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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

#191

Post by hkt »

corney91 wrote: post #158
danjac wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios. On an average day you'll notice multiple anti-remote working articles parroted by Cabinet ministers. Why should they care how businesses conduct their business, especially if it's more convenient and can lead to a happier and…

It was The Times that fired Boris Johnson for lying, The Telegraph hired him after that. They have gone off the deep end though. Some good coverage of The Telegraph's fall in standards is Peter Oborne's resignation letter: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...

It continues to astonish me how far the telegraph (and conservatism generally) has left people like Oborne behind. Really quite something to behold, and pretty deeply alarming.

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

#192

Post by austhrow743 »

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…

The 1450 per million figure the article cites as the cost of covid to Sweden actually makes them look worse than your own data.

It's not an article about the cost of covid though, its about the benefits of not fighting it as hard as other countries. It's very light on that, not much of an attempt to quantify and compare to the cost, but still props to it for even acknowledging that those benefits exist and count for something.

The best write up I've seen so far on the topic is this [0] which concludes:

> So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.

> Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

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

#193

Post by hkt »

spookthesunset wrote: post #126
jchook wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice the article doesn't mention countries where proper lockdown worked very well and took only around 100 days.

And what, pray tell is a “proper lockdown”? I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.

NZ and AU are faring pretty differently. AU is wracked with crisis and NZ has been business as usual for ages. The key difference as I understand it is that NZ sacrificed easy international travel for domestic wellbeing and AU didn't.

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

#194

Post by spindle »

rahoulb wrote: post #168
overeater wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are public schools paid in the UK? Does that mean private schools are the free schools? Or do they call free public schools something else?

It’s a historical thing. In the olden days the only way to get an education was through privately tutoring. So establishments where everyone was educated together were “public” - even though you paid to attend. Nowadays “public meaning paid” implies one of these original public schools (Harrow, Eton and the like). I went to a paid school, founded in 1513, but it wouldn’t be called “public” because it’s not one of tho…

Just on a detail, I discovered recently that there have been various official definitions of "public school" and lists of public schools, and FWIW your school probably counts as one according to those. But I agree with your main points and your explanation.

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

#195

Post by m4rtink »

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…

When you want to see how bad it can get, see the Czech Republic in the top ten. We are land locked, quite high density and with a lot of neighbors with a lot of regular cross border traffic. There were lockdowns though arguably too late, chaotic and often ignored.

End result ? 30000+ dead.

Well, at least it looks like the ammount of people who got infected was quite massive as with only 50% vaccination rate right now things are not going back to hell so far, with hardly any precautions still in place.

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

#196

Post by acdha »

throwawayboise wrote: post #149
anigbrowl wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever noticed that the people who reject model-derived predictions for things like pandemic and climate are extremely confident about their economic forecasting ability? If only some of these super-geniuses would share their unquestionable brilliance with other fields, not to mention eliminating recessions and financial panics.

Why do we reject model-derived projections for the stock market and accept them for climate and disease?

Which one of those has intelligence?

CO2 doesn’t try to stymie your mitigation plans; a virus has selective pressure but it’s stochastic rather than directed by an intelligent adversary. In contrast, the stock market has a huge number of people with massive resources who can make enormous profits when they find a way to exploit some aspect of the system.

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

#197

Post by dukeyukey »

overeater wrote: post #162
pharmakom wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marriage and friendship networks. Particularly those formed in the public school (“public” means paid in UK) system. I doubt it’s official meetings, but rather discussions outside work.

How are public schools paid in the UK? Does that mean private schools are the free schools? Or do they call free public schools something else?

"State" school are the free, government run schools. "Public" schools are typically fee-paying, and are named so because when they were founded, anyone who paid could send their children there, rather than it being restricted by class or religion. They were "public" because the general public could send their kids there.

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

#198

Post by Godel_unicode »

johanneskanybal wrote: post #154
sergiosgc wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except if the risk is unknown you don't know how much risk are you taking, and hence if it is above our below your threshold. When faced with a cataclysmic, albeit low probability, event, the only course of action is the cautious one.

Not sending kids to school, eliminating social interactions, shutting down businesses, this was the drastic unknown experiment not the other way around. The effects are becoming more apparent now and I'm sure there will be a lot written about the subject in the future. Gloating doesn't seem appropriate at this point but sure after a year of the world screaming how bad we handled it maybe a Swedish moderate amount of…

One interesting, and quite unexpected, effect was on the suicide rate in the United States. Specifically, the fact that it has declined slightly. This is especially surprising given the seemingly inexorable rise on that same rate for decades. We are only now starting to see analysis of this data, and while I hardly think that this is enough to make any sizable statements about lockdowns, it's also certainly not the case that we know they were more harmful than unchecked covid.

https://healthfeedback.org/what-has-been-the-effect-of-the-p...

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

#199

Post by antipodes123 »

benjilb wrote: post #161
spookthesunset wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what, pray tell is a “proper lockdown”? I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.

Why not NZ? We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.

How has the NZ tourism sector been going - eg QT/Wanaka? Did domestic tourism pick up the slack?

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

#200

Post by [deleted] »

eckesicle wrote: post #130
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…

In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that. Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the…

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