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Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

nytimes.com

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Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#581

Post by jonathanstrange »

username90 wrote: post #199
whatshisface wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not possible to calculate that exchange rate, because you don't have access to the counterfactual. You're not taking the ratio of lockdown years to years lost to deaths, right? Both of those belong in the expenses side...

Sweden didn't lock down, that is the typical worst case you would get. So lives saved is the deaths per pop in Sweden compared to deaths per pop where you are.

No, Sweden has an exceptionally low population density. You cannot just grab a country and take it as a model for any other country. The same measures as in Sweden would lead to a catastrophe in many other countries.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#582

Post by jddj »

_-___________-_ wrote: post #580
jddj wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may have been a misunderstanding. I didn't post to score points against you or at all discredit your personal experience.

Not sure what you mean. I was responding to this: > I have to disagree with the idea that Vietnam didn't take it particularly seriously I didn't present that idea, so I'm not sure how you can disagree with it.

I guess there was a misunderstanding.

Have a nice evening.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#583

Post by kwhitefoot »

patelh wrote: post #478
senderista wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children seem far more vulnerable to the flu than the coronavirus, so I don’t understand your argument.

Children get the flu vaccine.

Really? Here in Norway children would only be vaccinated against influenza if they already have other severe conditions such as diabetes, chronic heart or lung disease, etc.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#584

Post by lmm »

VectorLock wrote: post #176
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an argument you have to accept on some level, unless you propose to make more radical changes to society. How many thousands of people could we have saved from car accidents in 2019 by banning nonessential driving?

At a fundamental level, yes. By degree of magnitude not even in the same galaxy. If you take a 200 million mile road trip you might contribute to one death, vs. going to a party and risk contracting and spreading a pandemic that has has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Driving kills 38,000 people/year in the US. Covid-19 has killed around 140,000 people. It's the same order of magnitude.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#585

Post by hatefulmoron »

simonh wrote: post #455
roca wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now explain New Zealand. Lots of very different countries have beaten the virus in different ways. Apologists for the failed US response have to resort to special pleading: "it's not fair to compare the USA to South Korea ... or Taiwan ... or Germany ... or Australia ... or New Zealand ... or Japan ... or Vietnam ... or China ..." American exceptionalism at its least fine.

Of course some countries have dramatically different demographics, geography and medical systems than others which can have a huge effect. As has been pointed out in a parallel thread Vietnam locked down all international travel very early, and demographically has a far younger population than most nations which has a huge effect on relative mortality rates. For New Zealand they have an extremely widely geographicall…

> For New Zealand they have an extremely widely geographically dispersed population

I don't know the answer, but is this actually true? Sure, the density as measured as a ratio between population and land mass indicates a dispersed population, but is the population not centered in a handful of cities?

A quick search indicates that Auckland, a single city, contains a third of New Zealand's population.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#586

Post by belorn »

mc32 wrote: post #201
argonaut wrote: post #193

The jury is still out on "economic failure." The evidence cited on the economy is thin at best. The main piece of evidence is that "Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to contract by 4.5 percent this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent." Economic forecasts are ridiculously unreliable. In the US, economists forecast (on average) that 8 million jobs would be lost in May. Instead there…

The NYT has fallen into the bad habit of writing to a narrative, conscious or unconscious, rather than investigating more honestly. In this case they want to paint the alternative path as wrongheaded and foolhardy. I’m glad someone tried something different in light of a lack of hard evidence. Time will tell if one or the other was better, but at least we’ll have baselines to compare against.

The first image people are greeted with in the article says everything needed about the editorial nature of the article. It is:

It is taken of the area which has one of the lowest covid-19 death rates. Compared to its nearby city in Denmark it even has a significant lower rate of deaths.

It is taken over the wrong time period. Both nationally and locally in that area, the death rate is going down. The image is from a few weeks ago during the warm weather when the rate was almost the lowest point of the whole measure period of the pandemic. The trend in that region is still downwards.

It is the wrong demographic when talking about death counts. In Sweden the wast majority that died occurred in elderly care homes in low social economical areas, not young people on the beach located near expensive and hip restaurants in the second highest social economic area.

But it makes for a great narrative tool, which illustrates the editorial values of NYT.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#587

Post by makomk »

nradov wrote: post #438
alvah wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Zealand hasn't even begun dealing with Covid-19 yet, unless their plan is to keep the borders closed permanently, or at least until the development of the first vaccine in history for any coronavirus. They are probably the farthest away from reaching herd immunity of any developed country.

Their plan is to require a strict quarantine for all arrivals from overseas. That will be permanent, at least until an effective vaccine is available. It may work, at the cost of their tourism industry.

Emphasis strongly on the "may" - we've seen how well that worked in Australia, which is now having to gradually impose lockdowns.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#588

Post by kwhitefoot »

mekster wrote: post #576
shermheadryder wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't wear shoes at home and public spaces don't have litters all over. I might be missing something, but what does this have to do with COVID?

It means, whatever you have stepped on outside, you don't just spread it all over your house... Maybe you don't step on Covid infected materials but who knows? It's just another possible source.

Stepping in something isn't going to infect you.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#589

Post by oblio »

mekster wrote: post #556
twblalock wrote: post #499

Any coherent explanation of this pandemic is going to need to explain why some countries that didn't do very much (e.g. Japan) ended up with far fewer deaths per capita than countries that locked down (e.g. EU countries and the United States). Sweden is somewhere in the middle -- they are being criticized, yet other countries in Europe which locked down have ended up with a higher per capita death rate. Why is it tha…

> countries that didn't do very much (e.g. Japan) They already had masks on when others questioned their effectiveness and to this day, 95% people wear masks outside. They have hand sanitizers on pretty much every shop entrance and chairs are placed with certain distances apart. They don't wear shoes at home and public spaces don't have litters all over. They don't hug and kiss frequently like some countries do. Some…

> They don't wear shoes at home

Who wears shoes at home? Especially their normal, outdoors, day-to-day shoes?

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#590

Post by jacobush »

patelh wrote: post #478
senderista wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children seem far more vulnerable to the flu than the coronavirus, so I don’t understand your argument.

Children get the flu vaccine.

Not in Sweden as far as I know.
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