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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

#201

Post by michaelmrose »

Closi wrote: post #157
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…

Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below: * Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years. * If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that pe…

Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater.

I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.

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

#202

Post by throw0101a »

spookthesunset wrote: post #131
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…

Your argument is that we should ignore news media with an “anti lockdown” agenda? It may come as a surprise but not every smart, well meaning person supports the lockdowns. You can look at all the publicly available data and come to the conclusion that they were a colossal public health blunder. I would argue the pro lockdown crowd have a huge bias toward ignoring any bit of data that demonstrates lockdowns are a bad…

> Your argument is that we should ignore news media with an “anti lockdown” agenda?

The argument may be more 'be aware of the biases of the news media you consume'.

Contrast:

> Sweden has recorded more COVID-19 cases per capita than most countries so far: Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.

[…]

> Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%. (None of these economies shrank by more than 4% over the course of 2020, though.)

> Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average.

* https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...

* https://archive.is/dtMEG

Compared to the UK (where the Telegraph is based) Sweden did pretty well—but that may not be a valid apples-apples comparison for a variety of reasons. Compared to the other Nordics—which may have more similarities (economy, demographic, geography)—Sweden did not do as well AFAICT.

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

#203

Post by antipodes123 »

hkt wrote: post #193
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.

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.

AU has certainly sacrificed international travel also - there are still Australians trying to get back. Aus outbreaks were mostly from escapes from hotel quarantines, and the quarantines were in the major cities.

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

#204

Post by bluGill »

hkt wrote: post #191
corney91 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there anyplace a conservative can find real news anymore?

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

#205

Post by robocat »

shadilay wrote: post #10
ambicapter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they benefit from their relatively low pop density.

Nearly 90% of Sweden lives in high population density urban environments. https://www.statista.com/statistics/455935/urbanization-in-s...

More than half of Swedish households are single-person

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190821-why-so-many-yo...

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

#206

Post by basisword »

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.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.

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

#207

Post by gizmo385 »

Closi wrote: post #157
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…

Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below: * Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years. * If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that pe…

That comparison of life hours isn't valid though. There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. And that's not to mention the potential overwhelming of the healthcare system, resulting in many other lives being lost or severely impacted.

People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.

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

#208

Post by mhh__ »

bluGill wrote: post #204
hkt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there anyplace a conservative can find real news anymore?

Anywhere reputable.

For example, I read the guardian pretty much everyday, and various other papers, even though although culturally I am a proper grauniad-reader type, politically I am not - but by virtue of actually reading the articles text you can actually (believe it or not?) determine both the facts and the flavour separately.

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

#209

Post by mhh__ »

anigbrowl wrote: post #123
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 Telegraph leans strongly conservative just as the Guardian leans strongly left. This seems like a very slanted article; it buries the mortality impact of CVOID until near the end. I seriously doubt that Norway would prefer to swap its ~10x lower death rate for Sweden's GDP numbers. Further: In a paper published last week in science journal Nature, Dr Bhatt, together with the UK's former government advisor Neil Fe…

The guardian is left leaning culturally but actually fairly centrist economically.

They get stick from Tories who call them elitist Londoners (this is deeply ironic, but that's for another comment) and even more stick from proper lefties who don't believe they are on their side enough.

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

#210

Post by poulsbohemian »

danjac wrote: post #118
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 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…

I'm glad to see someone call out the WSJ... I was a subscriber for many years and it was a conservative yet outstanding source of information. Today it's crap, yet still trades on its historic reputation. Really breaks my heart as I've not been able to find a replacement.
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