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The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#71

Post by spookthesunset »

kasperni wrote: post #52
spookthesunset wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t prove the people doing these voluntary lockdowns had any different of an outcome than if they did nothing at all. Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control. If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns…

Of course they have an effect. Take, for example, the UK. All three local peaks of covid deaths (Apr 20, Nov 20, Jan 21) all came exactly 2-3 weeks after each of the 3 national lockdowns.

That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random. You’d have no way to tell which of our theories are true. None of these lockdowns were proven to work prior to everybody jumping on them.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#72

Post by spookthesunset »

mavhc wrote: post #53
richardw wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its proven. It’s physics. I can’t catch covid from you because we’re probably on different continents. Living across the street works as well if I don’t open the door. This has been tested for every transmissible disease every organism has had that we’ve managed to witness. Similarly, fewer interactions result in fewer opportunities for transmission. Reduce transmission and the numbers go down. What’s to prove here?…

Also there's graphs, lockdown enacted, cases go down, lockdown stopped, cases go up, repeat.

Oh really?

https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#73

Post by gpsx »

kybernetikos wrote: post #60

It's so weird to see people still claiming this. Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average. The diffe…

Your comment about counterfactuals reminds of a saying, or what I would call a more accurate version of a common saying - "Hindsight is 50/50". (Note, that doesn't make hindsight necessarily wrong, just difficult to have confidence in.)

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#74

Post by tomp »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #35

Telegraph has an anti-lockdown agenda to push in the UK; it is not an impartial source here. In the UK the praise for the "Sweden model" comes particularly from the conservative-aligned pro-business anti-lockdown lobby; who are producing PR for their proposition that "lockdowns do more (economic) harm than they do (public health) good". Right or wrong, it's certainly not impartial reporting on a foreign country, it's…

Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK, except an ad-hominem jab on a more liberally-oriented website like HN?

There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK (Labour is mired in one scandal after another and can't elect a proper leader), whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#75

Post by tomohawk »

wldlyinaccurate wrote: post #41
spookthesunset wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t prove the people doing these voluntary lockdowns had any different of an outcome than if they did nothing at all. Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control. If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns…

> If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it Tell that to New Zealand, who have had less than 3,000 cases in a population of 5 million. They did this with strict border controls (people on inbound flights must isolate for 2 weeks) and quick response to community transmission (several lockdowns totalling 40 days).

This is not what I think of by "it worked"

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/17/asia/new-zealand-lockdown-one...

At best, its a fragile, brittle, costly "solution" that may work in an isolated country like NZ until vaccines are available.

It's been 8 months since vaccines have been available, and they're still in the low 20s in terms of people getting the vaccine.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#76

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

spookthesunset wrote: post #71
kasperni wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they have an effect. Take, for example, the UK. All three local peaks of covid deaths (Apr 20, Nov 20, Jan 21) all came exactly 2-3 weeks after each of the 3 national lockdowns.

That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random. You’d have no way to tell which of our theories are true. None of these lockdowns were proven to work prior to everybody jumping on them.

> That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random.

This is not a serious response. The correlation is far too definite to be mere chance; and the mechanisms that cause it not hard to understand. Or in plain English: it's not random.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#77

Post by ptr »

varjag wrote: post #65
lazyjones wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "excess 10k dead"? Sweden basically only reported excess mortality in early 2020 and since then it has a mortality deficit.

Sweden has ~14k official COVID deaths. Neighbouring Norway, at half the population and a moderate lockdown/PPE policy, has ~800 COVID deaths. The culture, climate, population density and demographics are very close. All these extra Swedes died for sheer ineptitude of their government. There's hardly any difference in economic impact either.

The socioeconomic group that had the most deaths were people of foreign background aged 65 or more. Maybe Sweden just has a proportionally larger group of those?

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#78

Post by audunw »

marderfarker2 wrote: post #25
warning26 wrote: post #17

What I find particularly interesting is that Sweden wasn't the only country that did this -- Brazil also did a no-lockdown strategy, and it was basically a disaster there. Evidently, there must have been some other factors at play besides the boolean of lockdown true/false. Better healthcare, maybe?

China did the opposite by sealing everything up in the beginning, and now everything has gone back to normal for them bar international travel. Probably it’s down to developed countries having a well-defined response protocol AND its citizen sticking to it.

> and now everything has gone back to normal

Right now it seems quite the opposite. Their vaccines are not very effective against the Delta variant, and they're having several outbreaks. They recently shut down a huge port. They never learned how to do partial lockdowns and just dealing with low levels of infection, so if they don't manage to eliminate the virus, they're screwed. What are they going to do with the Delta variant? Import foreign vaccines? Wait for better domestic vaccines? What if a new more infectious variant comes along that's even less affected by their vaccines?

I think China may be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. We know their approach has killed people, and the huge amount of resources spent on these lockdowns and massive amount of testing may have been better spent saving lives elsewhere. But we'll never know because they don't publish reliable data on excess mortality.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#79

Post by breck »

richardw wrote: post #43
spookthesunset wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See but since there was no actual randomized test the fact that Brazil did a no-lockdown strategy (which I guess some say is false)… it could have been just as big of a disaster even with a lockdown. There is basically no real way to prove that lockdowns did a single thing. The fact so many countries were so willing to jump onto a completely unproven non pharmaceutical intervention that has massive negative side effe…

Its proven. It’s physics. I can’t catch covid from you because we’re probably on different continents. Living across the street works as well if I don’t open the door. This has been tested for every transmissible disease every organism has had that we’ve managed to witness. Similarly, fewer interactions result in fewer opportunities for transmission. Reduce transmission and the numbers go down. What’s to prove here?…

Lockdowns are an incredibly fragile “solution”. It’s a multi agent problem with lots of probabilities. All lockdowns allow some “essential workers” to not lockdown. You could have only 2% of workers deemed essential—and there is no general rule since all geographies are different and in situations like the exact details matter—and have the exact same long term outcomes as no lock down at all. It’s fun to run multi agent simulations and see how easy it is to screw up any centralized plan through the injection of little probabilitities.

In my opinion anything that does not allow people to exercise conditional probability at the last mile is bound to have negative expected value.

Things that I do think make a difference: better airflow, more outdoor time, less obesity, better testing, a public equipped with better tools to diagnose and treat conditions at home, vaccines, better data infra and publishing of medical data, etc. Dumb blanket mandates that are applied across a population are stupid.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#80

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

tomp wrote: post #74
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #35

Telegraph has an anti-lockdown agenda to push in the UK; it is not an impartial source here. In the UK the praise for the "Sweden model" comes particularly from the conservative-aligned pro-business anti-lockdown lobby; who are producing PR for their proposition that "lockdowns do more (economic) harm than they do (public health) good". Right or wrong, it's certainly not impartial reporting on a foreign country, it's…

Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK, except an ad-hominem jab on a more liberally-oriented website like HN? There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK (Labour is mired in one scandal after another and can't elect a proper leader), whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.

> Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK

When it comes to UK newspapers of course it does.

> There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK

That's certainly an opinion, but one that is not relevant to talking about newspapers.

> whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.

UK lockdowns were consistently too late, because the Conservative government did not want too admit the necessity. That's why the lockdowns had to be so long and repeated. Pressure like this article exits because the UK Government is know to be susceptible to it. Because they don't have their own serious plans for COVID, or actually for anything else either.

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