There are several of these articles trying to redeem Sweden's choices. Here are the results versus their similar neighbors in deaths per million people[1]:
Sweden 1478
Denmark 474
Finland 219
Norway 173
They're 3 to 8 times worse. They now do compare favorably to Portugal for example at 1796. When did Portugal have the huge spike in deaths that propelled it in front of Sweden? When it decided not to do lockdowns, even though the numbers were horrible, to "save Christmas". 13k people or 3/4 of the total COVID deaths in Portugal happened from that decision alone. That other places also made horrible decisions doesn't help justify Sweden's.
You're citing known COVID deaths, I think, while the epidemiologist points out in the article that a better metric is excess mortality:
>Sweden had one of the lower excess mortality levels in Europe
Presumably, excess mortality includes the effects of overloaded hospitals, delayed medical care, lockdown-related depression, and undiagnosed COVID, which are hard to measure any other way, and which seem logically much higher under lockdown.
Looks like Sweden's (cumulative) excess mortality shot up at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since trended downwards, whereas other nordic countries have been fairly low but trending upwards.
We'll see how this plays out. Could be that Sweden simply killed off larger percentage of the old and frail at the start, who are now dying in other countries. Or maybe Swedish population got infected more, and now has stronger protection than other countries.
Well yes, if you deliberately chose to compare Sweden with only those countries that have better statistics, Sweden will indeed prove to have the worst statistics. Truling shocking how that works out.
There is more (and less) to similarity than the shape of the flag. Taking in account economic, geographic and cultural factors, a fair comparison would also consider Germany and Netherlands, possibly also Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and UK. The 'rich germanic protestant NW Europe countries' block. For the nitpickers, Finnish is not germanic and Austria is Catholic, but the point stands.
I would love it if we could get such clear-cut results from the numbers, and just be able to say “this strategy is good, if we do that everything will be fine” (not saying you're saying that), but I really don't think that's the case.
Here in Switzerland, we had plenty of lockdowns, followed the scientific wisdom and so on, and we're at 1375 deaths per million.
The UK has shifted strategies around a bunch, but they have one of the highest vaccination rates, and have had multiple lockdowns, but are still at a very high 2119 deaths per million.
I'm not trying to say this or that approach is good or bad, and I'm happy we've had lockdowns here in Switzerland. I'm just saying that correlating the number of deaths with the implementation of lockdowns definitely does not fully explain what we've seen so far.
There are so many other factors, such as excess mortality, compliance with measures, psychological impacts on both mental and physical health, international travel, local variants, and a lot of factors we don't even know exist yet.
Age of population is a huge factor that must be included but I seldom see it mentioned.
Another one we don’t even understand at all yet is genetic makeup of the population. We know that with other diseases there are genetic markers that increase of decrease susceptibility. There probably are here too but we don’t know what they are. Differences in distribution of those markers could totally confound studies.
The best comparisons right now are going to be within more genetically and demographically similar populations.
Here in Ohio we have seen that the vaccine is over 90% effective at preventing severe COVID and death but far less effective at simply stopping transmission. (Ohio has used the mRNA Pfizer/Moderna one almost exclusively.) But we already know it does not sterilize.
Not sure about masks and lockdowns. Have to look that up. There are even more confounders there like what masks are being used (N95 vs KN95 vs thin cloth junk) and uneven compliance that nobody is able to track.
We don't even know why covid has a seasonality. Obviously it has a physical cause but the interplay of all factors is so complicated that no one can really explain why peaks come and go, and at different times in each place.
Best guess I've seen on hit this has to do with how much time people are spending inside due to weather. See the screenshot of covid positivity rates at two different dates.
The guess was that more people were inside in the south the summer when it was hot, and they were running air conditioning. Now that the South has more reasonable temperatures, people are spending more time outside. While the north is starting to get colder and people are spending more time inside. This also seems to apply to California which has relatively stable temperatures all year, so they haven't been hit by either spike yet. Though the part that doesn't fit in here is the northeast corridor is not being hit as hard. My only guess is they were the ones hit hardest when covid started, so maybe they won't get as big of a spike now.
> The authors then used a dataset of meteorological conditions with daily resolution ... analyz[ing] how four variables — UV radiation, temperature, humidity and precipitation — correlated with the daily growth rate of COVID-19 cases ... [and] found evidence that a location’s UV exposure significantly affects COVID-19 transmission. A change in UV exposure by 1 standard deviation (roughly equal to the difference in UV between May and June in Los Angeles) reduced the growth rate of new cases by around 1 percentage point over the following two weeks
> The seasonal values of ultraviolet (UV) radiation and ADC, however, were consistent with fluctuations in COVID-19 prevalence across all five countries
> Not only that (rate of interaction spent outdoors), also an effect of UV was observed. Not massive but significant.
Cool!
Wonder if anyone has tried to figure out what part of that is related to the virus transmitting less efficiently in UV light (disinfecting effect) and what part is related to peoples skin producing vitamin D when exposed to sunlight?
Personally I have tried the Norwegian cod liver oil (yuck) to get my necessary vitamin D.
While it is disappointing that there are cases rising in those places, hospitalizations are remaining constant, which is a good sign. Hopefully it means that even if there are break through cases, it will continue to mean that fewer people are getting severe cases.
> We have the worst vaccine coverage of western Europe.
You're right, I hadn't realised this. Still, all countries in Western Europe are within ~10% of each other when it comes to the percentage of the population that's fully vaccinated.
More generally, I definitely don't think Switzerland's handling of the pandemic was perfect, but it currently seems to me that Switzerland did mostly follow the advice of the scientific community.
The problem is that it's not black/white. Close all roads to normal traffic and you'll have near-zero mortality from traffic accidents. But does that make it a smart policy?
Even then it's not an issue-free baseline. How many people died because they couldn't use the roads, either directly (get to help) or indirectly (delivery of inputs that prevented a death)?
Covid is even harder to measure. One Example: You shut down elementary schools to prevent kids from getting infected; how many were pushed back into broken homes from the only safe space they had? How many will have long-term pain from learning , nutrition, physical abuse, mental health?
Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry" which completely ignores the direct and indirect costs of any action.
> How many will have long-term pain from learning , nutrition, physical abuse, mental health?
We know that. Not exact numbers, but at least there are rough estimates. It's been an active area of research for quite some time, so there's a lot of data. Statistically speaking, we know how childhood poverty or a missed school year means for average lifespan.
It's been theoreticized that a reason for the differences in pandemic response when it comes to Sweden are down to the fact that they recently unified all their people health issues, that is not only medical issues but also social ones, under one government agency. That broader mandate is generally more data driven and needs to take longer term effects of missing school into account.
> Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry"
That's not all there is to it. Strictly following that reasoning would emphasize known risks against unknown risks. That does not explain the policy making that dominated during the pandemic.
And going out of lockdown you get things like a spiking of RSV infections (in turn apparently enough to noticeably fill up children's hospitals in some countries) because kids are now "catching up" in one go with all the infections they normally would have had spread out over the course of the last year or two.
While I agree comparing countries can be apples and oranges, it makes sense to compare the Scandinavian countries. That Norway and Finland were much lower strongly suggests Sweden's strategies worsened things.
Only if you assume the countries are similar in every other way that matter. But that is not the case, Sweden is for example by far the most urbanized country in Scandinavia - the share of people living in big or medium sized cities is 10% higher than other Scandinavian countries. Countries with high level of urbanisation have (so far, and especially early on) been hit way harder than more rural countries.
What’s frustrating is that the people who insist you should only compare Sweden to its Scandinavian peers are the same who insist that the US or Europe should use have used remote islands in the Pacific as their pandemic model.
This goes the other way too, of course - people who are keen to compare Sweden to the UK instead of Denmark cry foul whenever New Zealand is brought up.
The problem though is that there’s no bulletproof explanation for why lockdowns were so effective in the rest of Scandinavia and less so elsewhere in Europe (or many American states for that matter). Without that, the counterfactual is still a bit of a question mark. If Sweden had adopted Denmark’s strategy, maybe they would’ve indeed come out looking like Denmark - or maybe they would’ve come out looking like the UK. Vaguely gesturing towards “they’re all Scandinavian” doesn’t have much explanatory power.
What you say makes sense when we think of geographic locality. But is that really what should guide the pandemic response?
Sweden is much more like UK, the Netherlands and Germany than it is like Norway or Finland when we look at things like urbanisation, demographic diversity and immigration. In part because much more of the population is centralized to a few areas. The organization of public health care, especially that of old people's homes, is completely different between those countries.
If we look at the regional differences, you'd see that the areas of Sweden which demographically is similar to Norway indeed followed the pandemic outbreak of Norway very closely, with a very low incidence for the longest time, and then scattered outbreaks with increasing magnitude.
During those first crucial months, the pandemic outbreak in Sweden almost exlusively took place in the two most populous and urbanized areas. The rest of the country was pretty much spared. With the differently implemented lockdown in place, it was interesting to compare incidence in smaller geographic areas separated by the border but otherwise much more similar than the countries are. It is quite clear that any correlation can not be substantiated by data.
> The UK has shifted strategies around a bunch, but they have one of the highest vaccination rates, and have had multiple lockdowns, but are still at a very high 2119 deaths per million.
Another reason why such comparisons are hard: UK aggressively cleared hospitals in early 2020, in anticipation of case rises, and discharged whoever they could home.
This lead to thousands of old people being discharged to care homes, as it turns out frequently with Covid, with care home staff having not even the basic protective gear. IIRC 25% of first wave deaths were attributed to care homes, and due to various quirks of the number, this may well be an underestimate.
I guess you’ll see other cases where the general policy was good/bad but external forces skewed the result.
Poland do basically no protective steps until Autumn 2020, and despite that was totally spared the pandemic. Then later shit hit the fan pretty badly...
UK is a bad example to choose. They used the highest possible sensitivity setting on the PCR test, to the degree that no meaningful information could be extracted from them.
In addition, anyone who died, for any reason, at any time after a positive test, was recorded as a covid death. Even if they died in a car accident months after they had the test.
Sources:
Covid-19: The problems with case counting:
"What is a case? One issue in trying to interpret numbers of detected cases is that there is no set definition of a case. At the moment it seems that a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive result is the only criterion required for a case to be recognised.
In any other disease we would have a clearly defined specification that would usually involve signs, symptoms, and a test result, .... “We are moving into a biotech world where the norms of clinical reasoning are going out of the window. A PCR test does not equal covid-19; it should not, but in some definitions it does."
http://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3374.full
Why no one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England:
"A Department of Health and Social Care source said: ‘You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a COVID death.’” https://web.archive.org/web/20201012190837/https://www.cebm....
And my favourite... Sir Humphrey responds to the allegation of test inaccuracy...
"Positive test results at the limit of detection that occur late in the cycle of infection represent individuals with a low or very low risk of transmission, as a result of the decline in infectious virus production or remnants of viral RNA in respiratory secretions. The clinical significance of these positive results, at the limit of detection of the assay, are difficult to interpret in the absence of a clinical history and context. Possible reasons for the non-repeatability of these results include stochastic effects at the limit of detection of the assay, true prolonged low level detection of the virus, and very rarely, analytical errors in sample handling." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sars-cov-2-rna-te...
I have no idea what you are talking about. The facts I stated are not in dispute and can easily be verified by official sources. I even cited the UK government. What precisely do you disagree with?
One of the three links is a link to a .uk.org page. If you missed that, I don't want to continue this conversation because you're just wasting everybody's time.
Unfortunately the disease has been so politicized health experts can’t have an honest discussion of how to count people who died directly by covid vs died with Covid vs Covid had some effect but not the main cause, etc., and this means it will be years before we understand the disease better.
These sort of “over sensitive PCR tests”, “died with not of” claims are silly. You start peeling away at them even a little - why are hospitals overwhelmed? Why are there so many excess deaths? - and any explanations start becoming conspiratorial (“there’s no actual overwhelmed hospital, it’s all fearmongering from the media”) or completely implausible (“hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, in numbers that line up with positive PCR tests, were actually caused by lockdowns”).
My prediction—-when this point in time is measured 20 years from now, I suspect we are going to see that the excess deaths measured 2020-2025 are not going to be dramatically higher compared to 2014-2019 (at least as high as people today anticipate. There will be some, but Covid seems to be extremely skillful at killing people early who were statistically likely to die in the coming 5 years.
How often are hospitals overwhelmed? What does “overwhelmed” mean - 95% capacity? Excess beds but not enough nurses? Turning patients away? Operating at max capacity?
What qualifies as “so many excess deaths”? The Hong Kong flu was per capita comparable to what we have now and most people didn’t know anything was happening.
“Overwhelmed” means “hospitals, doctors, nurses, and health care officials all over the world say they’re overwhelmed, and say that it’s due to COVID”. This is what I mean by “conspiratorial” - you need to assume that massive numbers of people in dozens of countries are colluding and lying to believe that medical systems aren’t struggling due to COVID.
The idea that COVID and the Hong Kong flu were comparable is, at this point, outdated. For instance, the most liberal estimate (per Wikipedia) of HKF deaths is around 100k in the US. Adjusting for population growth you’d see something like 175k dead (the US population was 200M at the time). The US is now at ~800,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and rising.
The most sensible number to look at for countries with differing data quality is excess mortality.
However tempting it may be to correlate only with the magnitude of the lockdown procedures, however, it is equally if not more important to correlate them with how public health is organized and what kind of service citizens could be expected to receive.
We can only hope that in time people will look back at this with a scientific mindset and draw any conclusions from that.
What about "whether people observe care or not"? Because I have seen (also not far away from the poster, and not even in a single "culture") that a large amount of people seemed to be completely oblivious and irresponsible - and I am very sure that factor has been and is being critical. Extreme lack of contextual awareness - in general and in specific occasions, day by day and moment by moment.
Incidentally: never received so many invitations to "go out and meet and do" like in the past two years. (And of course, never been so glad of cheap communication tech being available.)
> Here in Switzerland, we had plenty of lockdowns, followed the scientific wisdom and so on, and we're at 1375 deaths per million.
You can compare the number of days of lockdown to deaths per million. You should also compare at what point of time the lockdowns were undertaken. There's plenty of research that shows Non Pharmaceutical Initiatives are very effective in stopping the spread of virus.
You really would not be able to tell this by looking at a state-by-state map of deaths in the USA, which have had various (sometimes opposing) views of “Non Pharmaceutical initiatives”
I don't know. A lot of people are attempting to use Sweden as some sort of political blunt force instrument to drive home some point, seems to be used to argue both the horrors of lockdowns and the horrors of not locking down.
In terms of saving lives, it clearly wasn't the best strategy. In terms of securing a reasonable standard of living, keeping the economy going, keeping mental health effects limited, it was reasonably measured.
Bodies weren't piling up in the streets.
In my wider circle of acquaintances, I know of exactly two people who got sick during the pandemic. Maybe a few more did but didn't tell anyone, but it wasn't anywhere near the apocalyptic tales you see on the Internet, especially from people who haven't even been to the country.
Are you sure on the economics part of the equation? My impression was that Sweden also had a bigger GDP per capita decline than the other Scandinavian countries. I don't have the data in front of me, though.
It's pretty hard to draw conclusions from looking at the GDP, since the global economy is so entangled (and the Swedish economy is fairly exports-based).
Bodies don't pile up on the streets in an advanced first world country. That's kinda the problem: everyone is entitled to the best medical care.
A 100 years ago nobody would have even blinked at a cholera epidemic in Stockholm's slums causing deaths.
In the Netherlands less than one thousand patients on the ICU is able to bring a healthcare system to a grinding halt.
Germany's numbers are exploding right now. In the U.S. you could also compare New York and Vermont. New York was more like Sweden (not by choice, but through incompetence and extreme population density). Vermont had the officially recommended policies and was a poster child.
Now the Vermont numbers are exploding, while New York's are not.
There is something to be said for the theory that the highly connected nodes in the social graph (who are often very healthy) all need to be infected in a short period. Then the outbreaks stop (like they have always done with the flu).
The graph is unusable considering the context of the different countries. You simply can not compare the two considering how little attention Sweden actually pays to Covid in general and how little testing facilities there actually are in comparison to Germany.
This is true, but the fatality graphs tell the same story: Rising in Germany now, flat in Sweden. And I presume that fatalities are lagging behind the case graphs by 4-8 weeks, so it is going to get worse in Germany.
There is this theory about pockets of herd immunity being formed after massive infection waves. These tend to be formed in a period of 2-3 months and with new infections dropping radically afterwards. Certain regions in India are now a perfect example.
Yes, but comparing flat numbers in a statistically uncorrected way is like saying "Why aren't there any of the population from oap nursing homes in primary schools?".
Context is king, no more so than large scale and complex statistical analyses. Sadly almost nobody seems to appreciate this as long as they have a number to argue a point.
Nobody corrects for population demographics. Population density. The various interventions which will pollute the study even further as some have proven damaging. Not to mention the large scale all cause mortality spike associated with the vaccine drive observed as predicted in each further country from watching the Israeli data.
Ignoring all of the above in your statistical analysis is both cherry picking and employing the same logic used by people to exclaim 5G definitely causes cancer because of study-X where a rat died that one time.
Ironically yes, I could provided enough raw data is actually published and this was part of the formal statement about reproducibility and reliability of report 9.
That alone is probably one of the reasons the above data is now declared in the interests of nation states rather than being openly shared data.
Only a few years ago we were making headway in data like this being made publicly available in it's entirety through equivalent to the English ONS.
But this is now very inconvenient and frankly some of the data has been deemed "does not exist" so it can't be requested under FOI laws in the UK, despite the infrastructure still being in place and working in collection of this data.
I'm not crying conspiracy I'm just making a statement that lack of transparency sucks the big one when it comes to public policy.
Maybe better to compare to Singapore which had ~6 deaths per million earlier this year, has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but since barely relaxing their restrictions now has ~120 deaths per million, raging number of cases (mostly vaccinated) and had the highest level of suicides last year since 2012?
It doesn't makes any sense to compare a country with a population density of 25/km2 to one with 8,358/km2. Also, Singapore's deaths per positive test and deaths per hospitalization are far lower even during the same outbreak period. Also, the suicide rates were already spiking by 19.15% in 2019, while the increase for 2020 was 13%, so to place the blame on lockdowns is misinformed and disingenuous, at best.
Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities? That’s just lying. It’s like calculating Canada’s density over the Arctic when 80% live within 100 miles of the US border.
And is my statistics about suicides wrong? 2020 was the highest since 2012?
> Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities? That’s just lying. It’s like calculating Canada’s density over the Arctic when 80% live within 100 miles of the US border.
Even if you want to compare by Sweden's most dense region, it's still 282/km2 versus 8,358/km2. Your comparison makes no sense whatsoever.
> And is my statistics about suicides wrong? 2020 was the highest since 2012?
You weren't making some generalized point about suicides increasing (which would have been irrelevant to the conversation at hand), you were trying to imply that lockdowns were directly responsible for the increase, which the statistical trend refutes.
” Population density is concentrated within Stockholm including its immediately surrounding urban area, averaging 11,802 people per square mile (4,279 per square kilometer).”
Clearly I’m the one spreading disinformation. Looking at city to city (Singapore is a city state) the density differences are minor.
And in in terms of suicides they were up 13% in one year. Singapore seems to think the covid situation was a factor.
Sure, we can compare city to city, but the comparison instantly falls apart, because that peak urban density is still nearly HALF of Singapore's entire density. There is no universe in which 50% is considered a "minor" difference, and that's STILL pretending the rest of Sweden doesn't even exist. That is the definition of an apples-to-oranges argument.
In regards to the suicides, you just referenced an individual's personal thoughts on a potential reason for part of the increase. That's not evidence of anything, especially given that the statistical trend was already rising sharply upward, meaning there were existing issues being exacerbated long before COVID showed up. Even if we pretend that 100% of the 52 additional suicides in 2020 (a death rate of 12.6/mil) were directly caused by lockdowns, that's still a small fraction of the number of COVID deaths resulting from not having lockdowns, as is evidenced by ANY country's statistics.
So, yeah, you are ignoring all of the obvious facts that refute your assertions, which makes you disinformative.
Wow! You sure back down quickly. You originally said we should use Sweden's 25 people/sq km and now you're willing to concede that in reality it's half? And sorry, but Singapore and Stockholm have the same population density in terms of order of magnitude.
Are you kidding me right now? You suggested we use the densest part of Sweden as a comparison, which is not how comparisons actually work, but I humored you anyway -- and it's still nearly HALF, which makes it not even comparable. So even when you unfairly nit-pick a particular region of Sweden, you're still completely wrong in all of your assertions. Your trolling is off the charts right now.
Half the density is "not even comparable"? You're not even arguing in good faith. You've just been proven wrong and now you're moving the goalposts and trying again.
My point was nothing more than the density is not that different, and your numbers show that.
This is so far beyond ridiculous at this point. Everything you say is the opposite of reality and with the direction intention of gaslighting and causing chaos. You are a troll of the highest order, and I'm honestly not sure why you're allowed to pull this kind of shit on HN.
The entire point I was making was that despite a very strict lockdown, Singapore is seeing really significant case numbers and deaths and they still aren't through it yet. All of those things are true.
Once the total costs of lockdown are fully tallied, we may find out the return on those restrictions weren't as high as we thought they would be.
> The entire point I was making was that despite a very strict lockdown, Singapore is seeing really significant case numbers and deaths and they still aren't through it yet. All of those things are true.
That's not the point you were making at all and you know it, so now you're just further gaslighting -- and you haven't been remotely correct about any of it.
Let's recap.
> Maybe better to compare to Singapore which had ~6 deaths per million earlier this year, has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but since barely relaxing their restrictions now has ~120 deaths per million, raging number of cases (mostly vaccinated) and had the highest level of suicides last year since 2012?
You wanted to compare Sweden to Singapore, but got called out for making a poor comparison given the drastic differences in population density. You also suggested that suicide rates increased because of lockdowns, without any evidence for that whatsoever, while also baselessly suggesting that more people died from lockdowns than would have from COVID, which is just completely false by every metric.
> Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities?
Your response was to immediately move the goal post and limit the comparison to Sweden's most populated areas, while also making another false claim that "most" Swedes live in two cities, despite >65% of Swedes NOT living in those two cities. I played along with your trolling and explained why that's still a completely irrelevant comparison.
> Looking at city to city (Singapore is a city state) the density differences are minor. [...] And in in terms of suicides they were up 13% in one year.
Your response was to move the goal post AGAIN, to now strictly include the densest part of urban Stockholm itself. Unfortunately, even the densest part of Sweden's densest city isn't remotely similar to Singapore, especially given that the densest of Singapore's subzones have 45,000/km2, which is nearly 10x that of Stockholm's densest city center.
You also tried to use one person's musings as evidence that suicides were directly tied to lockdowns, even though the person didn't even claim that connection -- and at this point, you're still trying to insist that Singapore's "lockdown-induced" suicide rate increase is higher than Sweden's non-lockdown COVID death rate.
> Wow! You sure back down quickly. You originally said we should use Sweden's 25 people/sq km and now you're willing to concede that in reality it's half? And sorry, but Singapore and Stockholm have the same population density in terms of order of magnitude.
Here's where your trolling becomes egregious, because despite your decision to repeatedly put new, unfair and illogical restrictions on the comparison, you've now claimed that I was the one who changed the parameters. In reality, all I did was prove you wrong no matter how many times YOU decided to change the rules. In a last ditch effort to pretend your arguments have any footing, you also made a new claim that 4,000 is the same as 8,000 because they have the same number of digits, which is beyond absurd.
You also conveniently dropped your suicide rate argument at this point, because you ran out of manufactured and personally theorized "evidence."
> Half the density is "not even comparable"? You're not even arguing in good faith. You've just been proven wrong and now you're moving the goalposts and trying again.
You're now claiming that 50% is similar to 100%, which again, is beyond absurd. At this point, you've also completely misdirected away from the actual comparison between Singapore and Sweden being drastically lower than half, which is the case even for Stockholm alone when you more appropriately include the metropolitan area. You also repeated your claim that I moved the goal posts, which we've a...
You keep making this point about death by suicide and every time people keep telling you all the different ways that you're wrong.
Since you've never tried to engage with those points I'm left to assume that you do not care about truth, and are only mis-using suicide stats to dishonestly make a point. That's pretty repellent behaviour.
...and civilization. "Defined" as that area in which "you will use contraceptives methods" and "you will not leave the house" while having the same effects are valued differently on a base of sheer logic, directly translating as "good sense". And in a further step "defined" as "if the citizens are treated as minors a dire, critical problem is revealed".
With reference to the countries that went to look for hermits in the deserts to tell them they should lock themselves somewhere to comply to the policy.
Expected lifespan under covid was still higher in Sweden than Denmark or Finland. So to me it seems like other healthcare or national policies matters much more than the covid response, overall covid had a very minor effect on healthspan compared to laws regulating alcohol or tobacco or similar.
I don't really see why people talk so much about covid when you can get way more health benefits just by limiting the hours you can buy alcohol on or similar, compared to limiting the movement of an entire population.
And next year as people got vaccinated the one year covid caused drop of 0.5 years will disappear and Sweden will be even better, while the huge push for covid measures didn't have any lasting impact. Imagine how many lives could be saved if the same amount of political will and resources were spent on more important things...
How would limiting the hours you can buy >3.5% alcohol have a big impact on lifespan. What data exists that supports your thesis?
All the alcoholics seem to either buy <=3.5% or hang around in pubs all day?
It matters for among other things drinking and driving. You would save way more lives in the long run if you fixed this than had a few covid lockdowns. There are also positive health effects to moving stronger alcohol away from grocery stores, do both and it becomes a no brainer positive effect. And no whining about "freedom", if you think that locking down people is fine in order to save lives then you can manage to buy alcohol at daytime at special stores.
> One older overview of systematic reviews found that reducing hours of sale resulted
in averting 250 to 750 Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) per one million
population (8)
> One older systematic review and a recent rapid synthesis found an association
between hours of sale of alcohol and increases in alcohol-related harms, including
drinking and driving and road accidents, but the association was less clear for the
effects on alcohol consumption or health harms
> Two older reviews found significant increases in alcohol-related motor casualties and
assaults with increased temporal availability
The tolerance against driving under influence in Sweden is extremely low. The punishments are severe and the allowed alcohol percentage to drive is lower than in most countries in the world. There is just no way that carries over from wherever that study was done, it's not Sweden for sure. If that is the main cause of reduced life expectancy (the measure you use now is something else really but sure lets roll with it) then it's not a good argument to apply to Sweden. I have tried to look for a study focused on the Swedish context but I haven't been able to find one.
750 DALY per 1 million is 0.00075 years per person by the way. That's basically negligible.
I'm just completely astonished by the level of incompetence. I really can't imagine how human powered moon landing occurred and if it can occur under current leadership again.
I don't really understand what happened in the last year?
We got the vaccines at the beginning but why no new vaccines? Why no lifelong protection vaccines? Where are all of the incentives to accelerate the r&d of new ways to handle this?
I mean, the current wave is worse than the worst and the strategies are still pure incompetence.
Competent people are not working for the government. They choose private sector where they can earn a lot more.
Start paying handsomely and maybe competent people will become interested.
On top of earnings, there is also the issue of unreasonable demand. Did you know for example that some government agencies can not use productive software because of stupid policies imposed by incompetent regulating bodies?
Which again is cherry picking as you're not comparing them to the country over, or two steps away. Many of which had exactly the same death rate per 100,000 and did lock down. And the countries you're comparing them to are much smaller population wise.
And worse still, a lot of the cases in Sweden earlier doors were brought back by holidayers in Spain, a popular Swedish holiday location apparently, which is exactly what happened to the UK too.
Is it a popular Finnish holiday location? Norwegian? Do those countries even have flights to Spain?
Answers I dont know, do you?
There's two sides to every story. Instead you might ask why don't they have a higher death rate than the UK or France or Italy, all of whom locked down.
You can’t look at deaths in a vacuum though. How many survivors in other countries were locked up in nursing homes with seeing their families? How many businesses closed permanently? How many suicides and drug deaths? How many students fell behind?
I’m honestly surprised people still exist who support lockdowns.
> I’m honestly surprised people still exist who support lockdowns.
18 months of relentless one-sided fear porn will do that to a mind.
I highly recommend Laura Dodsworth's recent book A State of Fear for more on this. It's about the UK but I'm sure a similar story could be told about most Western countries.
If we compare Sweden with Denmark it indeed looks bad with 3 times higher rate in Sweden. If we however compare region vs region, the numbers look different. Skåne, being the region next to Denmark with only a bridge separating the two, had similar deaths per million people as Denmark. If we look even closer, Malmö as the city on one side had lower rates than Copenhagen on the other side.
We need to answer three major question. 1: Malmö has the same lock down rules as the rest of Sweden, so why are the numbers so low compared to Copenhagen. 2: Why does Stockholm and the surrounding area have so high rate that it brings up the national average to be 3 times higher then Denmark? Finally 3: How does the lock downs relate to those two questions.
Finland made a smart move in the beginning of the pandemic. They locked down the capital with restricted movement in and out, keeping the initial spread low.
As I see it, Sweden made three mistakes. They should have locked down Stockholm. They should also have closed down the only subway Sweden has, located in Stockholm. They should have isolated the elder care workers who lived in Stockholm, many who used the subway system to reach the elder care homes going from elder care homes to elder care homes. Last they should have injected funds and medical supplies to the privatized elder care system, as many workers didn't even get enough time to wash their hands between patients.
Yes but for whatever reason, death rates in Sweden before any measures were introduced by any Nordic country were already much higher than in the other Nordic countries. So it's not a fair comparison of measures versus measures. Any conclusion on that basis is invalid. Sweden's excess mortality in 2020 was one of the lowest in Europe.
An overall comparison with Scotland as a country which took drastic measures shows that it fared very badly with much greater excess death together with the many long-lasting knock-on effects of lockdown. Death rates as of Nov 2021 as % of the population are 0.216 (Scotland) versus 0.147 (Sweden).
Halting an economy to the point of economic depression levels (early on) for the sake of people who were already vulnerable (look at the US, lockdowns but people still left the house cause duh...groceries and jobs) was a dumb idea. The government was trying to play god with it's citizens and they couldn't even police simple things like "stay at home" orders. So what was the point in even shutting down everything and giving people free money to the point of absurd inflation?
It depends on how expansive we take the whole "government as protector" role. It is a perfectly reasonable position to believe our government overstepped their responsibility if you take a more narrow view of this idea. In the last 2-3 decades in the US we've seen a consistent erosion of our civil liberties, because people want more "protection" from an ever increasing list of harms.
So if the government did such a bad job policing people from staying at home, why did we even bother with continuing with the stay at home orders? It was obvious from the end of 2020 that nobody was abiding by it and police clearly weren't enforcing these completely unconstitutional laws.
Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply chain failures all around.
But hey, at least we saved a few old or obese people already knocking on deaths door...
I don't think it's ever been about saving people from Covid, it's always been about saving hospitals from bad-but-eventually-non-threatening pneumonia explosions to the detriment of everything else they're supposed to care for.
I live in Hong Kong, where we have still a somewhat silly aggressive policy. We had 213 deaths for 8M people, so around 26 deaths per million people. Our hospitals never even felt the pandemic. Nobody is suffering of doubling inflation, ridiculous shortage or supply chain failures all around, but it's true we have less obese people than the US in the first place...
If the US didn't let their people free to have so many co-morbidities, they wouldn't pay such a dear price each time a cold mutates from a lab in China. Talk about a powerful country if such a small thing coming from here can knock them down, don't you think ?
It's a revision of history to suggest that government-imposed lockdowns are the only thing that caused the economy to stall. If you recall in the United States at least, not much had really changed until the NBA, a private organization, suspended play on their own on 3/11 [1]. Then the floodgates opened as other private organizations followed suit. The first government shutdown orders then came from San Francisco on 3/16 [2] and New York followed suit on 3/20 [3].
You can see in [4] that consumer spending patterns were changing well before lockdown orders were issued. In fact, consumer spending falls off a cliff the day the NBA suspended its season, which was also when the US stopped all flights to Europe. I don't think anyone argues that stopping travel to Covid hotzones was a bad idea, right? You can see that people starting to eat out less the first week of March, whereas lockdowns really came into full swing around the end of March.
Did lockdowns impact the economy? Sure. But you can't say the economy would be inflation-free and there would be no shortages or supply chain failures if no lockdowns were imposed.
Democrats most definitely want a one-party rule as they have in California.
California is total shit. Liberals preach all day about how they can solve world hunger, make free energy, and deal with drug addicted 'homeless' people.
They are full of shit. San Francisco is a total third world piece of shit. Drug addicts lying dead in the street everywhere. Gas prices are FUCKING INSANE and this is after the hair-gel nazi has banned a lot of gas-powered devices. Yes, let's electrify the fucking highways when we have rolling blackouts every FUCKING YEAR.
FUCK YOUR ONE PARTY GOVERNMENT. One world government is just a hop-skip-jump from this.
WoW. I shouldn't have bitten. Don't even know where to begin. :O
(Note - replying to parallel comments as they flagged dead so I'm unable to reply directly; understand this may Confuse people as it seems I'm replying to myself - not sure what the right etiquette is here?)
1. "Democrats as Marxists"? Please. I'm in Canada, and general perception is that USA Democrats are much in line with our Conservatives . Our Liberals are overall further left. I wonder what you'd think of our NDP, which is our third mainstream party and essentially socialist.
And then let me tell you about actual communist/marxist-leninist parties of the country I was born in! It seems that so many people spew words they think are bad and intended as an insult ("You're a socialist!!!!" "Umm, yeah; and?"), more than having any remote vague understanding what they mean.
2. "Democrats want a one party rule" - I don't follow this. Is there any party that wouldn't want to always win? Is there a perception, anywhere, that USA Republicans are the party that enjoys democracy and power to the people? :) I feel there's more details to this particular statement that I'm not getting. Are we looking for word "Dictatorship"?
3. "California is total shit. "
I mean, that's subjective. You may well feel so. It's my personal favourite part of USA, but I do get the feeling we'll disagree on many things in life:). My other favourite places in USA, whether Boston etc, are probably not in your top 3 either :).
4. "Stop pretending to be stupid. "
I honestly am not; I don't spend enough time in specific echelons so claims like this take me by genuine surprise. It's like the time my well-educated aunt in Europe suddenly one day said "Hilary Clinton is part of Jewish way of taking over the world". It's those "Umm, what???" moments where I get that I may appear stupid, but they are genuinely unexpected and I haven't a foggiest where they came from.
I don't feel our perception of reality on the ground, risk, and likelihood of that risk is sufficiently similar.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? you've been doing it repeatedly lately, and it's not what this site is for.
Should an economy serve humanity or should humanity serve the economy? It's largely a moral choice, but how a population answers it determines their political response
Certainly one predicates the other (i.e., there's no economy without humanity) and it's quite impractical for humanity to exist at any scale without trade, but whether it makes sense to sacrifice human life for 'the greater good of the economy' or to sacrifice economic function for 'the greater good of humanity' entails a moral choice
Technically you can have economies that don't operate with money; economies are just a (not necessarily good) quantitative lens to analyze human behavior.
I never made an assertion to the contrary, but I think economies are also useful for permitting specialization (and hence supply chains, to create more complex goods) and amortizing local disruptions to supply (e.g. food stores, trade) and probably a bunch of other useful things. They can also enable large scale waste, environmental destruction, debt traps, extreme inequality etc
No you're still misunderstanding. Even in for example, a super primitive society, there are, say "obligation economies" that exist even though nobody inside the society is using it to understand their situation. Likewise, in a modern society there are economies of waste, economies of environmental destruction etc. The "economies" are just quantitative frameworks for understanding human interaction.
Ah sure, I suppose I'm talking about what pops into mind when most people here the word 'economy', but certainly there's more going on as you've noted.
When I use the word, I'm talking something a more to do with the systems of trade of goods and services, currency, etc. - the health of such systems are the concern of many anti-lockdown proponents.
In modern times, you serve an economy because if you don't, you starve. This isn't star trek socialism. It's a survival of the fittest environment.
The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power. Even among private institutions. Look how many took advantage of the government PPP loans or outright laid off workers just for the hell of it.
The majority of the COVID deaths can be attributed to the old, obese, and sickly people. But most institutions serve people outside of that set. But because we have to protect the already dying, lets shut down everything and make life miserable for everyone! Lets not just tell these people to stay inside and be shut ins even though we could've!
The economy, as you know it, exists because government says, "Nope, we know best!" It is a survival of the fittest environment solely because the people in charge of the government don't want Star Trek socialism.
It is true that the majority of COVID deaths are among the population that one government called "life unworthy of life." But the decision to let them die off for the greater good is, itself, a form of saying "Nope, we know best." When a pandemic hits, you don't get to not choose a response.
My point is simply that Sweden chose a response. You are absolutely welcome to argue that they chose a better response than what others chose, that they served the greater good for cheaper, that the surviving Swedes are happier. But everyone - most especially the Swedish government ministers who made that choice - will tell you that Sweden said, we think we know better, so we're doing this.
> The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power
Because everyone knew everything in early 2020. Epidemiologists weren't sure about the details of the virus, its spread and how to contain it, but you can retrospectively claim that it couldn't be contained and it didn't make sense to try? Maybe you should revisit the statistics and reporting from Italy or any of the other highly impacted countries early on, the ones with the military hospitals, makeshift morgues, military run hearses and crematoriums, doctors having to choose who has a higher chance of survival under care and take them in, refusing the others.
> But most institutions serve people outside of that set
No, most institutions serve everybody. In countries with older populations, like Italy, Spain or Portugal, or countries with high percentage of obese or sickly people like the US or Mexico, are you really advocating that they should have sacrificed even 5-10%, or even more of their populations so that... The others could go to the cinema or restaurant? People like you are cold as fuck.
> you serve an economy because if you don't, you starve
Sounds like a problem with the economy. Economies are human constructs. With enough consensus they can be shaped in different ways. Quantitive easing is one instrument, but still very much within the rules. The rules can be bent further with consensus
> The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power.
Mask mandates and lockdowns in some western democracies outside of the US have worked exceedingly well, but they by-in-large had less quarrelsome (and smaller) populations
> The majority of the COVID deaths can be attributed to the old, obese, and sickly people. But most institutions serve people outside of that set.
It seems you largely agree that there's a moral dimension here. You may not agree there's malleability to how an economy functions - but once again, economies are a part of the social compact. If people decide that their parents, their kids' grandparents, the immunocompromised, etc. are worth saving, they may hold a different view than sheer social darwinism
The point of lockdowns v1 was panick and healthcare supply chain related. Once we knew who was dying from this (May-2021) we should have stopped given the millions who will suffer and people who will probably die from tanking the economies of the developed world. But hey, have to stick the agenda of report9 to the WHO which predicted 200Million+ dead in year1...
I love the regular repeated downvoters who simply won't engage in conversation that there was a hugely better way of handing this that was at best unwillingly ignored and at worst ignored because who is saying it which is just baffling.
I'm not signing the praises of antivax nonsense I want them all put in a box and sent out to sea. But facts are facts, even the inconvenient ones.
Since you've continued to use HN for political/ideological flamewar and ignored our requests to stop, I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
The bureaucrats that have been responsible for the questionable approach Sweden has followed are currently fighting like a cornered cat to avoid any and all accountability. So this 'message' fits the narrative well.
The prime minister has stepped down and left the reigns to someone else this week. The responsible for the health authorities has started his pension a week or two ago.
Both conveniently around the same time that the Swedish investigative COVID commission has released a scathing report on the handling of the epidemic.
The state epidemiologist, Dr. Tengele, sorry, Dr. Tegnell, is still there but currently in full-on "blame others"-mode, as long as the buck doesn't stop with him. It's the regions, or the elder care facilities, or the immigrants, or anyone as long as it isn't him.
It's makes for a immensely sad and sorry sight, but not unexpected in a country with no opposition voices, neither in politics nor media.
But that's nothing new under the sun as it was already known in 1971, and nothing has changed since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Totalitarians
Additionally, Sweden has changed it's guidance since last week so people that have been vaccinated twice should no longer get COVID tests, so please take any and all official numbers with a serious grain of salt and consider them as 'absolute minimum' values
Your entire argument falls over flat if you look at excess mortality. Aggregate statistics are hard to misunderstand. Sweden did worse at first, but is in general unremarkable.
The prime minster stepped down, but his second is taking over, and she's been more or less as involved as him during all this. Lots of other political aspects (and probably soon private ones) surely did factor in the timing.
Regarding the guy responsible for the health authorities. He looks quite old so it makes sense for him to retire, especially after a significant very special "project" is "done". Tegnell's wife (who's also been a public face during the pandemic) is taking over. Doesn't look too me like they're trying to start over.
No opposition: Really? There's been plenty in the news about the handling of the pandemic. TNT seems completely out of touch with reality. Could there be an alternative explanation why there's no uprising? Maybe people in Sweden in general isn't super dissatisfied (in general) with the outcome? I think it's clear even just from this thread that the view on how Sweden had handled the situation is mixed/unclear.
As for your last statement. There's a lot of difference in quality in the numbers from all countries more or less.
I'm a Swede with a relative who worked at "Folkhälsomyndigheten" during the pandemic who have also heard from other sources how these numbers/stats are collected in various countries.
PS. I'm not saying Swedens strategy was right or wrong. I'd say we need to wait and see what actual science has to say after we're all done with this. Instead of seeing random things as signs and thinking it's all a conspiracy.
Netherlands has just imposed lockdown measures even though they're more than 80% vaccinated, I wonder at what point are we going to call this bluff, and I say this as a vaccinated person (including the booster shot).
It's such a political thing that many people are going to support government measures and wear masks at family gatherings for the rest of their lives. I wouldn't be surprised if some things like masks at the post office last forever at this point regardless of necessity.
The post office is a federal thing here so it wouldn't matter where I moved. My own state hasn't had general mask mandates or capacity restrictions etc. for most of the year.
Post office? Long time since I heard those two words together.
What country are you from? Looking at how quickly the disappeared from Sweden (merged into grocery stores) I would not be very surprised if they are gone in your country too before whatever mask mandatory you have.
We're still living with the outcome of 9/11 and the security theatre you experience everytime you travel; Covid has been far more imnpactful and we're already seeing eternal "amber health states" that I don't see ever disappearing.
Now that you mention it, they post a lot of covid statistics daily in the media here, but none of them are 'How many of new infections are vaccinated people'.
>“Now, we’re two years into this and Sweden doesn’t really stand out. We’re not the best, but we’re definitely not the worst. That’s what I hear now: how much good did all these draconian [measures] do for anybody?”
Whatever your stance on the merits of lockdowns, I think this is a question that very much needs asking and analysing objectively. Sadly I suspect that too many political careers are at stake across the board for the answer to this question to be answered objectively for a long time yet.
Objectivity seems to be the biggest causality of COVID...
The vast majority of people have "picked a side" and will use any data they deem to be advantage to their side to highlight how they were right, and ignore any data that disproves their side.
This is true for both the "science" class and the political class.
"Trust the science" has become a "Trust the science that agrees with my worldview, ignore the rest"
For politicians that is expected for people that claim to be "scientists" that has become an alarming trend over the last 24 mos'
I find this statement, which we hear ad infinitum from every direction, to be indistigushable from "trust in god". This "Science" thing is the new faith.
I think a lot of politicians lacked and still lack the moral courage to say “we don’t know yet” or “we’re acting out of caution as the science isn’t clear”. I’m not sure how we can devise a system of politics where moral courage doesn’t conflict with career progression, perhaps a nonpartisan democracy would be better for this but that may have issues of its own.
I think the bigger problem here is not "we’re acting out of caution as the science" but more that politicians are incapable of saying "we are NOT going to act because the science is unclear"
They must be seen as ALWAYS doing something, anything, to solve every perceived problem. This is the root cause of most of the issues, Just once I would love to see a politician say "This is not for government to solve" ... Just once...
Because it is what we learn in school as kids. We are persecuted for saying "I don't know" and here we are. Everybody have opinions on everything. A lot of people think, that they know a lot. But actually only few people actually know something.
Some of this is because instead of presenting data, we are now presenting personalities.
When people in media, or politicians say "Trust the science" they do not point to a piece of data, or research, they instead point to a person, often a high profile person, that we are to trust.
What the fuck happened in your childhood that you are willing to believe the most wild conspiracy theories and are willing to suck Fauci's dick so much?
I don't think it is interesting to hear "the architect" evaluate his own work. Tegnell has a lot of critics but they don't get the same day of light. I can't refer to an English source but Ivar Arpi's interview with Björn Olsen recently is a good balance to this self-gratulatory message from Tegnell.
Sweden is a strange country. Even moderately right wing people advocated for stronger lockdowns in unison, whereas the left wing perspective was think of the children (keep schools open) and think of the working class (who are the ones to lose their jobs).
Says a lot of how malleable political discourse is, I guess.
One thing that’s become clear to me is that looking at any two places at one point in time, comparing that day’s stats, and using that to judge/justify the Covid policies of each on that day, is naive. We may even be in a “Moneyball” situation where we don’t know the most critical stat to measure.
I do think there is, maybe a purposeful almost?, disregard for environmental conditions. The epidemiologist in question, Dr. Tegnell (interesting that the article made a distinct effort not to use any of his credentials or titles), did say that if you try to compare things in context that the results are very inconsistent: "Covid doesn’t care about history or language, it cares about socio-economic status or migrant backgrounds or crowded housing. That’s where Sweden stands out in a Nordic context, but not so much in a EU context,”" Per capita comparisons are almost meaningless as factors such as population density, public transit, climate, socio-economics, and others have significant impact.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadSweden 1478
Denmark 474
Finland 219
Norway 173
They're 3 to 8 times worse. They now do compare favorably to Portugal for example at 1796. When did Portugal have the huge spike in deaths that propelled it in front of Sweden? When it decided not to do lockdowns, even though the numbers were horrible, to "save Christmas". 13k people or 3/4 of the total COVID deaths in Portugal happened from that decision alone. That other places also made horrible decisions doesn't help justify Sweden's.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
>Sweden had one of the lower excess mortality levels in Europe
Presumably, excess mortality includes the effects of overloaded hospitals, delayed medical care, lockdown-related depression, and undiagnosed COVID, which are hard to measure any other way, and which seem logically much higher under lockdown.
Looks like Sweden's (cumulative) excess mortality shot up at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since trended downwards, whereas other nordic countries have been fairly low but trending upwards.
We'll see how this plays out. Could be that Sweden simply killed off larger percentage of the old and frail at the start, who are now dying in other countries. Or maybe Swedish population got infected more, and now has stronger protection than other countries.
Sweden: 5.21%
Finland: 1.57%
Denmark: -0.09%
Norway: -0.85%
And you think these numbers somehow argue that Sweden "no longer stands out"? Or tells a more positive story than the covid death numbers at least?
Source (thanks tomp): https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Data as of October 17th (the latest date that Sweden has data for).
Mortality for the five years prior: [1]
2015: 90 907
2016: 90 982
2017: 91 972
2018: 92 185
2019: 88 766
And 2020: 98 124
Had 2019 been in line with the previous years the excess mortality would have been noticeably less pronounced.
This does explain some (not all though) of the difference in excess mortality, especially the many elderly who died early on.
[1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk...
Here is the same graph of excess mortality with all 27 EU states included: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Note how Sweden has the is the sixth lowest of all the countries in the graph.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9jyxqt/gdp_per_cap...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File...
Here in Switzerland, we had plenty of lockdowns, followed the scientific wisdom and so on, and we're at 1375 deaths per million.
The UK has shifted strategies around a bunch, but they have one of the highest vaccination rates, and have had multiple lockdowns, but are still at a very high 2119 deaths per million.
I'm not trying to say this or that approach is good or bad, and I'm happy we've had lockdowns here in Switzerland. I'm just saying that correlating the number of deaths with the implementation of lockdowns definitely does not fully explain what we've seen so far.
There are so many other factors, such as excess mortality, compliance with measures, psychological impacts on both mental and physical health, international travel, local variants, and a lot of factors we don't even know exist yet.
Another one we don’t even understand at all yet is genetic makeup of the population. We know that with other diseases there are genetic markers that increase of decrease susceptibility. There probably are here too but we don’t know what they are. Differences in distribution of those markers could totally confound studies.
The best comparisons right now are going to be within more genetically and demographically similar populations.
Here in Ohio we have seen that the vaccine is over 90% effective at preventing severe COVID and death but far less effective at simply stopping transmission. (Ohio has used the mRNA Pfizer/Moderna one almost exclusively.) But we already know it does not sterilize.
Not sure about masks and lockdowns. Have to look that up. There are even more confounders there like what masks are being used (N95 vs KN95 vs thin cloth junk) and uneven compliance that nobody is able to track.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1457438899580456...
The screenshot is from the NYTimes covid tracker.
The guess was that more people were inside in the south the summer when it was hot, and they were running air conditioning. Now that the South has more reasonable temperatures, people are spending more time outside. While the north is starting to get colder and people are spending more time inside. This also seems to apply to California which has relatively stable temperatures all year, so they haven't been hit by either spike yet. Though the part that doesn't fit in here is the northeast corridor is not being hit as hard. My only guess is they were the ones hit hardest when covid started, so maybe they won't get as big of a spike now.
I cannot find the original material that informed me, but I see there was a research effort last year, described at
https://bren.ucsb.edu/news/seasonal-uv-light-exposure-affect...
> The authors then used a dataset of meteorological conditions with daily resolution ... analyz[ing] how four variables — UV radiation, temperature, humidity and precipitation — correlated with the daily growth rate of COVID-19 cases ... [and] found evidence that a location’s UV exposure significantly affects COVID-19 transmission. A change in UV exposure by 1 standard deviation (roughly equal to the difference in UV between May and June in Los Angeles) reduced the growth rate of new cases by around 1 percentage point over the following two weeks
and a more recent one, described at
https://eos.org/research-spotlights/scientists-uncover-the-s...
> The seasonal values of ultraviolet (UV) radiation and ADC, however, were consistent with fluctuations in COVID-19 prevalence across all five countries
Cool!
Wonder if anyone has tried to figure out what part of that is related to the virus transmitting less efficiently in UV light (disinfecting effect) and what part is related to peoples skin producing vitamin D when exposed to sunlight?
Personally I have tried the Norwegian cod liver oil (yuck) to get my necessary vitamin D.
CA, OR, and WA have better rates than many places, and the North East is by far the most vaccinated area of the country.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/corona...
For OR, I understand that they had a warm summer and spiked this summer already and are trending down now.
https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...
We have the worst vaccine coverage of western Europe.
The government didn't take the necessary measures in September/October last year which lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Most schools have no mitigation in place, no CO2 meter, no filtering, no mask, no testing.
The largest political party (SVP/UDC) has systematically downplayed the pandemic.
Etc.
You're right, I hadn't realised this. Still, all countries in Western Europe are within ~10% of each other when it comes to the percentage of the population that's fully vaccinated.
More generally, I definitely don't think Switzerland's handling of the pandemic was perfect, but it currently seems to me that Switzerland did mostly follow the advice of the scientific community.
with covid its all been a bunch of speculation and shouting
Covid is even harder to measure. One Example: You shut down elementary schools to prevent kids from getting infected; how many were pushed back into broken homes from the only safe space they had? How many will have long-term pain from learning , nutrition, physical abuse, mental health?
Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry" which completely ignores the direct and indirect costs of any action.
We know that. Not exact numbers, but at least there are rough estimates. It's been an active area of research for quite some time, so there's a lot of data. Statistically speaking, we know how childhood poverty or a missed school year means for average lifespan.
It's been theoreticized that a reason for the differences in pandemic response when it comes to Sweden are down to the fact that they recently unified all their people health issues, that is not only medical issues but also social ones, under one government agency. That broader mandate is generally more data driven and needs to take longer term effects of missing school into account.
> Most policy can be reduced to "Better safe than sorry"
That's not all there is to it. Strictly following that reasoning would emphasize known risks against unknown risks. That does not explain the policy making that dominated during the pandemic.
Kids, and many people for that matter, cannot just stay in lockdown for months like domestic cats without triggering mental health issues.
Without that, they seem pretty lazy, or designed to drive a political point regardless of the evidence.
This goes the other way too, of course - people who are keen to compare Sweden to the UK instead of Denmark cry foul whenever New Zealand is brought up.
The problem though is that there’s no bulletproof explanation for why lockdowns were so effective in the rest of Scandinavia and less so elsewhere in Europe (or many American states for that matter). Without that, the counterfactual is still a bit of a question mark. If Sweden had adopted Denmark’s strategy, maybe they would’ve indeed come out looking like Denmark - or maybe they would’ve come out looking like the UK. Vaguely gesturing towards “they’re all Scandinavian” doesn’t have much explanatory power.
Sweden is much more like UK, the Netherlands and Germany than it is like Norway or Finland when we look at things like urbanisation, demographic diversity and immigration. In part because much more of the population is centralized to a few areas. The organization of public health care, especially that of old people's homes, is completely different between those countries.
If we look at the regional differences, you'd see that the areas of Sweden which demographically is similar to Norway indeed followed the pandemic outbreak of Norway very closely, with a very low incidence for the longest time, and then scattered outbreaks with increasing magnitude.
During those first crucial months, the pandemic outbreak in Sweden almost exlusively took place in the two most populous and urbanized areas. The rest of the country was pretty much spared. With the differently implemented lockdown in place, it was interesting to compare incidence in smaller geographic areas separated by the border but otherwise much more similar than the countries are. It is quite clear that any correlation can not be substantiated by data.
Another reason why such comparisons are hard: UK aggressively cleared hospitals in early 2020, in anticipation of case rises, and discharged whoever they could home.
This lead to thousands of old people being discharged to care homes, as it turns out frequently with Covid, with care home staff having not even the basic protective gear. IIRC 25% of first wave deaths were attributed to care homes, and due to various quirks of the number, this may well be an underestimate.
I guess you’ll see other cases where the general policy was good/bad but external forces skewed the result.
Poland do basically no protective steps until Autumn 2020, and despite that was totally spared the pandemic. Then later shit hit the fan pretty badly...
In addition, anyone who died, for any reason, at any time after a positive test, was recorded as a covid death. Even if they died in a car accident months after they had the test.
Sources:
Covid-19: The problems with case counting:
"What is a case? One issue in trying to interpret numbers of detected cases is that there is no set definition of a case. At the moment it seems that a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) positive result is the only criterion required for a case to be recognised. In any other disease we would have a clearly defined specification that would usually involve signs, symptoms, and a test result, .... “We are moving into a biotech world where the norms of clinical reasoning are going out of the window. A PCR test does not equal covid-19; it should not, but in some definitions it does." http://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3374.full
Why no one can ever recover from COVID-19 in England:
"A Department of Health and Social Care source said: ‘You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a COVID death.’” https://web.archive.org/web/20201012190837/https://www.cebm....
And my favourite... Sir Humphrey responds to the allegation of test inaccuracy...
"Positive test results at the limit of detection that occur late in the cycle of infection represent individuals with a low or very low risk of transmission, as a result of the decline in infectious virus production or remnants of viral RNA in respiratory secretions. The clinical significance of these positive results, at the limit of detection of the assay, are difficult to interpret in the absence of a clinical history and context. Possible reasons for the non-repeatability of these results include stochastic effects at the limit of detection of the assay, true prolonged low level detection of the virus, and very rarely, analytical errors in sample handling." https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sars-cov-2-rna-te...
What qualifies as “so many excess deaths”? The Hong Kong flu was per capita comparable to what we have now and most people didn’t know anything was happening.
The idea that COVID and the Hong Kong flu were comparable is, at this point, outdated. For instance, the most liberal estimate (per Wikipedia) of HKF deaths is around 100k in the US. Adjusting for population growth you’d see something like 175k dead (the US population was 200M at the time). The US is now at ~800,000 excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, and rising.
However tempting it may be to correlate only with the magnitude of the lockdown procedures, however, it is equally if not more important to correlate them with how public health is organized and what kind of service citizens could be expected to receive.
We can only hope that in time people will look back at this with a scientific mindset and draw any conclusions from that.
What about "whether people observe care or not"? Because I have seen (also not far away from the poster, and not even in a single "culture") that a large amount of people seemed to be completely oblivious and irresponsible - and I am very sure that factor has been and is being critical. Extreme lack of contextual awareness - in general and in specific occasions, day by day and moment by moment.
Incidentally: never received so many invitations to "go out and meet and do" like in the past two years. (And of course, never been so glad of cheap communication tech being available.)
Attention is everything.
You can compare the number of days of lockdown to deaths per million. You should also compare at what point of time the lockdowns were undertaken. There's plenty of research that shows Non Pharmaceutical Initiatives are very effective in stopping the spread of virus.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
In terms of saving lives, it clearly wasn't the best strategy. In terms of securing a reasonable standard of living, keeping the economy going, keeping mental health effects limited, it was reasonably measured.
Bodies weren't piling up in the streets.
In my wider circle of acquaintances, I know of exactly two people who got sick during the pandemic. Maybe a few more did but didn't tell anyone, but it wasn't anywhere near the apocalyptic tales you see on the Internet, especially from people who haven't even been to the country.
In the Netherlands less than one thousand patients on the ICU is able to bring a healthcare system to a grinding halt.
Have a look here (tone is satirical) for a comparison of Sweden's and Germany's graphs:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/11/12/wear-a-mask-and...
Germany's numbers are exploding right now. In the U.S. you could also compare New York and Vermont. New York was more like Sweden (not by choice, but through incompetence and extreme population density). Vermont had the officially recommended policies and was a poster child.
Now the Vermont numbers are exploding, while New York's are not.
There is something to be said for the theory that the highly connected nodes in the social graph (who are often very healthy) all need to be infected in a short period. Then the outbreaks stop (like they have always done with the flu).
And this is very important.
Context is king, no more so than large scale and complex statistical analyses. Sadly almost nobody seems to appreciate this as long as they have a number to argue a point.
Nobody corrects for population demographics. Population density. The various interventions which will pollute the study even further as some have proven damaging. Not to mention the large scale all cause mortality spike associated with the vaccine drive observed as predicted in each further country from watching the Israeli data.
Ignoring all of the above in your statistical analysis is both cherry picking and employing the same logic used by people to exclaim 5G definitely causes cancer because of study-X where a rat died that one time.
That alone is probably one of the reasons the above data is now declared in the interests of nation states rather than being openly shared data. Only a few years ago we were making headway in data like this being made publicly available in it's entirety through equivalent to the English ONS. But this is now very inconvenient and frankly some of the data has been deemed "does not exist" so it can't be requested under FOI laws in the UK, despite the infrastructure still being in place and working in collection of this data.
I'm not crying conspiracy I'm just making a statement that lack of transparency sucks the big one when it comes to public policy.
Let’s revisit this in a decade when folks can add up deaths from Covid (and delayed care for other issues), mental health and economic impact.
THAT will be interesting to see.
Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities? That’s just lying. It’s like calculating Canada’s density over the Arctic when 80% live within 100 miles of the US border.
And is my statistics about suicides wrong? 2020 was the highest since 2012?
Even if you want to compare by Sweden's most dense region, it's still 282/km2 versus 8,358/km2. Your comparison makes no sense whatsoever.
> And is my statistics about suicides wrong? 2020 was the highest since 2012?
You weren't making some generalized point about suicides increasing (which would have been irrelevant to the conversation at hand), you were trying to imply that lockdowns were directly responsible for the increase, which the statistical trend refutes.
Your commentary is intentionally disinformative.
” Population density is concentrated within Stockholm including its immediately surrounding urban area, averaging 11,802 people per square mile (4,279 per square kilometer).”
Clearly I’m the one spreading disinformation. Looking at city to city (Singapore is a city state) the density differences are minor.
And in in terms of suicides they were up 13% in one year. Singapore seems to think the covid situation was a factor.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/suicide-highest-re...
Not sure kind of games you’re playing here.
In regards to the suicides, you just referenced an individual's personal thoughts on a potential reason for part of the increase. That's not evidence of anything, especially given that the statistical trend was already rising sharply upward, meaning there were existing issues being exacerbated long before COVID showed up. Even if we pretend that 100% of the 52 additional suicides in 2020 (a death rate of 12.6/mil) were directly caused by lockdowns, that's still a small fraction of the number of COVID deaths resulting from not having lockdowns, as is evidenced by ANY country's statistics.
So, yeah, you are ignoring all of the obvious facts that refute your assertions, which makes you disinformative.
Come on man. Just admit you were wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
Total area: 728.6 km2
Density: 7,804/km2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm
Urban area: 381.63 km2
Urban density: 4,200/km2
Metro area: 6,519 km2
Metro density: 370/km2
My point was nothing more than the density is not that different, and your numbers show that.
The entire point I was making was that despite a very strict lockdown, Singapore is seeing really significant case numbers and deaths and they still aren't through it yet. All of those things are true.
Once the total costs of lockdown are fully tallied, we may find out the return on those restrictions weren't as high as we thought they would be.
That's not the point you were making at all and you know it, so now you're just further gaslighting -- and you haven't been remotely correct about any of it.
Let's recap.
> Maybe better to compare to Singapore which had ~6 deaths per million earlier this year, has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but since barely relaxing their restrictions now has ~120 deaths per million, raging number of cases (mostly vaccinated) and had the highest level of suicides last year since 2012?
You wanted to compare Sweden to Singapore, but got called out for making a poor comparison given the drastic differences in population density. You also suggested that suicide rates increased because of lockdowns, without any evidence for that whatsoever, while also baselessly suggesting that more people died from lockdowns than would have from COVID, which is just completely false by every metric.
> Why calculate density of Sweden based on the total country when most people live in a couple cities?
Your response was to immediately move the goal post and limit the comparison to Sweden's most populated areas, while also making another false claim that "most" Swedes live in two cities, despite >65% of Swedes NOT living in those two cities. I played along with your trolling and explained why that's still a completely irrelevant comparison.
> Looking at city to city (Singapore is a city state) the density differences are minor. [...] And in in terms of suicides they were up 13% in one year.
Your response was to move the goal post AGAIN, to now strictly include the densest part of urban Stockholm itself. Unfortunately, even the densest part of Sweden's densest city isn't remotely similar to Singapore, especially given that the densest of Singapore's subzones have 45,000/km2, which is nearly 10x that of Stockholm's densest city center.
You also tried to use one person's musings as evidence that suicides were directly tied to lockdowns, even though the person didn't even claim that connection -- and at this point, you're still trying to insist that Singapore's "lockdown-induced" suicide rate increase is higher than Sweden's non-lockdown COVID death rate.
> Wow! You sure back down quickly. You originally said we should use Sweden's 25 people/sq km and now you're willing to concede that in reality it's half? And sorry, but Singapore and Stockholm have the same population density in terms of order of magnitude.
Here's where your trolling becomes egregious, because despite your decision to repeatedly put new, unfair and illogical restrictions on the comparison, you've now claimed that I was the one who changed the parameters. In reality, all I did was prove you wrong no matter how many times YOU decided to change the rules. In a last ditch effort to pretend your arguments have any footing, you also made a new claim that 4,000 is the same as 8,000 because they have the same number of digits, which is beyond absurd.
You also conveniently dropped your suicide rate argument at this point, because you ran out of manufactured and personally theorized "evidence."
> Half the density is "not even comparable"? You're not even arguing in good faith. You've just been proven wrong and now you're moving the goalposts and trying again.
You're now claiming that 50% is similar to 100%, which again, is beyond absurd. At this point, you've also completely misdirected away from the actual comparison between Singapore and Sweden being drastically lower than half, which is the case even for Stockholm alone when you more appropriately include the metropolitan area. You also repeated your claim that I moved the goal posts, which we've a...
Since you've never tried to engage with those points I'm left to assume that you do not care about truth, and are only mis-using suicide stats to dishonestly make a point. That's pretty repellent behaviour.
Do better.
With reference to the countries that went to look for hermits in the deserts to tell them they should lock themselves somewhere to comply to the policy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
I don't really see why people talk so much about covid when you can get way more health benefits just by limiting the hours you can buy alcohol on or similar, compared to limiting the movement of an entire population.
And next year as people got vaccinated the one year covid caused drop of 0.5 years will disappear and Sweden will be even better, while the huge push for covid measures didn't have any lasting impact. Imagine how many lives could be saved if the same amount of political will and resources were spent on more important things...
> One older overview of systematic reviews found that reducing hours of sale resulted in averting 250 to 750 Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALY) per one million population (8)
> One older systematic review and a recent rapid synthesis found an association between hours of sale of alcohol and increases in alcohol-related harms, including drinking and driving and road accidents, but the association was less clear for the effects on alcohol consumption or health harms
> Two older reviews found significant increases in alcohol-related motor casualties and assaults with increased temporal availability
https://www.mcmasterforum.org/docs/default-source/product-do...
750 DALY per 1 million is 0.00075 years per person by the way. That's basically negligible.
I don't really understand what happened in the last year?
We got the vaccines at the beginning but why no new vaccines? Why no lifelong protection vaccines? Where are all of the incentives to accelerate the r&d of new ways to handle this?
I mean, the current wave is worse than the worst and the strategies are still pure incompetence.
Is everyone just faking competence currently?
Start paying handsomely and maybe competent people will become interested.
On top of earnings, there is also the issue of unreasonable demand. Did you know for example that some government agencies can not use productive software because of stupid policies imposed by incompetent regulating bodies?
And worse still, a lot of the cases in Sweden earlier doors were brought back by holidayers in Spain, a popular Swedish holiday location apparently, which is exactly what happened to the UK too.
Is it a popular Finnish holiday location? Norwegian? Do those countries even have flights to Spain?
Answers I dont know, do you?
There's two sides to every story. Instead you might ask why don't they have a higher death rate than the UK or France or Italy, all of whom locked down.
Just another data point.
New York 2920
Vermont 620
They are 5 times worse! New York's decision to have a more urban population is completely unjustifiable.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
LOL!!! What a clueless comment.
> There are several of these articles trying to redeem Sweden's choices.
Who are you trying to redeem? Sleepy Joe?
Why didn't you compare the number of people inconvenienced, or economics losses, or jobs lost?
I’m honestly surprised people still exist who support lockdowns.
18 months of relentless one-sided fear porn will do that to a mind.
I highly recommend Laura Dodsworth's recent book A State of Fear for more on this. It's about the UK but I'm sure a similar story could be told about most Western countries.
We need to answer three major question. 1: Malmö has the same lock down rules as the rest of Sweden, so why are the numbers so low compared to Copenhagen. 2: Why does Stockholm and the surrounding area have so high rate that it brings up the national average to be 3 times higher then Denmark? Finally 3: How does the lock downs relate to those two questions.
Finland made a smart move in the beginning of the pandemic. They locked down the capital with restricted movement in and out, keeping the initial spread low.
As I see it, Sweden made three mistakes. They should have locked down Stockholm. They should also have closed down the only subway Sweden has, located in Stockholm. They should have isolated the elder care workers who lived in Stockholm, many who used the subway system to reach the elder care homes going from elder care homes to elder care homes. Last they should have injected funds and medical supplies to the privatized elder care system, as many workers didn't even get enough time to wash their hands between patients.
An overall comparison with Scotland as a country which took drastic measures shows that it fared very badly with much greater excess death together with the many long-lasting knock-on effects of lockdown. Death rates as of Nov 2021 as % of the population are 0.216 (Scotland) versus 0.147 (Sweden).
Not sure if I understand this reasoning, the government has to protect its citizens, that is the number one task.
The assholes that inhabit this forum want us all to be taking booster shots and showing our vax papers for the next 20 years.
Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply chain failures all around.
But hey, at least we saved a few old or obese people already knocking on deaths door...
I live in Hong Kong, where we have still a somewhat silly aggressive policy. We had 213 deaths for 8M people, so around 26 deaths per million people. Our hospitals never even felt the pandemic. Nobody is suffering of doubling inflation, ridiculous shortage or supply chain failures all around, but it's true we have less obese people than the US in the first place...
If the US didn't let their people free to have so many co-morbidities, they wouldn't pay such a dear price each time a cold mutates from a lab in China. Talk about a powerful country if such a small thing coming from here can knock them down, don't you think ?
You can see in [4] that consumer spending patterns were changing well before lockdown orders were issued. In fact, consumer spending falls off a cliff the day the NBA suspended its season, which was also when the US stopped all flights to Europe. I don't think anyone argues that stopping travel to Covid hotzones was a bad idea, right? You can see that people starting to eat out less the first week of March, whereas lockdowns really came into full swing around the end of March.
Did lockdowns impact the economy? Sure. But you can't say the economy would be inflation-free and there would be no shortages or supply chain failures if no lockdowns were imposed.
[1] https://www.nba.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-causes-nba-sus...
[2] https://sfmayor.org/article/san-francisco-issues-new-public-...
[3] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-03-20-...
[4] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-consumers-are-spend...
The intention of the Open Border policy is to allow millions of illegal aliens as potential new Democrats in.
Stop pretending to be stupid.
California is total shit. Liberals preach all day about how they can solve world hunger, make free energy, and deal with drug addicted 'homeless' people.
They are full of shit. San Francisco is a total third world piece of shit. Drug addicts lying dead in the street everywhere. Gas prices are FUCKING INSANE and this is after the hair-gel nazi has banned a lot of gas-powered devices. Yes, let's electrify the fucking highways when we have rolling blackouts every FUCKING YEAR.
FUCK YOUR ONE PARTY GOVERNMENT. One world government is just a hop-skip-jump from this.
(Note - replying to parallel comments as they flagged dead so I'm unable to reply directly; understand this may Confuse people as it seems I'm replying to myself - not sure what the right etiquette is here?)
1. "Democrats as Marxists"? Please. I'm in Canada, and general perception is that USA Democrats are much in line with our Conservatives . Our Liberals are overall further left. I wonder what you'd think of our NDP, which is our third mainstream party and essentially socialist.
And then let me tell you about actual communist/marxist-leninist parties of the country I was born in! It seems that so many people spew words they think are bad and intended as an insult ("You're a socialist!!!!" "Umm, yeah; and?"), more than having any remote vague understanding what they mean.
2. "Democrats want a one party rule" - I don't follow this. Is there any party that wouldn't want to always win? Is there a perception, anywhere, that USA Republicans are the party that enjoys democracy and power to the people? :) I feel there's more details to this particular statement that I'm not getting. Are we looking for word "Dictatorship"?
3. "California is total shit. "
I mean, that's subjective. You may well feel so. It's my personal favourite part of USA, but I do get the feeling we'll disagree on many things in life:). My other favourite places in USA, whether Boston etc, are probably not in your top 3 either :).
4. "Stop pretending to be stupid. "
I honestly am not; I don't spend enough time in specific echelons so claims like this take me by genuine surprise. It's like the time my well-educated aunt in Europe suddenly one day said "Hilary Clinton is part of Jewish way of taking over the world". It's those "Umm, what???" moments where I get that I may appear stupid, but they are genuinely unexpected and I haven't a foggiest where they came from.
I don't feel our perception of reality on the ground, risk, and likelihood of that risk is sufficiently similar.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Humanity is economy, no money on the table means no food and no shelter.
When I use the word, I'm talking something a more to do with the systems of trade of goods and services, currency, etc. - the health of such systems are the concern of many anti-lockdown proponents.
The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power. Even among private institutions. Look how many took advantage of the government PPP loans or outright laid off workers just for the hell of it.
The majority of the COVID deaths can be attributed to the old, obese, and sickly people. But most institutions serve people outside of that set. But because we have to protect the already dying, lets shut down everything and make life miserable for everyone! Lets not just tell these people to stay inside and be shut ins even though we could've!
It is true that the majority of COVID deaths are among the population that one government called "life unworthy of life." But the decision to let them die off for the greater good is, itself, a form of saying "Nope, we know best." When a pandemic hits, you don't get to not choose a response.
Because everyone knew everything in early 2020. Epidemiologists weren't sure about the details of the virus, its spread and how to contain it, but you can retrospectively claim that it couldn't be contained and it didn't make sense to try? Maybe you should revisit the statistics and reporting from Italy or any of the other highly impacted countries early on, the ones with the military hospitals, makeshift morgues, military run hearses and crematoriums, doctors having to choose who has a higher chance of survival under care and take them in, refusing the others.
> But most institutions serve people outside of that set
No, most institutions serve everybody. In countries with older populations, like Italy, Spain or Portugal, or countries with high percentage of obese or sickly people like the US or Mexico, are you really advocating that they should have sacrificed even 5-10%, or even more of their populations so that... The others could go to the cinema or restaurant? People like you are cold as fuck.
Sounds like a problem with the economy. Economies are human constructs. With enough consensus they can be shaped in different ways. Quantitive easing is one instrument, but still very much within the rules. The rules can be bent further with consensus
> The government stepping in and saying "NOPE! WE KNOW BEST!" and then basically forcing every citizen to restructure their lives for something that couldn't even remotely be contained just shows the abuse of power.
Mask mandates and lockdowns in some western democracies outside of the US have worked exceedingly well, but they by-in-large had less quarrelsome (and smaller) populations
> The majority of the COVID deaths can be attributed to the old, obese, and sickly people. But most institutions serve people outside of that set.
It seems you largely agree that there's a moral dimension here. You may not agree there's malleability to how an economy functions - but once again, economies are a part of the social compact. If people decide that their parents, their kids' grandparents, the immunocompromised, etc. are worth saving, they may hold a different view than sheer social darwinism
I'm not signing the praises of antivax nonsense I want them all put in a box and sent out to sea. But facts are facts, even the inconvenient ones.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29217024.
The prime minister has stepped down and left the reigns to someone else this week. The responsible for the health authorities has started his pension a week or two ago. Both conveniently around the same time that the Swedish investigative COVID commission has released a scathing report on the handling of the epidemic.
The state epidemiologist, Dr. Tengele, sorry, Dr. Tegnell, is still there but currently in full-on "blame others"-mode, as long as the buck doesn't stop with him. It's the regions, or the elder care facilities, or the immigrants, or anyone as long as it isn't him.
It's makes for a immensely sad and sorry sight, but not unexpected in a country with no opposition voices, neither in politics nor media. But that's nothing new under the sun as it was already known in 1971, and nothing has changed since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Totalitarians
Additionally, Sweden has changed it's guidance since last week so people that have been vaccinated twice should no longer get COVID tests, so please take any and all official numbers with a serious grain of salt and consider them as 'absolute minimum' values
Regarding the guy responsible for the health authorities. He looks quite old so it makes sense for him to retire, especially after a significant very special "project" is "done". Tegnell's wife (who's also been a public face during the pandemic) is taking over. Doesn't look too me like they're trying to start over.
No opposition: Really? There's been plenty in the news about the handling of the pandemic. TNT seems completely out of touch with reality. Could there be an alternative explanation why there's no uprising? Maybe people in Sweden in general isn't super dissatisfied (in general) with the outcome? I think it's clear even just from this thread that the view on how Sweden had handled the situation is mixed/unclear.
As for your last statement. There's a lot of difference in quality in the numbers from all countries more or less.
I'm a Swede with a relative who worked at "Folkhälsomyndigheten" during the pandemic who have also heard from other sources how these numbers/stats are collected in various countries.
PS. I'm not saying Swedens strategy was right or wrong. I'd say we need to wait and see what actual science has to say after we're all done with this. Instead of seeing random things as signs and thinking it's all a conspiracy.
Do you honestly expect anyone to take you seriously when you compare someone to a Nazi war criminal?
What country are you from? Looking at how quickly the disappeared from Sweden (merged into grocery stores) I would not be very surprised if they are gone in your country too before whatever mask mandatory you have.
And so on. We are secure but… not enough!
Oh, and you're going to need a booster jab every six months, but stop asking questions.
Whatever your stance on the merits of lockdowns, I think this is a question that very much needs asking and analysing objectively. Sadly I suspect that too many political careers are at stake across the board for the answer to this question to be answered objectively for a long time yet.
The vast majority of people have "picked a side" and will use any data they deem to be advantage to their side to highlight how they were right, and ignore any data that disproves their side.
This is true for both the "science" class and the political class.
"Trust the science" has become a "Trust the science that agrees with my worldview, ignore the rest"
For politicians that is expected for people that claim to be "scientists" that has become an alarming trend over the last 24 mos'
I find this statement, which we hear ad infinitum from every direction, to be indistigushable from "trust in god". This "Science" thing is the new faith.
They must be seen as ALWAYS doing something, anything, to solve every perceived problem. This is the root cause of most of the issues, Just once I would love to see a politician say "This is not for government to solve" ... Just once...
When people in media, or politicians say "Trust the science" they do not point to a piece of data, or research, they instead point to a person, often a high profile person, that we are to trust.
I trust data, not people.
I think this will be the high price that Sweden really will have to pay in the long run.
Time will tell.
A genuinely sincere question:
What the fuck happened in your childhood that you are willing to believe the most wild conspiracy theories and are willing to suck Fauci's dick so much?
I guess expect the truth to be somewhere in between. But (like proven with other far-right strategies) also don't expect it to be exactly mid-day.
Although I don't agree he is far right. He is right.
In any case, Björn Olsen is certainly an expert and his viewpoints are a healthy balance to what Tegnell says
Björn Olsen has held a consistent line throughout so he is worth listening to.
Says a lot of how malleable political discourse is, I guess.
I feel like the right wing in Sweden (conservatives) are the ones that are less likely to be liberal.
In the sense that the have opinions on how people behave.
For example when it comes to freedom of religion or sexuality or want to have opinions what should be considered real art and what is not etc.
We need live executions on prime tv of all the FASCIST TYRANICAL governors and mayors that showed humanity's worst.
They need to be publicly executed to show the world that we will not tolerate this behavior.
What is particularly disgusting is that these same people won't even follow their own edicts.
SF Mayor London Breed has routinely flaunted her own masking mandates, most recently at the Getty Wedding.
CA Governor Gavin Newsom has repeatedly been caught inside without a mask and refuses to vaccinate one of his own daughters.
Nancy Pelosi, repeatedly violates the mask law, once again most recently at the Getty wedding.
All these politicians need their heads on staves.
Fuck your social distancing.
Fuck your vax mandates.
Fuck your vax pass mandates.
Fuck San Francisco.
Fuck Mayor Breed.
Fuck Pelosi.
Fuck Newsom.
Fuck all of California.
1) Torture and murder puppies.
and
2) Create US taxpayer funded bio-terrorism then make money from big pharma to deal with it.