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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

#261

Post by foxylad »

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?

When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.

So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.

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

#262

Post by lmm »

sumedh wrote: post #234
deltree7 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it good genes or a healthy population because of good nutrition and exercise?

Consider which of those possibilities would make it easier to publish experimental results, and consider the distinct lack of clear published results despite this being a topic of significant interest.

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

#263

Post by lmm »

frankbreetz wrote: post #148
alliao wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

South Korea/Taiwan don't have low population density. Best response comes from states with educated citizens with good basic hygiene and understanding of exponential so are able to accept early intervention. NZ have the benefit of citizens actually trust the government; bit of a wet dream for many politicians around the world.

It seems improbable that all the best responses were all effectively isolated island nations. I think they may have another advantage.

This article is coming from Britain which is also an island nation, yet had a significantly worse pandemic experience.

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

#264

Post by DrJones1098 »

kenneth wrote: post #230
anigbrowl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Slatestar Codex did an interesting look at it. The entire thread is worth a read. It's taken a little out of context as he's just joking and playing around with numbers but still interesting to think about.

""" Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal. """"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

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

#265

Post by scythe »

Gwypaas wrote: post #103
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…

Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? It is a completely irrelevant metric, lets include the Canadian arctic when calculating the density of Toronto and the effects of Covid, makes a whole lot of sense! A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density. "Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at whic…

>By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741.

Germany at 2651 did much better than Sweden. France is around 4800. Italy is just over 4000. Sweden is closer to Denmark than to either of those two.

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

#266

Post by ajdlinux »

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.

NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.

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

#267

Post by michaelmrose »

sokoloff wrote: post #228
michaelmrose wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The larger point is that its impossible to objectively value other people's lives and any reasoning based on doing so is faulty.

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

#268

Post by areyousure »

lancewiggs wrote: post #82
tomohawk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New Zealander here. Yes we locked down over one case. The next day we had a few more, and then more and more and more (21 in each of the last two days). Delta is amazingly spreadable. Because we are locked down straight away, every case is easily contact traced, and people that did catch COVID are already isolated in their bubble, so cannot re-transmit easily behind that. As people are diagnosed they are taken to iso…

Will you get that back, or is New Zealand's quest for zero Covid lost?

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

#269

Post by tamiral »

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…

Where is the chart stat from ?

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

#270

Post by wraptile »

elliekelly wrote: post #46
tpmx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Swedish. I think the most important difference is that ~50% of the population here thought the government was being incompetent/paralyzed and then performed a voluntary lockdown, much harsher than the government-mandated restrictions. Since lots of those people who disagreed with the government (in)actions work as "knowledge workers", it was also relatively easy to make the switch to work from home, and they did,…

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.

That exactly what was happening here in Thailand. We even had a saying "who needs lock downs when no one wants to go out anyway". Despite many people here being young and healthy not many would care to risk covid exposure just to have dinner or to shop around.
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