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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

#291
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Stockholm in summer is empty. People leave the town and go on holiday, retract to the country side. I also don't understand when he says there is/was no social distancing. That is totally not my experience here, a lot of people were working from home and commuter trains were quite empty.

What about the photos of people happily seating in groups in restaurants and even attending sports events? I never seen anyone in those photos with masks. Also, I believe schools were kept open at least before summer vacations? I am not living there but very curious about how the life was during COVID period there.

It is some cherry picking of photos. Public space activity did drop alot in Mars due to people not following recommendations (not a typo). There still was normal eg. restaurant activity just with fewer guests.

The main problem was that the authority leaders don't believe in wide testing, PPE for nursing home workers or asymptomatic transmission, I guess.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#292

"COVID is over in Sweden" is a pretty bold claim with ~400 daily infections, and increasing again as per https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6... Just like in other EU countries, it is now the younger population which seems mostly affected, and thus the mortality is lower - which is ultimately some good news. Summer holidays are now almost over though, so people are traveling home from vacation…

I'm quite fed up with people counting the number of cases as if it has any value, it's like they don't want to admit we were wrong for creating such a panic. Infections are meaningless.

Let's count how many people are in ER and how many die.

The conspirationist in me can't help but think that COVID has been the scapegoat for the worst financial crisis in this century.

While we look at meaningless COVID stats and debate wether we should wear a mask, we don't look at the real culprits for the current financial crisis that will take decades to heal (if it ever heals fully).

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the photos of people happily seating in groups in restaurants and even attending sports events? I never seen anyone in those photos with masks. Also, I believe schools were kept open at least before summer vacations? I am not living there but very curious about how the life was during COVID period there.

It is some cherry picking of photos. Public space activity did drop alot in Mars due to people not following recommendations (not a typo). There still was normal eg. restaurant activity just with fewer guests. The main problem was that the authority leaders don't believe in wide testing, PPE for nursing home workers or asymptomatic transmission, I guess.

In general, any photo you see anywhere is going to be cherry-picked. Of course, that only goes so far. If you have a crowded school corridor with almost no one wearing masks, well--that happened. But it's hard to draw broad conclusions generally because of what seems like a somewhat crowded restaurant or an empty street.

A lot of people also bring their own beliefs about what is appropriate to the interpretation and discussion.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#294
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has adopted virtually every recommendations without it being mandated . This is an enormous difference from some Florida Man arguing why lockdowns are unnecessary. As much as people focus on face masks, in Sweden the sparsity of people given their response makes it much less of a necessity. https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/i58jjj/helgtr%C3%A5... There you go -- read about Swedes talking about their COV…

So if I understand you correctly, although Sweden hasn't closed schools, children aren't attending? And although non-essential businesses aren't closed, Swedes aren't going to those stores? And masks aren't mandated, but most people are wearing them?

Their schools have been on summer break, right? So there haven't been classes to attend.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Lots of evidence now that aerosol covid is a major risk with prolonged exposure. Scientist have found the virus in ventilation systems of hospitals supporting this. This means the ‘aura’ of effect for an individual is quite large, especially in buildings with shared ventilation systems. This still requires much greater exposure time due to virion density decreases over distance from source, but that…

> Lots of evidence now that aerosol covid is a major risk with prolonged exposure. I've been hearing people say "just wear a mask," but considering aerosol risk, they probably aren't effective enough for anything prolonged and indoors.

Masks increase the amount of time you can spend indoors with someone emitting virion loaded aerosol, but I wouldn’t spend more than 5-10 minutes in that environment.

Bathrooms appear to be a large risk of aerosol due to flushing induced formation.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#296
post #74

NYC is a good case study since it's one of the first place hit and is now more or less "done" with covid in the same sense used in this article (it had a peak and is now on the right tail). NYC is at 2716 cases per 100k and 281 deaths per 100k: https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases States with aggressive reopening policies like Florida/Louisana/Arizona etc had spikes recently but are also coming back down. Th…

Your numbers are way off. 25% percent of NYC was seropositive in May. So that works out to about 25k per 100k people. The reported cases have always been just the tip of the iceberg. And we never knew how big the underwater part was. We still down't. Take the current situation, is the disease penetration larger than that in March/April? Most likely not, not even close, yet the reported new cases are about 5x larger.

The most recent, randomized studies of the NYC metro area finds SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in about 14% of participants when they randomly solicit people directly. Prior studies put out ads looking for participants, naturally drawing in people who "had that unexplained thing a few months back".

Even when directly appealing to people the participation rate is likely higher among people who suspect they may have had it.

We know that testing was very limited early in the outbreak, when NYC was hit, and that it caught only a fraction of the people infected. But all metrics are that there is still a huge victim base in the area.

The drop is more likely entirely behavioral.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#297
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is some cherry picking of photos. Public space activity did drop alot in Mars due to people not following recommendations (not a typo). There still was normal eg. restaurant activity just with fewer guests. The main problem was that the authority leaders don't believe in wide testing, PPE for nursing home workers or asymptomatic transmission, I guess.

In general, any photo you see anywhere is going to be cherry-picked. Of course, that only goes so far. If you have a crowded school corridor with almost no one wearing masks, well--that happened. But it's hard to draw broad conclusions generally because of what seems like a somewhat crowded restaurant or an empty street. A lot of people also bring their own beliefs about what is appropriate to the interpretation and…

Ye, I agree. As a note, schools up to 15 y.o:s were open so photos of those should show a lot of pupils.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economies do not always "bounce back". In fact, after the major economic impacts of the 20th century, most economies worldwide required gigantic public policies targetting their rebuilding to reemerge, and even that tended to take many, many years.

With something so artificial as this lock down I'm sure it will. We basically removed millions of jobs from the economy on purpose.

But we didn't remove the requirement to pay rent/mortgages on the real estate used by the businesses that shut down, or make the loan payments on the loans that they took out. Consequently, oodles of small business are simply going to fail.

I'd love to believe that you're right (and 3 months ago, I felt the same way). But I just don't.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#299

"COVID is over in Sweden" is a pretty bold claim with ~400 daily infections, and increasing again as per https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6... Just like in other EU countries, it is now the younger population which seems mostly affected, and thus the mortality is lower - which is ultimately some good news. Summer holidays are now almost over though, so people are traveling home from vacation…

daily infections are irelevant if almost all of them are asymptomatic or extremely mild not requiring any hospitalization Czechia has 200-300 daily infections and we have like 30 hospitalized patients also in country of 10.7M, so there is pretty much zero chance of dying from COVID, from those 390 people who dies in those 4 months (where usually dies around 40000 people from all causes) had other issues and coronavir…

> daily infections are irelevant if almost all of them are asymptomatic or extremely mild not requiring any hospitalization

In fact, more daily infections without more deaths are a good thing. It means the virus is not as dangerous as we thought and we're closer to herd immunity/the end of the pandemic.

Re: A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid

#300

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 --…

Simple mathematical models are not appropriate for a situation as nuanced and multivariate as this one.

Case count will oscillate up and down as restriction levels and individual comfort levels oscillate. As we approach herd immunity, the oscillations will dampen while following a downtrend.

The cases/day downtrend is still very much intact, and while it could reverse, it is premature to be concerned.

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