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Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

nytimes.com

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Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#321

Post by glofish »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #317
glofish wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a risk/benefit analysis, we are talking about tradeoffs would I trade getting out of six months of quarantine if the price was the chance of 1/100,000 of dying. Of course I would. I contrasted that to the fact that I frequently take on much higher risks of dying (mountaineering) for a lot less payoff (it is fun). (the 1/100,000 is an estimate based on existing data for my age group)

That is the estimated risk of death, not the risk of becoming a carrier of the disease, possibly an asymptomatic one, who spreads it to others. This is what's really frustrating about this whole "trade-off" argument: it's fine to make trade-offs for yourself, but you do not have the right to implicitly force your choice on others. If you sit within six feet of me not wearing a mask, my risk of falling off a mountain…

how is anyone forcing anything on you?

also where and in what way did the mask pop into this at all?

we are talking about what a person would trade aka risk vs reward

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#322

Post by jeffbee »

bjourne wrote: post #68

You have to look at the excess deaths figures. That is, how many usually dies from January to June in a normal year and compare that to how many extra that died in 2020. For Sweden the excess deaths almost exactly matches the number of Covid deaths, give or take 10%. That is not the case for many other countries. For example, the UK had almost twice the number of excess deaths as Covid deaths in a few weeks in April.…

Comparing disease outcomes at all is futile because they are incredibly sensitive to initial conditions. One sick person travelling in January made all the difference.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#323

Post by _-___________-_ »

leto_ii wrote: post #120
nradov wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the criteria for defining an acceptable number of deaths?

Any death is unacceptable. This is, of course, unattainable in practice, so I would suggest looking at Eastern European or East Asian societies for a rule of thumb (e.g. Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam etc.).

The inclusion of Vietnam on these lists always surprises me. There is no excess mortality data for Vietnam, nor any data on infections (e.g. from random population sampling). All we have is their self-reported number of cases (i.e. confirmed infections) and deaths (zero!), which come from triumphant news releases from the Communist Party (usually paired with reminders about how great this success will be for their economy in the post-COVID world), repeated with zero critical thought by overseas media.

- Nobody knows if there was some excess mortality here, because there's no monitoring.

- There were thousands of "suspected cases" in the official reports, which remained suspected cases and never progressed to a confirmed case or a confirmed non-case (as they would if they were tested) until they stopped reporting numbers.

- People with confirmed close contact with known cases were told to isolate and were only tested if they showed symptoms (this is also normal practice in many/most Western countries).

- The supposed "large" number of tests carried out in Vietnam represents only 0.2% of the population.

- A significant portion of those tests are of people who had to be tested anyway, rather than community testing (e.g. overseas Vietnamese arriving home; the large number of charter flights that were allowed as exceptions from Korea and other countries, for employees of large firms with factories in Vietnam - e.g. LG - who did not stop during the lockdown).

- The lockdown was largely not enforced, and while streets were much quieter than usual, there were many people outside throughout. Smaller bars and restaurants only closed for a few weeks, and of course nobody wore a mask inside them. Many informal businesses (e.g. street food) never closed.

I think Vietnam's "success" is largely down to some environmental factor (average temperature/humidity, sunlight exposure, the general "outdoor" way most people socialise) keeping the number of infections or the severity of those infections down, and I think the chances that COVID caused exactly zero deaths are almost zero.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#324

Post by reddog »

Sweden is right to be concerned about their economy. Its not just about skipping a few haircuts -- a shattered economy kills people as sure as coronavirus does. Every shuttered manufacturing plant has a body count associated with it and its own case mortality rate.

I don't know how many people died as a direct result of the Great Depression but based on what I've been told by relatives the suffering was considerable with deaths due to lack of food, homelessness and despair. I do know that the Nazi party would never have come to power in Germany without the world economic collapse. They were a minor party on the wane in the late 20s only to get their second wind in the elections following the crash. It's also possible the Japanese militarist would never have come to power without the Great Depression for more complex reasons. WWII was the result at the cost of 45-70 million lives. Economic catastrophes are not just about money -- they have life and death consequences. I wish more people would have taken this into consideration before they carpet bombed the US economy to combat the pandemic. I guess they figured that no matter what, the US was safe from the kind of civil unrest that gripped the Weimar republic. A strong man taking control of the US? Fascist and antifascist battling in the street? That could never happen here.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#325

Post by Afforess »

b112 wrote: post #310
dvdplm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what needed to be done, in Sweden and elsewhere. Pay staff triple and have them stay with the old folks and get everything delivered by externals with as little contact as possible. And no new admissions into the care homes.

Will you force them with a gun? To forgo all friends, family, comforts of home, and be literally trapped at work for months? Money doesn't just buy people. You'd essentially be drafting them.

Yes, then draft them. I'm in favour of martial law for this crisis.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#326

Post by whoisthemachine »

jlmorton wrote: post #144
leto_ii wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In an average year, 13/1000 Swedes die anyway. Yes, people die. That's true of all countries and all times. What we might call civilized societies have however strived to reduce those numbers as much as possible. This was done by trying to avoid violence, improving lifestyles and developing better medical techniques in order to prevent or repair diseases and injuries. Containing and minimizing the effects of a pand…

> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the infl…

It has much less to do with people dying directly from Covid and more to do with the sheer number of severe Covid cases overloading healthcare systems to the point that patients with other serious conditions can't receive medical treatment.

This occurred in Italy, New York City, etc., and is now being seen in some cities in Texas and Florida. This condition is what incentivizes societies to lock down, not just the mere occurrence of a new disease.

If a society's healthcare system can handle a severe influx of serious Covid cases, then you typically have seen that government's restrictions lift.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#327

Post by tenuousemphasis »

345218435 wrote: post #295
leto_ii wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important observation. In the Netherlands, where I live, I've had a number of people look at me with great surprise and mistrust when I mentioned that the Dutch have done a terrible job with this epidemic. The Guardian plots show that the Netherlands is one of the worst when it comes to under-reporting. This is not to say however that the Swedes have done a good job. While their numbers are credible, their…

the church of covid is a cult. get out. get perspective and truth. https://twitter.com/haraldofw/status/1280383315871236096?s=2...

LOL

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#328

Post by lsllc »

toss1 wrote: post #103
lsllc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison, Massachusetts with 8000 deaths out of a population of 6.9M (which is #4 for deaths per-capita worldwide after NY, NJ and CT). For some reason MA is now being held up as "the exception to America's coronavirus failure": https://theweek.com/articles/923075/massachusetts-exception-...

Massachusetts is the exception because our re-infection rates (Rt) have been successfully driven down to well below 1.00 (~0.90 in a recent report), despite having started with a nearly out of control situation. We've gone from thousands of new cases per day to now averaging ~100. The doubling days started out at around 2.4, stayed stubbornly in the dozens for many weeks, then rise, to now averaging well over 400. Th…

Not sure they were "driven" down by policy per-se:

According to rt.live, we started March 3rd with an Rt of 2.22 and were already in a steep Rt decline by the time Baker issued the stay-home request on March 24rd (Rt 1.22) and got below Rt 1.0 a week later on March 31st.

Baker issued his mask order May 6th (Rt 0.88) and we've been bouncing around at that since although we're creeping up now from our low of 0.75 around when reopening started and been slowly ticking upwards since late May to Rt 0.98 now.

A few weeks ago we had the lowest Rt in the nation, now we're only 5th lowest. Hopefully the start of Phase 3 this week won't push us up over 1, but I suspect it will.

https://rt.live/us/MA

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#329

Post by newacct583 »

bjourne wrote: post #68

You have to look at the excess deaths figures. That is, how many usually dies from January to June in a normal year and compare that to how many extra that died in 2020. For Sweden the excess deaths almost exactly matches the number of Covid deaths, give or take 10%. That is not the case for many other countries. For example, the UK had almost twice the number of excess deaths as Covid deaths in a few weeks in April.…

> You have to look at [confounding factor] [... therefore] In other words, comparing countries by their Covid deaths/capita rates is meaningless.

Sorry, that's wrong. The fact that there is uncertainty in data (which there always is) doesn't mean we can't make legitimate inferences from the data we have. Sweden is clearly, via many metrics (INCLUDING excess deaths), experiencing very elevated mortality rates due to covid. That's just obvious.

No, the science isn't done yet (and won't be for years, probably) to nail down exactly how much they're seeing. But we can ballpark it pretty well, and it's bad.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#330

Post by xienze »

_bxg1 wrote: post #87
bhupy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA The USA does not have "no strategy", it just depends from State to State[1]. Every state has had some form of lockdown and school closure. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...

It's all been reactionary. Individual states and even cities are opening up when people clamor for summertime fun, and then frantically closing back down when the inevitable spike hits a couple weeks later. There is no attempt at cohesion or long-term planning. There is no leadership. They're all just winging it.

And still the number of deaths per day has fallen by 90% and still dropping. It’s doing what viruses do, quickly burn through the elderly and infirmed and then taper off.
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