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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

#341

Post by [deleted] »

nmfisher wrote: post #250
kenneth wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat for saying it, I feel very much the same. I'm consciously aware of how many (or how few) years I have left, and I would never have agreed to losing two of them by not being able to see my family (including 2 babies born) in that time). I don't really have a problem with social distancing/masks/quarantine/etc, but locking people in their homes (and locking people out…

[deleted]

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

#342

Post by ajdlinux »

heisenzombie wrote: post #287
ajdlinux wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree that there's no guarantee of success. However, the political environment and compliance with lockdowns is very different between the two countries. For example, New Zealand is seeing nothing like the widespread protests in Melbourne and across Victoria.

The impression I get as an internet observer from the West Island is that on the whole the NZ government has done a much better job of public communications, maintaining social cohesion, and not trying to police their way out of a pandemic than Australia has. But we'll see whether that lasts. The political environment can change - see NSW - and if level 4 restrictions last more than a few weeks I think you might see the protests start up.

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

#343

Post by mediascreen »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #235
yodsanklai wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm claiming we don't know what would have happened under different policies (lockdown vs no lockdown) - and those who pretend otherwise don't have scientific evidence to back up their claims. Regardless, I'm claiming they've done quite well under all possible objective metrics compared to other European countries.

You should compare Sweden to its closest neighbors, not to all of Europe or all of the World). Countries geographically close to each other are more similar than countries far apart. Therefore you can more readily attribute the difference in death-rates to differences in policy. And use Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates is most probably the correct one: lack of lockdown. It…

Well, first of all it's 10x compared to Norway and 3X compared to Denmark.

There are huge differences in demographics between the Scandinavian countries. Over 20% of the Swedish population have been born outside of the country, mostly in the Middle East or Africa. This group has been hit disproportionately by Covid. The risk of needing intensive care for Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden is 6 times higher than for people with Swedish ancestry, and the risk of dying is 2.8 higher [0].

There are also pretty big differences in how elderly care is organized and run.

I'm not saying we did a good job in Sweden, but I definitely think that there are more factors than lockdown in play.

[0] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...

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

#344

Post by evgen »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #280
user-the-name wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why limit the comparison to nordic countries? We don't limit comparison of Italy to Mediterranean countries, or England to British Isle countries. Sweden is a European country. On a European scale Sweden was right in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita.

Limiting it to immediate neighbors leaves you with comparisons which have similar environment, socio-economic status, and culture/lifestyle. When doing statistical analysis you first try to control for as many potential confounding variables as possible. By limiting the comparisons to like vs like on many different variables you end up being able to make stronger claims about the consequences of active choices.

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

#345

Post by retsibsi »

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…

You're not taking into account the misery caused by covid. Death is far from the only bad consequence of an unchecked pandemic

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

#346

Post by ajdlinux »

nl wrote: post #338
ajdlinux wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials. New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing. A…

The issues with the non-AZ vaccines was that they didn't lock in early supply dates soon enough. For example, in June (which was already late for what was needed) Australia only had 1.7M Pfizer doses available[1] and now the PM is putting out press releases about obtaining extra supply from Poland[2]. Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/australia-…

I'm not saying the Australian rollout has been good. I'm just saying it's been better than New Zealand.

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

#347

Post by ajdlinux »

antipodes123 wrote: post #203
hkt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And NZ is having outbreaks from hotel quarantine in the middle of major cities too, exactly like us.

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

#348

Post by Moru »

tpmx wrote: post #152
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…

Swede here: It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this. I see two main failures: 1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up. 2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is…

The biggest problem with the discussions on most subject is that everyone cherrypicks their data or just don't have whole picture. And this picture is a realy big one.

For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?

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

#349

Post by supperburg »

dmitriid wrote: post #333
mannerheim wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area You've never been to Stockholm metro area. It's very sparsely populated compared to many big metro areas. Stockholm is a small city (800k people or so) surrounded by villages (another 1.5 million people) spread over 6,519.3 km2. Density is 360/km2 And that's the biggest city in the country. In comparison, Paris (as we were talking about France): 13 mln peo…

But when you look at the average distance between two random people who live in the same town/city it would probably indicate that lack of contact doesn’t explain any success they’ve had with their numbers

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

#350

Post by tdfx »

jchook wrote: post #91
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…

Notice the article doesn't mention countries where proper lockdown worked very well and took only around 100 days.

You mean places like Australia, that are still in strict lockdowns 18 months later and deploying soldiers to ensure people aren't leaving their house without government permission?

It boggles my mind that some people desire to live in a system like that.

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