, bars are closed, large events are cancelled, grocery stores reserve hours in the morning for senior citizens, elder care homes don't accept visitors, travel is way down, and people generally self-isolate and self-quarantine. Field hospitals have been constructed, recently retired healthcare workers have been asked to come back to work, vodka producers have shifted to making hand sanitizer, and other companies have shifted to making PPEs, etc."
is either incorrect or the policy was changed very recently ?
This is not a country divided. And we should also be clear that this is not a country that has done nothing. It has banned large gatherings, closed high schools and universities and told elderly people to self-isolate.
But restaurants, bars, primary schools and most businesses are still open.
Which directly contradicts your statement. (Your statement says that bars are closed while this article claims they are open.)
That article is mostly correct, and policy wasn't changed very recently. High schools and universities closed mid-March, for example.
But the article is slightly weaselly in its wording. Yes, bars and restaurants are open, but it's take-out or table service only, and you typically leave every other table empty so that people are sitting 2m away from everyone else. The actual bar part of bars and restaurants are closed.
Note how the picture in that article is taken at a low angle so you can't clearly see the spacing between the people at the tables. A photo from the side would show a completely different picture.
I live in central Stockholm, and the picture you're presenting is not true at all. People are socializing in large groups, both in bars and restaurants, and also out in parks and open spaces.
Of course numbers are down - it's not everyone that's partying - but the voluntary restrictions are absolutely not being followed by the majority of younger (and somewhat older) people.
Parent didn't claim restaurants are closed. Also, what I hear from friends in Sweden the bars in their area are indeed closed: there's little point in being open if nobody goes there, even you're legally allowed to be open. Of course no data how universal that experience is, given that a lot of this relies on voluntary actions I expect it varies widely across the country, which might explain the difference in representation by different folks. I don't think it's fair to say Swedes are doing "nothing", but it's clearly less than many other countries have been enforcing.
Google Mobility Report says "Retail and recreation" is down 27% in Stockholms län. Blunt statistics, but you can't pretend an almost 1/3 drop in business is anywhere near normal.
Some areas of the city look almost normal, yes, but other areas of the city are deserted wastelands. I'm sorry you are surrounded by idiots who are ignoring the official recommendations, but statistics show that your experience isn't universal.
The fact that in the county of Stockholm (ie: not central Stockholm) the supposed movement of people for 'retail and recreation' (as measured by Google) is down 27% is something completely different.
Personally I'm not surprised that people are out a bit less - I'm not meeting my friends in bars at the moment, for instance. But a rainy week could have an impact on bars and pubs at this time of year. A 27% fall (if true) is hardly surprising, given the circumstances right now.
In central Stockholm the bars, restaurants and even parks are full of people.
If you're driving a bus full of people towards a cliff, is it ok to not hit the brakes just in case the bus might get back-ended by a truck driving behind?
I live in Stockholm - had to walk through town the other evening to get a piece of equipment I left at the office (chose the evening to meet the least number of people was my plan). The bars and restaurants were PACKED and people were everywhere in the parks and open spaces.
There have been recent news reports in the English language media that Sweden has adopted a very different and less restrictive covid-19 strategy than most other countries. So while the parent comment may be wrong and even disinformation I would not have known that if not for the conflicting replies.
No, that was someone here on HN who couldn't read the data from the NYT article correctly. Sweden is absolutely experiencing excess deaths right now.
What the article said is that a bunch of countries have fewer covid-19 deaths than excess deaths for a certain time period, while Sweden has more covid-19 deaths than excess deaths for the same time period.
The conclusion of that article is that most countries are probably severely undercounting covid-19 deaths, while Sweden probably isn't.
(This isn't necessarily true, another plausible explanation is that a lot more people than normal are dying of heart problems because they're too afraid to seek medical care since hospitals are pretty busy with all the covid-19 patients.)
I'm not sure if you are referring to me since I have commented on this topic a few times. But if it was (no biggie ;)) I never mentioned that sweden had negative difference. What I meant was that Sweden (and now Belgium) seems to be the only countries where the number of excess deaths match their COVID deaths, while most other countries have a big difference (excess deaths in Sweden: 1200, COVID deaths: 1150, other countries do excess deaths: 1200, COVID deaths: 450 (numbers are made up)). So I have difficulty to compare Sweden numbers to others because I don't believe the others (or in my case, Portugal's) numbers.
When I first read the NYT article, Belgium wasn't included, they added it later. The interesting thing is other countries say the non COVID excess deaths are people 'afraid' to go to the hospital or something like that, and the numbers are right/lockdown is right. But now with Belgium, that did pretty much the same measures as other countries, doesn't show the same results, so I'm even more sure the 'they died because they were afraid to go to the hospital' is bullshit
And I agree with you, I can trivially think of death causes that could go up because of covid-19 + lockdown (heart attacks, suicide, medical neglect), down (influenza, traffic accidents, workplace accidents), and be unchanged (cancer, strokes).
So claims of non-covid-19 excess mortality have to be carefully examined. If the official covid-19 death count diverges sharply from the excess mortality of a country, the most rational explanation has to be that that country is underreporting covid-19 deaths.
Admissions to ER have halved. It breaks it down by reason for admittence to quite a granular level. Especially worrying: cardiac admissions halved at the lowest point. Fortunately it seems the messaging about how hospitals aren't overwhelmed and never were is getting through and they've started going up again. They're still far below normal for this time of year.
Unless you think people routinely go to ER with cardiac problems unnecessarily, it's hard to see how this won't translate into excess deaths that aren't COVID related. The UK sees about half of all excess death certificates right now not mention COVID, which makes sense.
Other crazy things about those graphs: pneumonia and other breathing related problems have also all collapsed. Not only are hospitals not overwhelmed but you can't even really see an uptick in admissions for COVID related problems, unless there's some odd data collection error like those cases not showing up in any of the graphs at all.
The numbers in Portugal (the one I am more familiar with) say otherwise. First health officials when they saw the numbers decreasing said : 'This only proves that indeed what we have been saying for years, people visit the ER for non serious cases' (which to be fair, having an ex-wife that was a paramedic, 1/2 of her calls were non-urgent). Then after the numbers of deaths increased, they changed they words to 'People need to go to the hospital, we can't be afraid of the virus' and now latest thing is 'We will be resuming to normal in hospitals/clinics and people should come for non-urgent related issues'.
But interesting Belgium and Sweden didn't have this discrepancy in number of deaths (COVID vs non COVID). So either our numbers are wrong and more people are dying of COVID than what they tell us, or the lockdown + stoping pretty much every non urgent procedures + telling people to stay at home actually caused more excess deaths than covid itself. But whatever is right, we need to pick one and not keep letting politicians not even admit they may not know/be wrong and keep changing the goal posts when confronted with new information.
I'd expect the amount of critical stay-away to vary between countries; as above, I expect the UK to be an extreme case due to both the government's messaging and the NHS's general position in society.
In Sweden people were not told to avoid hospitals, as far as I know, so that doesn't show much. Certainly some people did out of fear if they weren't too sick, but hopefully they'll avoid the UK situation.
For Belgium I don't know what they did, I haven't looked, but if all excess death is really being reported as COVID related then I suspect over-counting of COVID cases rather than undercounting; something that is already clearly happening in many places e.g. New York and Germany.
Actually no, the excess mortality that was reported yesterday was not negative. What was (very slightly) negative was the excess mortality minus known covid deads, which means that sweden excess mortality is accounted for. Some places like Italy are seen excess mortality twice as big as the number of accounted covid deads, which means that they are way under reporting.
But that isn't the case at all - Sweden is under-reporting the number of Covid-19 deaths by a significant amount, where the excess deaths minus the reported covid-19 deaths show a large deviation.
Here's an article (in Swedish) about the statistical anomaly:
There's strong pressure within Sweden to present the herd-immunity strategy as successful, especially considering the huge difference in deaths-per-million compared to our neighboring Nordic countries. There's always existed a very strong competitive streak in Sweden's relationship with its immediate neighbors, and the spotlight of international attention has escalated that - even at the cost of human lives.
I don't see anything in that article saying that there is a significant under-reporting (only that there is an above average number of deaths, which is expected). Since FoHM and SCB use the exact same register (where FoHM just filters out everyone not diagnosed), I find it difficult to believe that the discrepancy would be very large.
You have to do your own math to compare the excess deaths for the period of week 13-15 (around a thousand extra deaths) and the reported covid-19 deaths (just over 500).
It's difficult to find any article that I can cite for the disparity, as pretty much no-one wants to report it.
I was working from the figures here:
https://c19.se
But I see that you stated in another post that Sweden's bars and restaurants are closed, so I don't think we're going to agree about statistics.
I also tried checking the statistics, i.e. SCB deaths - FoHM deaths and found no big deviation from the 2015-2019 mean. Both data from the official excel sheets.
This is the first time in this entire comment chain that you mentioned that, just pointing that out.
But yeah, you're right. 901 excess deaths for Stockholms län during those three weeks according to SCB, with 518 covid-19 deaths according to c19.se
So Sweden is probably still underreporting. Expanding the area to the entire country makes the discrepancy smaller, but at the same time Stockholm has been hardest hit, so that's still consistent with underreporting. Interesting!
These analysis are based on data provided by the countries. While they all may provide mortality as a number at some point, some may not already do so in the interval needed to draw accurate comparisons over the last two months. For example: I find the difference between England/Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland to be strange. I'd expect these to be closer together.
Why would you expect them to be closer? The respective government responses were very different - the UK initially decided to to pursue a "herd immunity" strategy - i.e. do nothing to stop the spread of the virus. In contrast, the Irish government locked down early and hard - the UK lock down occurred later (once the significance of the threat became more obvious) and even then introduced lock-down measures more gradually.
England has London, Scottish cities aren't on the same scale.
There also appears to be a pretty huge immigrant/racial skew in ICU and death cases for unclear reasons, conjectured to be vitamin D related. This is likely also skewing Sweden vs their neighbours, given Sweden's enormous migrant intake.
So much interesting data and no idea what it means... why the visible bumps for SOME countries in December 2016 or January 2018? Why Spain has that higher mortality in winter? Why why why...
IANAE but ... all three years show the pattern of what I presume is the flu season (broadly speaking), causing deaths (mostly in the elderly), and differing in severity/rate between the three years.
2020 is different because there is a clear step-change in death rate after week 11, and the implication/fact is that that is COVID-19.
The conclusion is that those deaths are excess deaths on top of those that we would have had as a consequence of the 2020 flu season.
The excess deaths in the winter are flu related. A flu season can be worse than usual for several reasons: e.g. a particular bad strain or a strain outside of the coverage of the seasonal influenza vaccine.
In 2018 excess deaths increased at a roughly consistent rate of around 7,500/week to 113,302 excess deaths in week 15 and then stopped.
In 2019 excess deaths increased at a roughly consistent rate of around 5,100/week to 56,806 excess deaths in week 11 and then stopped.
In 2020 excess deaths increased at a roughly consistent rate of around 2,500/week to 27,552 excess deaths in week 11 and then started increasing at a rate of around 15,600/week to 105,564 in week 16.
Again IANAE, but different flu strains have different mortality rates, but broadly similar behaviour in that they mostly go away after winter. The step change (caused by COVID-19) is the difference, and the new excess death rate is much higher than the 2018 rate.
Posting separately so as not to distract from the point about the data: I'm sorry (for myself) to be driven to being snarky/whatever, but I don't get why this isn't completely plain from that excess deaths chart. I don't get why people are trying so hard to insist that there isn't an issue. Really, wtf?
It's a cumulated graph. Earlier flu seasons were responsible for excess deaths in 2018 and 2019, and since flu season starts earlier in the year than pandemic deaths, by April, more people had time to die than has died in total from covid-19 in 2020 so far.
You can click the "weekly" button and you'll see that covid-19 is deadlier than earlier flus, but has been killing people for a shorter amount of time.
> a) there were way more deaths in 2018 and 2019 than were expected
Flu season every winter brings excess mortality. Also very hot summers, but there's less of a pattern.
> b) b) despite Covid-19, the excess mortality still hasn't caught up with 2018 levels
You are missing a big factor: COVID is not behind us, and this excess mortality is happening DESPITE a lockdown, which never happens for regular flu seasons.
Agreed. Newsflash: put people in cotton wool boxes they'll experience fewer accidents, but might suffer some other issues. Imagine that, more variables outside than inside.
I have been following these reports for the last few weeks. There is often a sharp drop in the end, but it goes away the next week. I believe it is just an artefact of the modelling
When comparing figures between previous years and 2020 one has to keep in mind that the current excess mortality is despite people adopting unprecedented behaviours like strict social distancing, regular hands cleaning etc.
Some excess mortality might even be caused by such measures. I feel like I would have a much higher threshold before looking for (Covid-unrelated) medical help. Suicides should be on the uptick. Other things like accidents should go down.
I'm not saying the measures and restrictions aren't necessary, just that there are some costs associated. Those deaths aren't really "Covid-19" fatalities even though they are indirectly caused by the pandemic.
Many aren't going to doctor visits, aren't exercising, are eating more etc etc. It all adds up.
I guess Covid is like a really, really bad flu season showing up, in addition to the existing one. So when all is done. we'll really see. Flu does kill a lot of old and infirm people
> I feel like I would have a much higher threshold before looking for (Covid-unrelated) medical help.
In fact, our health authorities have insisted for people to come to the ER, because apparently the number of non-covid emergencies (like strokes) is unreasonably low.
To put that in context, in the UK it appears about half the excess mortality doesn't mention COVID-19 on the death certificate at all.
Of the half that does, this is basically a grep over the contents, so "not COVID-19 related" would fall into that bucket. Of the certificates where the disease is definitely implicated, that still doesn't mean someone died because of the virus, only that the person might have been infected at the time of death. Might, because no test is required to merely mention it on a death certificate. At time of death, because this disease targets the old and weak so much, that very often it's unclear how a cause of death should be classified - in a way it was just someone's time to go. However, the UK made COVID-19 a notifiable disease, so it gets reported to the government in every case over and above other causes of death.
Thus for the UK we can safely say that more people are being killed because of the lockdown than because of COVID, which is pretty shocking.
This can be hard to see because UK excess mortality has gone far above the flu seasons of the past 5 years. But this is a bit misleading. It appears that the UK basically didn't have a flu season in 2017: excess mortality didn't go outside normal variance. Whereas in the rest of Europe 2017 saw a bad-ish flu season, which COVID so far has merely matched in terms of deaths.
That could be. On the other hands some countries that are in lockdown like Germany (although maybe not as strict as some other european states) are seeing no excess mortality at all, which makes the hypothesis unlikely.
On the other hand there are much fewer traffic accidents, much less pollution and people aren't going to bars and getting into fights. So I'm not sure if the net effect of the lockdown on mortality is actually expected to be positive or negative.
could go both ways really. If you are stuck at home with your old folks (probably the case for young people at risk of suicide right now), much less chance to commit suicide with total privacy in the current circumstances.
Also, there's usually less suicides when things go really bad in the society at large, because it puts things in perspective more than any other time in terms of human suffering.
Also I suppose if you are suffering through a pandemic and are suicidal your first thought would probably be hopefully it will all be over soon and I don't have to do anything but be unlucky.
It could cause extra death because people are reluctant to seek help for other ailments, for example the number of people coming to ER with heart attacks have decreased drastically in Sweden (-25% between February 24 and April 5).
Also keep in mind the graph isn't zero-based which makes it seem worse than it is. It's 73k compared to 52k last year, so about 40% worse than last year, not 100% as the graph might make one think.
These kind of graphs, while useful, still miss a point. My experience in Spain is that there are a some hotspots like Madrid where hospitals and morgues are collapsed but other cities/villages, which have the same lockdown didn't have so many infected people per capita, so they will actually have probably the same or less mortality rates. The country on itself looks bad, but in the hotspots is terrible
In my country in places where there are fewer corona patients the hospitals used to be taking over IC patients from places where there are more. And now the total number of corona patients admitted to the hospital has been declining for about a month so that looks pretty good.
But these graphs don't tell a story of collapse. Or perhaps they do but no worse than Spain normally experiences? Spanish excess mortality has peaked already at only slightly above what it peaked at in 2017.
Remember that everything we think we know about collapsed hotspots comes via the media. For every anecdote there are other anecdotes telling the opposite.
The new EuroMOMO site is really much, much better than before (kudos to whoever did that upgrade if you're reading this!). Usefully it now shows cumulative deaths. Compared to 2018 we still have had fewer deaths so far this year even with COVID included. That's staggering. It'll probably change soon given the slope of the graph, but that's really worth thinking about. So far fewer people have died than normal in 2020 than by this time in 2018.
That's what I'm saying. These graphs are too broad for a country because the numbers change a lot between cities. I'm expecting that some cities even report less deaths because of the lockdown (less risky activities, less traffic accidents, less labour accidents,...). So even if the numbers look similar to the ones of previous years, it is not distributed as other years.
Anyone know why data only goes back to 2016. This organization was started in 2008, did it really take them 8 years to be able to start collecting data?
A common reason for this is some bureaucratic change in the collection procedure that breaks comparability with older data.
Another reason could be that it indeed took 8 years to get 26 countries to agree on, and implement correctly, common enough data reporting standards before the final analysis could be performed.
> Mortality baseline is modelled using a glm poisson corrected for over dispersion. The model is fitted on valid historical period as defined by the user, with a maximum of 5 years,
I don't know why they impose this limit. I'm guessing there's something about population drift over time in there.
> From 2016 onwards, the EuroMOMO network has been supported by and worked closely with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe.
Needless to say, it matches closely the COVID-19 clusters. Kudos to this institution used to release yearly studies for the quick turnaround. (and all the data is available to download).
Also of note for HN readers: in "Bouches-du-Rhone", a high-density population area, a ransomware attack has rendered the local cities unable to send the statistics for the second part of March, which they sent manually. I'm not sure how resolved this is, but it shows (yet again) how cyberattacks can have real-life impact (and this isn't a hospital…)
15-64 is a pretty wide age group covering everything from kids to senior citizens. I wonder why they havent divided it further into at least adolescent/adult and possibly +50
I think it's important to note that while the cumulative excess mortality is indeed increasing (it could hardly do otherwise since it's defined as a monotonically non-decreasing function) the weekly excess mortality count sharply decreased in the most recent week (week 16).
That said the decline is so large from the previous week (9289 vs 20975) that I suspect there may be some error in the graph or the data.
EDIT: My claim that cumulative excess mortality is defined to be monotonically non-decreasing is not correct, as the below comment points out.
EDIT: Ah OK, I see what you're saying. Yes, my statement that the cumulative graph is defined to be monotonically non-decreasing was indeed incorrect because it assumes that excess mortality itself is non-negative, which is not the case (total mortality would be non-negative though). Still for the cumulative graph to decrease the weekly excess mortality would have to go into negative territory, which is far from the case for the "all ages" group.
as I reported else thread, I have been following these reports for a few weeks now, and there is often a sharp drop at the end which goes away on the next report. I think it is an artifact of their modelling for delayed registration that forces a regression to the mean.
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Extremely high excess: UK, France, Spain, Italy
Very high excess: Sweden
High excess: Switzerland
Moderate excess: Portugal
Low excess: Denmark
They also started with way lower numbers. So keeping open with limitations is way easier.
Also, its probably the right approach. You cant lock down for one or two years at least..
Having a gradient of social distancing and having it be enforced by government officials is the only sane way to avoid mass needless death which is what is happening in Sweden right about now
They're not top testers but definitely significant testers.
In part it helps that they're one of the least dense countries in the world at around 20 people per square kilometer, compared to say 400/500 for the Netherlands and South Korea. The difference is less pronounced in cities of course but still there (when will we ever get population density figures for the median person who is weighted towards living in proximity, rather than a country-wide average)
Sweden is n. 35 in "Tests / million people", that's not good enough IMO. 16% of the tests are positive!
How else do you want to control how the virus spreads? On what data do they base their decisions?
I've seen nothing saying they're making strong efforts aside from comments posted here and there, but I'd be interested in seeing sources.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-sweden-and-norway-handle...
[2] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/9/21213472/coronavirus-sweden-her...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielleigh/2020/04/10/sweden-...
"To start with, it’s a myth that Sweden is doing nothing about the virus. Most Swedes have changed their habits a lot. Schools for older kids are closed, as are universities. People are working from home, when they can, and the elderly are being urged to keep to themselves. Gatherings of over 50 people are prohibited, and ski resorts are closed. Restaurants and bars are allowing table service only, and grocery stores are installing glass dividers between customers and cashiers."
"Second, contrary to the claims of John Fund and Joel Hay and many others, Sweden isn’t trying to develop “herd immunity,” meaning a state of affairs in which so many people get the virus that the virus runs out of kindling. (At least, Swedish officials claim they aren’t doing this, and they would have a lot to lose by lying about it.) Instead, Sweden intends to take as loose an approach as possible that still keeps case growth down to nonexponential numbers."
"With these premises in mind, Sweden has pumped the brakes instead of slamming on them. You close school for older kids, but you keep grade school going, because evidence so far suggests that younger children are not a major cause of transmission for the novel coronavirus."
>Sweden has a mortality rate that’s only about twice as high as that of Denmark, which has a strict lockdown
Sweden's mortality rate per million: 198.5
Denmark: 68
"about twice"?
Not to mention: Norway: 36.5 per million
Finland: 31.2
Strictly speaking, we shouldn't even compare ourselves to Denmark, whose population is much more geographically concentrated. By far the closest demographic match is Norway - where the mortality rate is 1/6.
But I'm curious why you are claiming something that is so completely wrong. Where did you get the idea from? Are you living in Sweden and strongly disagreeing with the official response, or are you living somewhere else, but "read it on the internet" ?
I suspect that there is a strong wish for Sweden to fail among people in countries with severe lockdowns, because that would validate their decisions to lock down in the first place. Sweden must be "punished" for not following the herd, because if it isn't, it means that the herd was wrong, it means that suffering through a lockdown was for nothing. It means your local politicians over-reacted, and destroyed parts of the economy needlessly.
And then you get these hit pieces that says everyone in Sweden is out and about, hugging and licking each other, and everyone died of the zombie apocalypse Last Thursday.
My best guess is that the truth is a lot more complicated than that, and that there absolutely isn't any kind of simple linear relationship between the severity of lockdown measures and excess deaths. There are so many variables, so much random noise, and so much cultural difference between countries. If every country is doing 20-30-40-50 different measures at once, how can we even start to figure out which ones do something, and which ones don't? Is washing your hands more important than wearing a mask while you're outside? Is closing workplaces more efficient than closing schools? There's appearing evidence that kids actually are very bad transmitters of this particular virus - contrary to "common sense", which dictates that kids are filthy petri dishes that are always sick and always spreading disease.
We know so little right now. It's going to take years before we'll know which countries did the right thing and which countries did the wrong thing.
The policy will look extremely unfortunate if one of the vaccines that's already being trialled actually works...
"Universities are closed, high schools are closed, elementary schools are half-empty, people that can work from home do so, a lot of employees have been furloughed, restaurants have switched to mostly take-out, bars are closed, large events are cancelled, grocery stores reserve hours in the morning for senior citizens, elder care homes don't accept visitors, travel is way down, and people generally self-isolate and self-quarantine. Field hospitals have been constructed, recently retired healthcare workers have been asked to come back to work, vodka producers have shifted to making hand sanitizer, and other companies have shifted to making PPEs, etc."
You can also check out for example Google's mobility reports: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-04-17_SE_Mobil...
is either incorrect or the policy was changed very recently ?
This is not a country divided. And we should also be clear that this is not a country that has done nothing. It has banned large gatherings, closed high schools and universities and told elderly people to self-isolate.
But restaurants, bars, primary schools and most businesses are still open.
Which directly contradicts your statement. (Your statement says that bars are closed while this article claims they are open.)
But the article is slightly weaselly in its wording. Yes, bars and restaurants are open, but it's take-out or table service only, and you typically leave every other table empty so that people are sitting 2m away from everyone else. The actual bar part of bars and restaurants are closed.
Note how the picture in that article is taken at a low angle so you can't clearly see the spacing between the people at the tables. A photo from the side would show a completely different picture.
Of course numbers are down - it's not everyone that's partying - but the voluntary restrictions are absolutely not being followed by the majority of younger (and somewhat older) people.
https://www.thelocal.se/20200420/coronavirus-will-sweden-eve...
I can assure you that's not true. All bars are open exactly as normal. Where are your friends located?
Google Mobility Report says "Retail and recreation" is down 27% in Stockholms län. Blunt statistics, but you can't pretend an almost 1/3 drop in business is anywhere near normal.
Some areas of the city look almost normal, yes, but other areas of the city are deserted wastelands. I'm sorry you are surrounded by idiots who are ignoring the official recommendations, but statistics show that your experience isn't universal.
The fact that in the county of Stockholm (ie: not central Stockholm) the supposed movement of people for 'retail and recreation' (as measured by Google) is down 27% is something completely different.
Personally I'm not surprised that people are out a bit less - I'm not meeting my friends in bars at the moment, for instance. But a rainy week could have an impact on bars and pubs at this time of year. A 27% fall (if true) is hardly surprising, given the circumstances right now.
In central Stockholm the bars, restaurants and even parks are full of people.
If you're driving a bus full of people towards a cliff, is it ok to not hit the brakes just in case the bus might get back-ended by a truck driving behind?
I live in Stockholm - had to walk through town the other evening to get a piece of equipment I left at the office (chose the evening to meet the least number of people was my plan). The bars and restaurants were PACKED and people were everywhere in the parks and open spaces.
Example article: https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/21/analysis-is-sweden-right...
What the article said is that a bunch of countries have fewer covid-19 deaths than excess deaths for a certain time period, while Sweden has more covid-19 deaths than excess deaths for the same time period.
The conclusion of that article is that most countries are probably severely undercounting covid-19 deaths, while Sweden probably isn't.
(This isn't necessarily true, another plausible explanation is that a lot more people than normal are dying of heart problems because they're too afraid to seek medical care since hospitals are pretty busy with all the covid-19 patients.)
When I first read the NYT article, Belgium wasn't included, they added it later. The interesting thing is other countries say the non COVID excess deaths are people 'afraid' to go to the hospital or something like that, and the numbers are right/lockdown is right. But now with Belgium, that did pretty much the same measures as other countries, doesn't show the same results, so I'm even more sure the 'they died because they were afraid to go to the hospital' is bullshit
And I agree with you, I can trivially think of death causes that could go up because of covid-19 + lockdown (heart attacks, suicide, medical neglect), down (influenza, traffic accidents, workplace accidents), and be unchanged (cancer, strokes).
So claims of non-covid-19 excess mortality have to be carefully examined. If the official covid-19 death count diverges sharply from the excess mortality of a country, the most rational explanation has to be that that country is underreporting covid-19 deaths.
Do these graphs change your mind?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
This is attendances at emergency rooms in the UK.
Admissions to ER have halved. It breaks it down by reason for admittence to quite a granular level. Especially worrying: cardiac admissions halved at the lowest point. Fortunately it seems the messaging about how hospitals aren't overwhelmed and never were is getting through and they've started going up again. They're still far below normal for this time of year.
Unless you think people routinely go to ER with cardiac problems unnecessarily, it's hard to see how this won't translate into excess deaths that aren't COVID related. The UK sees about half of all excess death certificates right now not mention COVID, which makes sense.
Other crazy things about those graphs: pneumonia and other breathing related problems have also all collapsed. Not only are hospitals not overwhelmed but you can't even really see an uptick in admissions for COVID related problems, unless there's some odd data collection error like those cases not showing up in any of the graphs at all.
But interesting Belgium and Sweden didn't have this discrepancy in number of deaths (COVID vs non COVID). So either our numbers are wrong and more people are dying of COVID than what they tell us, or the lockdown + stoping pretty much every non urgent procedures + telling people to stay at home actually caused more excess deaths than covid itself. But whatever is right, we need to pick one and not keep letting politicians not even admit they may not know/be wrong and keep changing the goal posts when confronted with new information.
In Sweden people were not told to avoid hospitals, as far as I know, so that doesn't show much. Certainly some people did out of fear if they weren't too sick, but hopefully they'll avoid the UK situation.
For Belgium I don't know what they did, I haven't looked, but if all excess death is really being reported as COVID related then I suspect over-counting of COVID cases rather than undercounting; something that is already clearly happening in many places e.g. New York and Germany.
https://www.dn.se/nyheter/kraftigt-okat-antal-avlidna-i-pand...
There's strong pressure within Sweden to present the herd-immunity strategy as successful, especially considering the huge difference in deaths-per-million compared to our neighboring Nordic countries. There's always existed a very strong competitive streak in Sweden's relationship with its immediate neighbors, and the spotlight of international attention has escalated that - even at the cost of human lives.
It's difficult to find any article that I can cite for the disparity, as pretty much no-one wants to report it.
Where did you get your 500 number from?
You said 500 deaths for that time period, but your own source says 898. Your numbers are wrong.
> I don't think we're going to agree about statistics.
898 vs 500 is not a matter of opinion or agreeing.
The deaths during that period for covid-19 were around 500 and the excess deaths around 900+
This is the first time in this entire comment chain that you mentioned that, just pointing that out.
But yeah, you're right. 901 excess deaths for Stockholms län during those three weeks according to SCB, with 518 covid-19 deaths according to c19.se
So Sweden is probably still underreporting. Expanding the area to the entire country makes the discrepancy smaller, but at the same time Stockholm has been hardest hit, so that's still consistent with underreporting. Interesting!
There also appears to be a pretty huge immigrant/racial skew in ICU and death cases for unclear reasons, conjectured to be vitamin D related. This is likely also skewing Sweden vs their neighbours, given Sweden's enormous migrant intake.
a) there were way more deaths in 2018 and 2019 than were expected, and
b) despite Covid-19, the excess mortality still hasn't caught up with 2018 levels
What am I missing here?
2020 is different because there is a clear step-change in death rate after week 11, and the implication/fact is that that is COVID-19.
The conclusion is that those deaths are excess deaths on top of those that we would have had as a consequence of the 2020 flu season.
How does that compare with 2018 excess death graph, clearly some other novel virus would have caused that, it broke all previous highs quickly.
In 2019 excess deaths increased at a roughly consistent rate of around 5,100/week to 56,806 excess deaths in week 11 and then stopped.
In 2020 excess deaths increased at a roughly consistent rate of around 2,500/week to 27,552 excess deaths in week 11 and then started increasing at a rate of around 15,600/week to 105,564 in week 16.
Again IANAE, but different flu strains have different mortality rates, but broadly similar behaviour in that they mostly go away after winter. The step change (caused by COVID-19) is the difference, and the new excess death rate is much higher than the 2018 rate.
You can click the "weekly" button and you'll see that covid-19 is deadlier than earlier flus, but has been killing people for a shorter amount of time.
Flu season every winter brings excess mortality. Also very hot summers, but there's less of a pattern.
> b) b) despite Covid-19, the excess mortality still hasn't caught up with 2018 levels
You are missing a big factor: COVID is not behind us, and this excess mortality is happening DESPITE a lockdown, which never happens for regular flu seasons.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/summary-infl...
The 2016-2017 goes a bit higher during 02/2017, but its span is also smaller.
Is the sum of the standard deviations not zero?
That put things into perspective.
I'm not saying the measures and restrictions aren't necessary, just that there are some costs associated. Those deaths aren't really "Covid-19" fatalities even though they are indirectly caused by the pandemic.
I guess Covid is like a really, really bad flu season showing up, in addition to the existing one. So when all is done. we'll really see. Flu does kill a lot of old and infirm people
Studies in developing countries have shown every extra month to significantly improve children's final IQ and lifetime earnings.
In fact, our health authorities have insisted for people to come to the ER, because apparently the number of non-covid emergencies (like strokes) is unreasonably low.
Of the half that does, this is basically a grep over the contents, so "not COVID-19 related" would fall into that bucket. Of the certificates where the disease is definitely implicated, that still doesn't mean someone died because of the virus, only that the person might have been infected at the time of death. Might, because no test is required to merely mention it on a death certificate. At time of death, because this disease targets the old and weak so much, that very often it's unclear how a cause of death should be classified - in a way it was just someone's time to go. However, the UK made COVID-19 a notifiable disease, so it gets reported to the government in every case over and above other causes of death.
Thus for the UK we can safely say that more people are being killed because of the lockdown than because of COVID, which is pretty shocking.
This can be hard to see because UK excess mortality has gone far above the flu seasons of the past 5 years. But this is a bit misleading. It appears that the UK basically didn't have a flu season in 2017: excess mortality didn't go outside normal variance. Whereas in the rest of Europe 2017 saw a bad-ish flu season, which COVID so far has merely matched in terms of deaths.
Unless the pollution was incredibly concentrated, wouldn't the effects show much later?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/20/air-poll...
Title: Strong correlation between Covid deaths and high air pollution
"Research shows almost 80% of deaths across four countries were in most polluted regions"
Study: 'Assessing nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels as a contributing factor to coronavirus (COVID-19) fatality'
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138605
Wouldn't this kind of graphs precisely answer the question, since deaths are not just related to COVID19 only?
could go both ways really. If you are stuck at home with your old folks (probably the case for young people at risk of suicide right now), much less chance to commit suicide with total privacy in the current circumstances.
Also, there's usually less suicides when things go really bad in the society at large, because it puts things in perspective more than any other time in terms of human suffering.
It would be interesting to see if previous years exhibited similar hotspots.
Remember that everything we think we know about collapsed hotspots comes via the media. For every anecdote there are other anecdotes telling the opposite.
The new EuroMOMO site is really much, much better than before (kudos to whoever did that upgrade if you're reading this!). Usefully it now shows cumulative deaths. Compared to 2018 we still have had fewer deaths so far this year even with COVID included. That's staggering. It'll probably change soon given the slope of the graph, but that's really worth thinking about. So far fewer people have died than normal in 2020 than by this time in 2018.
Another reason could be that it indeed took 8 years to get 26 countries to agree on, and implement correctly, common enough data reporting standards before the final analysis could be performed.
> Mortality baseline is modelled using a glm poisson corrected for over dispersion. The model is fitted on valid historical period as defined by the user, with a maximum of 5 years,
I don't know why they impose this limit. I'm guessing there's something about population drift over time in there.
They also changed the way they work in 2016: https://www.euromomo.eu/about-us/history
> From 2016 onwards, the EuroMOMO network has been supported by and worked closely with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe.
Graphs are client-side rendered now ! And we can have the raw data too ! Great :-)
https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/4470857
Needless to say, it matches closely the COVID-19 clusters. Kudos to this institution used to release yearly studies for the quick turnaround. (and all the data is available to download).
That said the decline is so large from the previous week (9289 vs 20975) that I suspect there may be some error in the graph or the data.
EDIT: My claim that cumulative excess mortality is defined to be monotonically non-decreasing is not correct, as the below comment points out.
Excess mortality in the 0-4 yr cohort for example shows some negative number of excess deaths...
EDIT: Ah OK, I see what you're saying. Yes, my statement that the cumulative graph is defined to be monotonically non-decreasing was indeed incorrect because it assumes that excess mortality itself is non-negative, which is not the case (total mortality would be non-negative though). Still for the cumulative graph to decrease the weekly excess mortality would have to go into negative territory, which is far from the case for the "all ages" group.