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

Post by mandmandam » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:38 AM UTC

frabbit wrote: post #239

mhh__ wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guardian is left leaning culturally but actually fairly centrist economically. They get stick from Tories who call them elitist Londoners (this is deeply ironic, but that's for another comment) and even more stick from proper lefties who don't believe they are on their side enough.

And the Guardian has been shifting inexorably to the neoliberal position as it has started to rely more and more on US and Australian readership. Their rampant bias against the only viable socialist, anti-imperialist party (Labour under Corbyn) was notable and they've followed this up with a disgusting lack of activism around the torture by imprisonment of Julian Assange. In short: the Guardian is anything but left-w…

Post by mandmandam » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:51 AM UTC

eCa wrote: post #337

tablespoon wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate fo…

> Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without l…

Post by zibzab » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 7:11 AM UTC

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…

Post by nl » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 7:23 AM UTC

HWR_14 wrote: post #340

mikem170 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years). The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years. Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway: > "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during t…

> The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years. The excess mortality graph only goes back 19 months, because that's when COVID start. It uses excess mortality, so those numbers are based on numbers in the previous years. It's like looking at a chart showing inflation over the past year and saying "this says nothing about the prices two years ago!" They're used to compute the number…

Post by kenneth » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 7:26 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #300

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…

It’s incredibly easy to trade statistical deaths for statistical happiness. Ask yourself instead if you would be willing to kill yourself and your family if you knew it would make your neighbors happy. Sounds aggressive, I know. But it’s a solid way to illustrate that there are real people behind statistics. If 10x more people die, “everyone” is not going to have 2 years of a non-miserable life. The people who lose t…