Why on earth would anyone stand out? The virus is the same everywhere and people are the same everywhere.
Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#132Netherlands has just imposed lockdown measures even though they're more than 80% vaccinated, I wonder at what point are we going to call this bluff, and I say this as a vaccinated person (including the booster shot).
Oh but you know? You are vaccinated but not vaccinated enough! And so on. We are secure but… not enough!
Remember: vaccine passports are only a temporary measure until we've got the virus under control.
Oh, and you're going to need a booster jab every six months, but stop asking questions.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#133Netherlands has just imposed lockdown measures even though they're more than 80% vaccinated, I wonder at what point are we going to call this bluff, and I say this as a vaccinated person (including the booster shot).
Are most of the ones that end up in your hospitals and die unvaccinated? If so, vaccination is worth it.
Yes, according to https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/some-75-of-hospital-co... which links to official RIVM the majority is not vaccinated. It's indeed worth it.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#134Earlier 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?
Conveniently ignoring all the things the government and the auto industry has done to minimize traffic accidents...
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
no. but at least you have a framework to reason about the tradeoffs. with covid its all been a bunch of speculation and shouting
Even then it's not an issue-free baseline. How many people died because they couldn't use the roads, either directly (get to help) or indirectly (delivery of inputs that prevented a death)? Covid is even harder to measure. One Example: You shut down elementary schools to prevent kids from getting infected; how many were pushed back into broken homes from the only safe space they had? How many will have long-term pain…
It’s surprising how many people think about lockdowns as some kind of a 1h drill.
Kids, and many people for that matter, cannot just stay in lockdown for months like domestic cats without triggering mental health issues.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#136There 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…
You can’t look at deaths in a vacuum though. How many survivors in other countries were locked up in nursing homes with seeing their families? How many businesses closed permanently? How many suicides and drug deaths? How many students fell behind? I’m honestly surprised people still exist who support lockdowns.
> I’m honestly surprised people still exist who support lockdowns.
18 months of relentless one-sided fear porn will do that to a mind.
I highly recommend Laura Dodsworth's recent book A State of Fear for more on this. It's about the UK but I'm sure a similar story could be told about most Western countries.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're citing known COVID deaths, I think, while the epidemiologist points out in the article that a better metric is excess mortality: >Sweden had one of the lower excess mortality levels in Europe Presumably, excess mortality includes the effects of overloaded hospitals, delayed medical care, lockdown-related depression, and undiagnosed COVID, which are hard to measure any other way, and which seem logically much h…
So the cumulative excess death since January 1st 2020 (in terms of percentage of expected) is Sweden: 5.21% Finland: 1.57% Denmark: -0.09% Norway: -0.85% And you think these numbers somehow argue that Sweden "no longer stands out"? Or tells a more positive story than the covid death numbers at least? Source (thanks tomp): https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Data as of October 17th (the lat…
Well yes, if you deliberately chose to compare Sweden with only those countries that have better statistics, Sweden will indeed prove to have the worst statistics. Truling shocking how that works out.
Here is the same graph of excess mortality with all 27 EU states included: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Note how Sweden has the is the sixth lowest of all the countries in the graph.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#138Earlier 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…
While I agree comparing countries can be apples and oranges, it makes sense to compare the Scandinavian countries. That Norway and Finland were much lower strongly suggests Sweden's strategies worsened things.
What you say makes sense when we think of geographic locality. But is that really what should guide the pandemic response?
Sweden is much more like UK, the Netherlands and Germany than it is like Norway or Finland when we look at things like urbanisation, demographic diversity and immigration. In part because much more of the population is centralized to a few areas. The organization of public health care, especially that of old people's homes, is completely different between those countries.
If we look at the regional differences, you'd see that the areas of Sweden which demographically is similar to Norway indeed followed the pandemic outbreak of Norway very closely, with a very low incidence for the longest time, and then scattered outbreaks with increasing magnitude.
During those first crucial months, the pandemic outbreak in Sweden almost exlusively took place in the two most populous and urbanized areas. The rest of the country was pretty much spared. With the differently implemented lockdown in place, it was interesting to compare incidence in smaller geographic areas separated by the border but otherwise much more similar than the countries are. It is quite clear that any correlation can not be substantiated by data.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The source was correct and corroborated by the other two sources I gave, The British Medical Journal and the UK Government.
Read them. More journalists and broken links. No data. No corroboration, not from those sources cited.
uh, I clicked through to, and I didn't see journalists and broken links.
Re: Sweden no longer stands out in pandemic, says architect of ‘no lockdown’ policy
#140There 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…
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway are not similar in any way that matters for a pandemic.