61–70 of 442 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Population density is meaningless for countries as a whole. Most of Sweden is wilderness where hardly anyone lives. Swedes mostly live in cities, just like Brits.
Swedes mostly live in low population density cities
It is no Hong Kong for sure, but not quite as sparse as it is often made out to be.
The excess mortality for the past few years in Sweden: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... Better than most, not as good as some. Certainly not the catastrophe predicted by some.
There may be extenuating circumstances in some instances, but in case of Sweden, I'm not sure what they would be. As far as I can see, policy makers rolled the dice and lost (assuming preservation of life is the metric of choice) - though that failure becomes less significant as time goes on and the fraction representing initial excess mortality starts shrinking...
Hope that offsets the excess 10k dead.
The excess mortality for the past few years in Sweden: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... Better than most, not as good as some. Certainly not the catastrophe predicted by some.
If you're comparing with literally any of their neighbors, then they did really really badly. Their excess mortality was around 1000 per million (i.e. around 10,000 more people dead than expected), while Denmark, Finland and Norway were much much less.
Hope that offsets the excess 10k dead.
What "excess 10k dead"? Sweden basically only reported excess mortality in early 2020 and since then it has a mortality deficit.
All these extra Swedes died for sheer ineptitude of their government. There's hardly any difference in economic impact either.
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The job of Governing is not solely to minimise loss of life, or to utterly avoid tail risks irrespective of cost. (imo) Focussing so myopically on the above has had unmeasurable consequences on a huge variety of fronts. My prime fury is reserved for closing schools. Extraordinary damage done, gulfs in opportunity and experience widened. Nobody cares much. Death stats are, after all, the only thing that matters to the…
You're pro having 30 people breathing in a small room with bad airflow for multiple hours when there's a pandemic? If you don't know how it's transmitted, then try various things and see if they help. We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it, if it didn't change the situation we would have tried other things instead.
It is not that lockdown is bad or wrong. It is that I do not agree with all the things which were hit. I acknowledge there is a price to keeping education open but I believe it would have been worthwhile.
Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.
Is it just me or there are A LOT of articles about how Sweden is better in doing X coming from the US and the UK recently? What's going on here? Frankly it seems a bit of nationalist content marketing after the 10th article I read in 3 years. Most of the times the articles claim Sweden is doing better X but that X could easily be applied to several other countries in Europe. "Sweden offers free health care and educat…
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Your link doesn't seem to go anywhere. Also, how accurate are IQ tests on 1 year old and younger babies? I'm not sure why IQs would be lower (if indeed this is the case) - parents are still around. In fact parents have been more often around during the pandemic given the increase in work from home policies.
I've updated the link to a non-amp link. Details of the study can be found here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v...
Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover?
> However, since all study visits take place in a clinical setting, parents less concerned about the pandemic, and those with strong social support networks, may have been more likely to participate than those with greater concerns.
This seems pretty impactful to me. If you consider that people more worried about the pandemic were avoiding doctor visits, and the study showed parent's education reduced the effect they saw...
They kind of glossed over the fact that children born just before the pandemic didn't have lower scores. I'm curious about that since the first few weeks/months for newborns they are not leaving the house much, so a pandemic shouldn't have changed a whole lot there. Why were they immune if the stages were they would've expected to start leaving the house (4+ months) were taken away, just like babies born during the pandemic?
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Your comment reminds me of the NYC Metro use data that (I think) was posted here at the very beginning of the pandemic. IIRC it showed subway use plummeted before the city or state government enacted any measures to combat the pandemic at all.
Yep. A lot of what got blamed on lockdowns was widely happening without government mandates, and I don't get how people keep making mistakes about this when looking at the effects of policy.
After we've witnessed the experience of northern Italy in February / March 2020, most informed/reasonable people concluded that the situation is more serious than previously indicated, so it's obvious that people's habits would change. People are somewhat rational, after all.
But arguably self-imposed/-chosen changes in human behaviour can both better account for individual differences (in health, exposure, and risk aversion) as well as respond much faster to short-term, local changes of the situation, compared to government policy.