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A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

sebastianrushworth.com

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Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#261

Post by brynjolf »

gorkempacaci wrote: post #135

Sweden didn’t go into total lockdown but still did a lot. In the grocery store the cashiers are in a plastic bubble. Wherever there is a line there are marks on the floor to show where to wait to keep distance. Nobody shakes hands for quite some time. Yes, people go to Cafes/restaurants but restaurants have been assessed and assigned covid-friendly seating layouts. There are many more things that clearly separate tod…

But people still don't socially distance in stores. I have had people walk so close they are touching my hands, thst never happens usually.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#262

Post by beagle3 »

Majromax wrote: post #209
wavepruner wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average new cases per day has dropped from about 1200/day in late June to less than 300/day now. There's a slight uptick over the past week. https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr... Downtrend in average deaths per day continues, currently at 6/day. https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

> There's a slight uptick over the past week. Any uptick at all is concerning. In fact, a flattening of the decline is concerning. The implied thesis in the linked article is that Sweden has reached a level of herd immunity due to widespread T-cell responses, and that life in the country continues as normal. If that is the case, then we would expect the infection curve in Sweden to follow a classic logistic model --…

Logistic model? Never saw anyone use that model. Do you have reference?

What one should expect, afaik, is a Gompertz curve - the derivative of which, depending on parameters, often rises quickly and drops slowly.

Michael Levitt calibrated a Gompertz model in April based on actions taken until that day, that predicted 5000 dead by 1-jul matched reality incredibly well - whereas the WHO/Ferguson model at the same time predicted 96,000 dead by 1-jul based on the same data.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#263

Post by aliswe »

refurb wrote: post #45
ouid wrote: post #8

Sweden is effectively as locked down as anywhere else. The prevalence of the virus is diminishing there because people are not going out and getting sick, rendering R_t<1. I don't participate in social distancing because my government says to, and I certainly don't stop because my government says to either.

Sweden is effectively as locked down as anywhere else. Is that true? Are all the schools closed? Are most people working from home? Are most businesses shutdown? That's not what I've read (outside this article).

Yes that statement is very strange to me.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#264

Post by aliswe »

gnicholas wrote: post #9

Cynical perspective: Trump doesn't want to reopen too fast because it won't be clear by the election (October, when mail-in voting happens) that this was a good strategy. Democrats don't want to reopen too fast because keeping the economy shut down is bad for Trump's reelection chances. Too cynical? Perhaps. But I do think that perspectives like the author's are dismissed too quickly because neither 'side' sees a way…

Not that I necessarily agree with your analysis, as I don't know enough, but: Why is this downvoted?

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#265

Post by aliswe »

supernova87a wrote: post #31

The author doesn't state (and I don't know the real-time info) about whether the country is locked down and social distancing/masks, etc. If so, it's not like their laissez-faire attitude (the previous months) is the success he's making it out to be. They only have stabilized because they adopted the recommended measures finally, if that's true.

Serious question, why is this downvoted?

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#266

Post by beagle3 »

zaroth wrote: post #182
hn_check wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NHL playoffs are incredible right now" No fans. Playing in two bubble cities in Canada. "NBA is just getting started" No fans. Playing in one bubble city. And I was talking about NYC. Zero NBA or NHL games are taking place in NYC. In an average month in NYC, pre-COVID, there are dozens of enormous sports events. Hundreds of concerts. Tens of thousands of significant parties. If social interaction were on a scale fro…

Here’s a graph which speaks to exactly this topic - the R value charted versus two axis; social connectivity, and herd immunity. Both are equally important pieces of the puzzle. They work together to get R below 1. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1291860668342079490?s=21

Looks useless to me; dropping R to below (but not much below l) 1 means a super-slow decline; you might need years with such a regime to eliminate the virus. And it doesn’t actually provide herd immunity, just a slow die-off.

Which leaves most of the population vulnerable, and re-introduction a possibility.

You have to get R significantly below 1 and the whole ecosystem (for the US: the whole world) to do it.

Or, you need herd immunity compatible with the R that you can maintain indefinitely - which la likely >2 so immunity needs to be >60%.

Any other way leaves you with the possibility of reintroduction as far as I understand.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#267

Post by hn_check »

xzel wrote: post #230
hn_check wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NHL playoffs are incredible right now" No fans. Playing in two bubble cities in Canada. "NBA is just getting started" No fans. Playing in one bubble city. And I was talking about NYC. Zero NBA or NHL games are taking place in NYC. In an average month in NYC, pre-COVID, there are dozens of enormous sports events. Hundreds of concerts. Tens of thousands of significant parties. If social interaction were on a scale fro…

I'm not sure how playing in a bubble without fans means they are a ghost. Honestly I wish fans didn't come back to live sports. Hearing the game and player noise makes everything much more enjoyable. I think most pro-sports are currently doing great besides missing ticket revenue, especially compared to a few months ago when they weren't going at all. Anyways, I don't think measuring recovery in the number of events…

a) The context is specifically in relation to communicability

b) Further, it was about New York City!

Extremely few sports are taking place in NYC, and even if we discount that, from the overarching context those sports having a tiny, tiny fraction of the communicability potential.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#268

Post by beagle3 »

agildehaus wrote: post #95
gnicholas wrote: post #89

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.

If and only if there is an effective vaccine within a year or two.

Sweden didn’t make this bet. Finland, Norway, and New Zealand did.

Sustained lockdown and lack of travel will be very costly if it has to be maintained for two years; and the fatigue from maintaining it will undo all of the supposed success.

This is not decidable at this point in time, and likely not within the next 5 years.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#269

Post by thu2111 »

chki wrote: post #53
refurb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden is effectively as locked down as anywhere else. Is that true? Are all the schools closed? Are most people working from home? Are most businesses shutdown? That's not what I've read (outside this article).

But this is also not the case for all the other countries in Europe which (according to the author) have taken the wrong approach to COVID. The more I think about it the more this article confuses and worries me. It's a thinkpiece that is not grounded in the scientific reality.

What is "scientific reality" in this case?

Look at this paragraph. It jumped right out at me, why is nobody else commenting on this?

The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was covid. Practically everyone who was tested had covid, regardless of what the presenting symtom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had covid. They came in with stomach pain and they had covid.

What sort of disease has no specific symptoms at all? I thought COVID patients were presenting with an unusual form of dry pneumonia?

If you look at the history of epidemiology and virology, it is unfortunately filled with stories of misinterpreted data leading to incorrect belief that a virus was the underlying cause. For a long time diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies were blamed on viruses although none actually existed.

When you read that some doctors experience of COVID was "people turned up as normal but suddenly they were all testing positive", you do have to wonder what is going on. I thought COVID patients in hospitals were clearly COVID patients by symptoms, but the list of associated symptoms seems to keep widening. That's confusing and worrying indeed.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#270

Post by thu2111 »

adrinavarro wrote: post #247
_-___________-_ wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First of all, it's silly assuming that other countries are shutting down their economies without a very good reason for doing so. I certainly wouldn't want to assume that governments only ever do the correct thing, or the thing that is in my best interests, so I think it's reasonable to ask questions. > As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & death rate was growing so fast, that…

Maybe it was based on seeing what happened in other countries, ie. Spain and Italy? I can say for sure that the impact in the health care system here in Spain was very significant.

It's hard to disentangle cause and effect though. Countries that were very hard hit also had the most extreme government reactions to it. This can compromise the efficiency of the healthcare system, for example, I've read that in Spain at the peak of the epidemic many nurses and doctors were self-isolating because they'd tested positive, so there was a huge loss of healthcare capacity. Then later on it was discovered that a lot of positive tests are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people don't transmit the disease, so this just hurt healthcare capacity for no reason.

Many countries had problems with care home workers abandoning their jobs, for example to return to their home countries before borders closed. There are some quite horrific stories of the terrible conditions created in care homes in some of the places with excess death spikes.

The imagery of ice-rink morgues etc had a similar effect. There was no real demand surge for morgue space, but undertakers were refusing to work until they were supplied with ample PPE because they thought they would be infected by the bodies with a killer virus. Same story in Bergamo. So then a sudden shortfall in PPE was converted into a shortfall in funeral capacity, even though at that point there was no sudden tsunami of bodies. This then led to more panic especially amongst health system workers.

It's very hard to disentangle what really went on here.

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