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A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

sebastianrushworth.com

121–130 of 340 posts

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#121
An observation and a question:

1) I'm glad I don't have this guy as a doctor. 2)If it's not a big deal, why is he wearing a mask in the picture? Catch covid-19, rub some dirt on it, and move on. If you die, you were going to anyway.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#122
post #5

its time to stop this! I am so proud to see my fellow germans rise up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=htDrDieOgh0

Looks like by "this" you mean contact with reality, evidence-based reasoning, and a scientific approach. Just curious - what do you thing will happen in the long run if the whole world chooses to live according to some mythology, as you propose?

Please don't break the site guidelines. I understand the frustration of people being wrong on the internet, but responding with name-calling ("contact with reality", "mythology you propose") only makes the thread worse. The spirit of this site means either posting corrective information (as others in this thread are doing), or resisting the temptation to post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#123
post #93

2 separate studies are pointing to herd immunity being impossible because SARS-CoV-2 antibodies disappear over time and previous carriers could become infected again. There haven’t been any cases of reinfection afaik but we’ll see in due time. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v... https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179

Memory B cells exist and will produce antibodies as needed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_B_cell

Proving herd immunity impossible is a rather bold claim and the threshold for that has simply not been met.

We do have a rather large confidence that this virus isn’t going anywhere and will be endemic. It will join the 200+ Cold viruses that hit us every year.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Finland comparison misses the author's argument. His claim is not that they haven't had many more deaths than Finland, but that Finland will catch up with Sweden. His theory seems to be that there will be a more-or-less fixed number of deaths per million, unless countries are willing to wait for a vaccine (which he thinks they won't do).

Delusional. For that, ~2700 more people would need to die in Finland. 14 people have died in Finland since June 1st and they're typically reporting 0 now. In Sweden, 40 people died ON June 1st. Both countries have it under control now. But it's clear Finland's shutdown saved lives.

It's not clear anything is saving lives. Once everything opens up we could be right where we started. Also we've said basically that people with coronavirus matter more than other illnesses. There will be millions of deaths around the world because of shutdown. Things like AIDs medicine. Then thousands due to lack of treatment of cancers and people not going to doctor(England did a study on this). Then you'll have the domestic violence, murder rate increase. Then the negative effects on children decades later. It's only a trade off of lives, not a net saving of lives. If you think it's "clear" that any lives are being saved then I would challenge you to think more critically.

The shutdown will be looked back on in 10 years as one of the worst mistakes the world has ever made.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#125
Are we now going to ignore the weeks of horror that New York went through and many South American countries are going through right now?

Contrary to the author’s claims, no one in their right mind went into lockdown trying to decrease the total number of deaths, not directly at least. Lockdowns were/are there to smoothen the spike of cases and prevent medical system from the overload.

As to diminishing cases, could it be that people got the habits of social distancing and hand washing? In a small country without large cities it would not take much to take R_t to the values that are close enough to 1.0.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#126

This article would be banned on facebook, because the view that covid still has many millions to kill in the US (sans vaccine) is the currently allowed truth.

it would indeed, as it posits spurious claims and is factually inaccurate, ER doctor or not. The fact is, over 150k have died in the US due to COVID, and this exceeds the US death toll from any known war, so there's no real minimizing such a figure. It's likely precisely due to a failure to contain the spread of the causative virus, precisely due to waffling around lockdown.

80k died in 2017-2018 US flu season. I'm sorry but where was the shutdown? Luckily this whole thing is going to be gone November 4th.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#127
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I told you to list 3 things you're grateful for each day, and hounded and sanctioned you for not doing it, if I talked about all these Nazis I know who incidentally also are not doing it, and meaningfully nodded your way every time, and made fun of you in filter bubbles... wouldn't you just do this minor thing that may actually be beneficial and is unlikely to do harm? The difference being that there is a strong…

Listing 3 things you are grateful for each day will improve your whole life and all your relationships. As something that is likely to do good and isn't much of a sacrifice, it's the same thing, and you didn't answer the question. > Because wearing masks shouldn't be a political issue if you can't develop a reasonable counterargument. You are the one making it about the masks and only the masks, even the protests are…

> it's the same thing

It is not. Masks are meant to protect everybody, they are not meant to protect yourself. I'm not in favor of preventing consenting mentally stable adults from doing basically anything to themselves and – to answer your question – I would obviously object to other people forcing me into adopting any unreasonable habit. But this is about protecting society and risk groups.

> IMO the pushiness is the problem, not what is being pushed.

By "the pushiness" do you mean the laws that are in place to force people to do things? Because those are pretty common in all sorts of situations.

Or do you mean the general attitude by commentators (in the media/on twitter etc.) towards people not abiding by those laws?

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#128
post #42
post #16

" Covid has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza. " The average number of people who die of influenza in the US is about 35,000. So we should expect 350,000 deaths and then we'll be all good?

I think his point is you can't compare the impact of the flu because 1) it hits every year (versus a quick outbreak) and 2) many people are vaccinated. Don't forget the '17 flu seasons was 65k deaths in the US. So we're at a little under 3x right now. So yes, Covid is worse, but we don't bat an eye at 65k deaths due to the flu.

> So yes, Covid is worse, but we don't bat an eye at 65k deaths due to the flu.

1) Only as long as they are old people. The moment flu kills even a couple children, everybody goes apoplectic.

2) I suspect that one of the takeaways from Covid is going to be that viruses (even flu) cause a lot more long-term damage than we give them credit for. Nobody was funding brain or circulatory scans for flu patients--we're going to get some of that data as a side benefit of all the Covid analysis.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#129
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Covid has taught me anything, it's to stop assuming a best case scenario. Even if a vaccine is approved in Q'21, due to manufacturing, supply chain and just general operations issues, it's going to be a while before a large part of the population is vaccinated. I assume they'll prioritize medical workers and the elderly, then start working through the rest of the population. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes ano…

I don't think anyone involved in COVID-19 vaccination work believes the first vaccines will be more than 50% effective and that only for a short period. I believe the Oxford vaccine project is expecting 6 months of resistance to infection. This isn't good enough for things to go back to the way the way things were. We'll be dealing with this virus permanently and it will likely be years, or decades, until there's a g…

It's unlikely that it will be politically feasible to stop vaccinated people from going back to normal, whether or not we think it's good enough in some abstract sense.
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