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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

#691

Post by nickalaso »

leto_ii wrote: post #166
jlmorton wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the infl…

All preventable deaths should be prevented - this is the gold standard. In reality, of course, things don't work out that way. The analogy with a flu season is deeply misleading. The coronavirus has, in half a year, killed more people than the worst flu seasons, with extraordinary measures in place all over the world. It's completely reasonable to assume that without lockdowns we would have had millions of deaths alr…

The response to the coronavirus has been many orders of magnitude more strict than the response to the flu. All this while be less than an order of magnitude as deadly, probably 3X-4X. This is why I think it is perfectly valid to compare it to the flu.

The collective response has been outsized to the actual risk of death, and I believe this is due to fear rather than sensible policymaking.

If it really was about reducing all cause mortality, most governments could do so much to reduce the primary causes of death, like heart disease and cancer, by banning things like cigarettes and enforcing healthier diets among the populace.

Imagine what banning sugar alone would do to the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the US. But no one wants to do that.

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

#692

Post by ashtonkem »

TMWNN wrote: post #682
ashtonkem wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

56 Florida ICUs are at capacity, with a further 35 are above 90%[0]. Five days ago the largest hospital operator in Houston, TMC announced that they were at 102% [1]. There’s a little bit of flexibility there; TMC can get that down to 72% by converting every possible bed to an ICU space[2], but they are now operating above official capacity. I agree that there’s a lot to criticize in how NYC handled their hospitals,…

>56 Florida ICUs are at capacity, with a further 35 are above 90% There are 306 ICUs in Florida ( https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/ICUBedsHo... ). As of today, 16.8% of all ICU beds are available. As I said, a 90% ICU load is normal ; hospitals routinely transfer patients elsewhere to maximize utilization across as many facilities as possible. Again, only a small portion of ICU patients are there fo…

Source on 90% capacity being normal? The only study I found [0] said that the ICUs studied averaged 52-87% full with a median usage of 62%.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/

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

#693

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

gridlockd wrote: post #656
SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all no, not lower than France's, but it was much lower for a while. Secondly, their economic contraction might be somewhat less, yet the death toll compared to Norway much higher, which did not suffer much worse economically. The question boils down was it worth for a modest economical benefit allow 5000 people to die or not. Some people think it is okay, most do not.

> Secondly, their economic contraction might be somewhat less, yet the death toll compared to Norway much higher, which did not suffer much worse economically. This is cherry-picking. You can always tell if somebody is making a bad argument when they pick Norway - a sparsely populated oil-rich welfare state - for a comparison. > The question boils down was it worth for a modest economical benefit allow 5000 people to…

Chose Finland then, then yo'd say they are not technically same, because of some cultural differences, Denmark not similar. No true Scotsman.

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

#694

Post by gridlockd »

SomeoneFromCA wrote: post #693
gridlockd wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, their economic contraction might be somewhat less, yet the death toll compared to Norway much higher, which did not suffer much worse economically. This is cherry-picking. You can always tell if somebody is making a bad argument when they pick Norway - a sparsely populated oil-rich welfare state - for a comparison. > The question boils down was it worth for a modest economical benefit allow 5000 people to…

Chose Finland then, then yo'd say they are not technically same, because of some cultural differences, Denmark not similar. No true Scotsman.

No, comparisons with Norway are just a pet peeve of mine.

It doesn't really matter anyway, I already admitted that countries like Germany and Netherlands did have fewer deaths with modest lockdowns. These are samples in favor of a lockdown.

However, there are also countries like France, Spain and UK that had the strictest lockdown, yet they had higher death rates. Those hint at strict lockdowns being no more effective than modest lockdowns when compared against Germany, or even being completely inneffective when compared against Sweden.

There is no clear correlation between having a lockdown and having fewer deaths, so you can't claim that Sweden would've had a far different result with a lockdown. That's just an unknown, there are many more factors at play.

Also, the costs aren't just economic. Lockdowns are a severe restriction of civil rights. There's a great deal of suffering caused by lockdowns. They can destroy livelihoods. They limit medical care. There's more domestic violence, more suicides, more depression.

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

#695

Post by thu2111 »

ljf wrote: post #655
thu2111 wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post says your wife gets out of breath sometimes after a relatively mild COVID infection. That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it, but I'm not sure that rises to the level of dangerous, exactly. Lots of people end up out of breath just from obesity, which is I guess can be considered dangerous in some ways, but most people probably wouldn't actually describe it that way relative to many other medical ailments.

She is a healthy 40 yo who used to exercise far more than me and do yoga multiple times a week. She's fit healthy and active until she was infected with covid. The breathlessness (sometimes accompanied with massively increased heart rate) also registers as very low blood oxygen levels on her meter. This isn't sometimes, this is after any activity. This is also just one of the symptoms she's had - massive fatigue, num…

The problem is, and I know you will hate to hear this, is that these sorts of anecdotes may or may not mean anything. Symptoms like that have a long history of turning out to be false alarms. That's the reason medical trials have placebos: health is weird and people can cure themselves or make themselves sick from all kinds of ways that logic dictates shouldn't happen, like 'thinking' themselves into it, or just via random chance.

Does COVID-19 cause breathlessness in a tiny percentage of people who caught it? Possibly, it's a respiratory virus after all. Does it cause loss of concentration? Hmm, maybe, who knows. The body works in mysterious ways. But if it can cause that then more or less any symptom at all is fair game.

Seen another way, do people with wifi sensitivity truly feel headaches when wifi is turned on? They certainly believe they do, their suffering seems to be real, yet we know their self-diagnosis cannot possibly be correct ... at least not without significantly rewriting the laws of physics and biology as we know them.

It may be that your wife should lose the Slack group and see a doctor. The risk is that the collection of symptoms she's reporting (which have no known link with respiratory diseases) actually have another cause and COVID is a distraction. It could be an undiagnosed case of something else that needs attention. We know that COVID is being spuriously linked in the media to all kinds of random conditions and symptoms, and especially when in a community of other sufferers, it's possible for incorrect inferences to be made.

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

#696

Post by TMWNN »

ashtonkem wrote: post #692
TMWNN wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>56 Florida ICUs are at capacity, with a further 35 are above 90% There are 306 ICUs in Florida ( https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/ICUBedsHo... ). As of today, 16.8% of all ICU beds are available. As I said, a 90% ICU load is normal ; hospitals routinely transfer patients elsewhere to maximize utilization across as many facilities as possible. Again, only a small portion of ICU patients are there fo…

Source on 90% capacity being normal? The only study I found [0] said that the ICUs studied averaged 52-87% full with a median usage of 62%. 0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840149/

Let me clarify. By "normal" I meant that 90% is not an unusual or undesirable situation. To some extent, an ICU bed is not being used is going to waste; from a hospital administrator's perspective, the ideal situation is 100% utilization at all times with every excess patient smoothly being transferred elsewhere. This of course is unrealistic—you want to leave some surge capacity (thus my 90% figure) if possible—but, generally speaking, a hospital will transfer excess patients elsewhere (either within the same system, or to others in the region), and accept others' excess patients to fill up its own empty beds.

COVID19 patients are not making up a large percentage of ICU patients at the moment; see, for example, the hospital in the aforementioned article with 100 ICU beds. Yes, the 100 beds are full at that moment, but only seven are COVID19 patients; no doubt some other fraction are patients who put off procedures during the lockdown. That hospital is sending new patients it can't handle elsewhere, and will also move some existing patients elsewhere when practical/safe. This is possible because there is no overcapacity on a regional or statewide level.

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

#697

Post by NoSubstitute »

username90 wrote: post #246
akmarinov wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well all other countries in the EU closed their borders to them, so it’s effectively the same thing.

No they didn't. Danish, Finnish and Norwegian tourists are still coming to Sweden. It is just that Swedes can't go to them.

And that is a textbook example of insanity. To be fair, I do think that they are supposed to self-quarantine when returning home?

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

#698

Post by NoSubstitute »

Scoundreller wrote: post #129
sjg007 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that people ignored the lockdown. Also the virus doesn’t discriminate. Younger people will die but may take longer to do so. Also we are detecting cases earlier than back in March where you had to be really sick to get a test.

Younger/healthier people are far less likely to die. But they can be a great vector of infection to others.

It's been verified that primary school teachers, who have all gone to work as usual, as primary schools never closed, haven't shown a significantly higher number of infection than others.

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

#699

Post by NoSubstitute »

nkurz wrote: post #82
DanBC wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the worst flu seasons still have a higher death toll than corona. Do you have a link to the statistics please? I think you're comparing two different methods of counting death. I think for covid-19 you're counting people who died after testing positive, or people where covid-19 is listed as the cause on the death certificate. But for flu I think you're counting excess mortality.

Not a scientific article, but this blog post gives some numbers for Sweden: https://emanuelkarlsten.se/more-swedes-died-in-one-month-199... . One big question would be why they chose April 2020 as the comparison point rather than May or June -- did the number of deaths per month in Sweden actually drop? (I haven't read the article closely, and don't have a horse in this race --- I just thought it was apropos. Feel fr…

Even official numbers from Socialstyrelsen over the last 10-20 years showed that weekly excess deaths were only significant certain weeks, with other weeks even being lower than other years.

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

#700

Post by toss1 »

lsllc wrote: post #665
lsllc wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure they were "driven" down by policy per-se: According to rt.live, we started March 3rd with an Rt of 2.22 and were already in a steep Rt decline by the time Baker issued the stay-home request on March 24rd (Rt 1.22) and got below Rt 1.0 a week later on March 31st. Baker issued his mask order May 6th (Rt 0.88) and we've been bouncing around at that since although we're creeping up now from our low of 0.75 aroun…

A day later, 30 more deaths and we're now 7th lowest, our Rt is up to 0.99 and 3-day hospitalization average is now going up for the first time in a while. The state is now also offering expanded free testing to anyone so it'll be interesting to see how that changes it.

Yes, the Rt declines before the lockdown are curious, but I wonder if they are statistical anomalies related to initial small numbers or some other factor. It could also be that the people were independently starting to take measures, distancing, masks, etc. I know I was, and I'm not the only one.

The chart of inferred infections by date seems to show very strong correlations to the lockdown measures: * very steep rate of rise in cases until 24-March * a bit of reduced slope right at the date * sudden peak/drop-off about a week later on 01-April * steep decline, then flatter decline during lockdown * then, a week after lockdown ends / next phase, around 25-May, the declining slope flattens

And the Rt starts to increase again in the last week of May

So, yes, the re-opening is looking very much like it's increasing re-transmission rates. Today just hit 1.01 on that chart.

Interesting times ahead. New England overall has relatively flat growth rates. Let's hope they continue measures to keep it that way!

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