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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

#221

Post by IdontRememberIt »

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…

This argument does not make sense.

1) +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area. (https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... )

2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image)

3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures.

As many have said, one of the major factor was how the elderly in home facilities had been protected and the state of the medical infrastructure (rate of intense care beds per capita to handle the peaks for exemple).

In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).

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

#222

Post by malloryerik »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #210
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…

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.

What about the Financial Times and Bloomberg?

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

#223

Post by aahortwwy »

nickloewen wrote: post #3

The article provides evidence to support the claim made in the headline, but there are important caveats included at the end: > The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to. > And Dr Bhatt does not think another, non-Nordic country such as Britain could have copied Sweden’s policies and got the same result…

I've become increasingly aware of news articles spending many paragraphs advancing a particular thesis only to apply significant caveats to that thesis in the closing paragraphs.

I assume this is done with the full knowledge that the final paragraphs are the least read in any article.

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

#224

Post by galaxyLogic »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #210
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…

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.

I think the downhill started when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought it. Anything they touch turns into ... bad things. Why is that? Because there are people who crave propagandists news. It is good business, tell us what we want to hear ..

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

#225

Post by Barrin92 »

avmich wrote: post #128
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…

> 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. I'm curious, how does it work in reality? A boardroom meetings where landlord's representative decide what to publish in the next issue to get people into commercial property? A weekly reviews of editors where they have the…

>I'm curious, how does it work in reality?

the same way gravity works, you don't start floating through the room even if you don't actively believe in it. The financiers of these papers know the editors and managers they hire, they set the tone, they dine in the same circles, their kids go to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, for ideology to proliferate there are no 'mechanics' required.

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

#226

Post by deltree7 »

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?

Also good genes. But that's a blasphemy to bring up

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

#227

Post by pugz »

antipodes123 wrote: post #199
benjilb wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can't speak for NZ, but in AU domestic tourism has more than picked up the slack - domestic tourists have spent more money than international tourists

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

#228

Post by sokoloff »

michaelmrose wrote: post #201
Closi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, you have to consider people who were single and dating. They had a way worse last 18 months than those in a committed, cohabitating relationship.

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

#229

Post by galaxyLogic »

user-the-name wrote: post #179
eckesicle wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same. Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.

Thank you for pointing that out: 10x. An order of magnitude difference in deaths.

Plus, it just makes common-sense that if people cannot meet other people, that prevents the spread of the disease. No?

That makes common sense, and then we see 10x difference in deaths. The Occam's razor explanation for the reason of 10x bigger death rate then is .. lack of lockdown!

Anybody arguing otherwise seems suspect of political calculus, in my view.

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

#230

Post by kenneth »

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…

I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life.

I know it's incredibly taboo to say something like this; but people are completely overvaluing the impact of the few absolute numbers of deaths, vs. the much harder to quantify widespread misery caused by these overreactions to the situation.

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