311–320 of 442 posts
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Sorry I saw this circulate a few days ago and linked the first thing I found on DDG. I have no reason to think it's fake news.
Everything in Babylon Bee is 100% satire and fake. It's used as a fake news source by people wanting to spread misinformation.
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> 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…
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…
It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.
That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies, and the best test for those policies is to compare like with like (e.g. other Nordic countries).
When people compare US numbers to other countries, I feel that's from more of a "what did the US do wrong" angle, and those comparisons could surface differences that could be learned from.
"The highest number of confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in the Nordic countries as of August 18, 2021, had occurred in Sweden at 14,664. Denmark followed with 2,562 deaths, Finland with 1,008, and Norway with 811."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
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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.
It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.
It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.
[0] https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762
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Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though? They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding. If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x. And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in…
> Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes ... If the data in the graph shared by kybernetikos is correct, the claim that 'it's all because of elder deaths in early 2020' seems to be misguided, given the 2021-01 peak, and the steady first-place position throughout the last ~18 months. https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX
Realistically, most of the people live in a few cities and the density is similar to Ireland, Croatia, Bulgaria, or even Greece.
Sweden after its first wave doesn't look much different than any of those countries.
Is it because a lot of the susceptible people already died? Maybe. But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.
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Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though? They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding. If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x. And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in…
What??!! What I'm hearing when you say "If you factor out all those deaths" is "Old people don't count". Economically they may not have as much impact as younger people, but they provide richness to family and community life that can't be replaced. So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.
The idea is that since the first wave and them changing their stance slightly - Sweden is not performing an order of magnitude worse than Norway and Finland, and it's pretty average compared to the rest of Europe - and definitely doing better than Russia.
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…
Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. This also fails to acknowledge that there might be a worthwhile set of cost:benefit ratios to compare your single data point against.
> but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.
People accuse the COVID situation of being political and dividing people. I think one of the major lines of division is in the expectations that one has about their daily life in a given society, and how few some people have about their own.
Each to their own, but the failure to acknowledge the validity of the opposing point of view, even in a polite tone, is a troubling development.
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Taiwan had only a few weeks of full lockdown last year, and then a few months of softer lockdown during the second outbreak this year. During the recent outbreak it was WFH and takeout from restaurants with certain businesses closed. About 100 days later most things are open again. They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.
Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare.
The Telegraph's title glosses over other factors, so hey: This one ^ does too!
I am relieved by my region's luck and the collective will to move the goalpost of success to be 'limiting the number of people dying of COVID'. It has been basically normal life domestically besides scattered lockdowns for 5 million people, without losing parents, grandparents; 1 death per M here compared to Sweden's 1425, USA's 1895.
National vaccination rate is lagging, on track to be sufficient in October, when the national modelling (Doherty) shows we will be sweet to test, trace, isolate, quarantine our way to control/suppression without need for further lockdown ad infinium. Just one precarious month in the way...