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Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

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Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#41
post #3

There are several of these articles trying to redeem Sweden's choices. Here are the results versus their similar neighbors in deaths per million people[1]: Sweden 1478 Denmark 474 Finland 219 Norway 173 They're 3 to 8 times worse. They now do compare favorably to Portugal for example at 1796. When did Portugal have the huge spike in deaths that propelled it in front of Sweden? When it decided not to do lockdowns, eve…

I don't know. A lot of people are attempting to use Sweden as some sort of political blunt force instrument to drive home some point, seems to be used to argue both the horrors of lockdowns and the horrors of not locking down. In terms of saving lives, it clearly wasn't the best strategy. In terms of securing a reasonable standard of living, keeping the economy going, keeping mental health effects limited, it was rea…

Are you sure on the economics part of the equation? My impression was that Sweden also had a bigger GDP per capita decline than the other Scandinavian countries. I don't have the data in front of me, though.

Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#42

Halting an economy to the point of economic depression levels (early on) for the sake of people who were already vulnerable (look at the US, lockdowns but people still left the house cause duh...groceries and jobs) was a dumb idea. The government was trying to play god with it's citizens and they couldn't even police simple things like "stay at home" orders. So what was the point in even shutting down everything and…

The point of lockdowns v1 was panick and healthcare supply chain related. Once we knew who was dying from this (May-2021) we should have stopped given the millions who will suffer and people who will probably die from tanking the economies of the developed world. But hey, have to stick the agenda of report9 to the WHO which predicted 200Million+ dead in year1...

Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#43
post #3

There are several of these articles trying to redeem Sweden's choices. Here are the results versus their similar neighbors in deaths per million people[1]: Sweden 1478 Denmark 474 Finland 219 Norway 173 They're 3 to 8 times worse. They now do compare favorably to Portugal for example at 1796. When did Portugal have the huge spike in deaths that propelled it in front of Sweden? When it decided not to do lockdowns, eve…

Maybe better to compare to Singapore which had ~6 deaths per million earlier this year, has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world but since barely relaxing their restrictions now has ~120 deaths per million, raging number of cases (mostly vaccinated) and had the highest level of suicides last year since 2012?

Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Government is playing god in protecting it citizens from death? Not sure if I understand this reasoning, the government has to protect its citizens, that is the number one task.

So if the government did such a bad job policing people from staying at home, why did we even bother with continuing with the stay at home orders? It was obvious from the end of 2020 that nobody was abiding by it and police clearly weren't enforcing these completely unconstitutional laws. Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply…

I don't think it's ever been about saving people from Covid, it's always been about saving hospitals from bad-but-eventually-non-threatening pneumonia explosions to the detriment of everything else they're supposed to care for.

I live in Hong Kong, where we have still a somewhat silly aggressive policy. We had 213 deaths for 8M people, so around 26 deaths per million people. Our hospitals never even felt the pandemic. Nobody is suffering of doubling inflation, ridiculous shortage or supply chain failures all around, but it's true we have less obese people than the US in the first place...

If the US didn't let their people free to have so many co-morbidities, they wouldn't pay such a dear price each time a cold mutates from a lab in China. Talk about a powerful country if such a small thing coming from here can knock them down, don't you think ?

Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#48
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> humanity serve the economy Humanity is economy, no money on the table means no food and no shelter.

Certainly one predicates the other (i.e., there's no economy without humanity) and it's quite impractical for humanity to exist at any scale without trade, but whether it makes sense to sacrifice human life for 'the greater good of the economy' or to sacrifice economic function for 'the greater good of humanity' entails a moral choice

Technically you can have economies that don't operate with money; economies are just a (not necessarily good) quantitative lens to analyze human behavior.

Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#49
post #3

There are several of these articles trying to redeem Sweden's choices. Here are the results versus their similar neighbors in deaths per million people[1]: Sweden 1478 Denmark 474 Finland 219 Norway 173 They're 3 to 8 times worse. They now do compare favorably to Portugal for example at 1796. When did Portugal have the huge spike in deaths that propelled it in front of Sweden? When it decided not to do lockdowns, eve…

I would love it if we could get such clear-cut results from the numbers, and just be able to say “this strategy is good, if we do that everything will be fine” (not saying you're saying that), but I really don't think that's the case. Here in Switzerland, we had plenty of lockdowns, followed the scientific wisdom and so on, and we're at 1375 deaths per million. The UK has shifted strategies around a bunch, but they h…

[deleted]

Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy

#50
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if we could get such clear-cut results from the numbers, and just be able to say “this strategy is good, if we do that everything will be fine” (not saying you're saying that), but I really don't think that's the case. Here in Switzerland, we had plenty of lockdowns, followed the scientific wisdom and so on, and we're at 1375 deaths per million. The UK has shifted strategies around a bunch, but they h…

The problem is that it's not black/white. Close all roads to normal traffic and you'll have near-zero mortality from traffic accidents. But does that make it a smart policy?

no. but at least you have a framework to reason about the tradeoffs.

with covid its all been a bunch of speculation and shouting

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