321–330 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.
Folks gotta be pretty gullible to not see that.
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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…
1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death.
> 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.
I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns.
These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing?
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
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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…
"Hitlers Volksstaat", Aly, Götz
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Your perception of a country doesn't make a scientific evidence on why Norway of Finland could be taken as reference point to assess Sweden strategy regarding Covid.
You're the one asserting they're not comparable here, so please trot out some factors where Sweden is measurably different from its neighbors then.
Maybe this explains the difference during the pandemic - Sweden had more old people.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
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>But that death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and well below those of France, Spain, Italy and the UK I mean one reason why you might want to compare Sweden to other Nordic countries is because you might assume that Nordic countries are more similar to each other than they are to Italy etc.
While that is very true. One thing to note is that we are also very different countries. One of my main gripes during the last almost 2 years now is the implication that Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are basically the same. Which is far from true.
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25 people per square kilometer is a low population density. Look at how they define urban area.
That's not an accurate figure for the density where a typical Swede lives. Most of the population lives in the southern part of the country, a quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area as well. It's like using Canadian population density with the whole country when almost the entire population lives within a hundred miles of the US border.
Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead. "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...
For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up. They are tied over the last four years.
More people may have died of covid in Sweden because there were more old vulnerable people in Sweden.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
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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-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-...
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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…
1. I think you underestimate how much of that misery comes from the pandemic itself and not from the reaction to the pandemic. I live in a country that went back and forth between relatively strict lockdowns and almost complete opening up. Yet even during the opening up phase people were afraid it would inevitably cause another wave, many would not go to pubs or clubs, businesses were not thriving...
2. I think you might overestimate the misery, which depends on personality, details of the restrictions in a given country etc. I am sure many suffered under the restrictions and I do not want to diminish that. However, I live in a country where I could go out running or cycling and nobody would prohibit me from visiting my family or going for a walk with a friend even during the strictest lockdowns (I am actually surprised by some experiences mentioned here, like not being able to see new babies born in the family - I make a resolution to examine more carefully what people mean when they talk about "lockdowns"). And I could work from home, which greatly improved my quality of life. And I am not alone in this - we are saying with my introverted colleagues that the pandemic would be great if it was not for the illness.
For me, basically all the stress comes from the fear that my parents of my grandmother could catch it or that I will catch it and have the bad luck of some long term problems. Virtually none of the stress comes from the restrictions. Again, I don't doubt that many do suffer, I just wanted to balance your view by a counter-view.