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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

#421

Post by tdfx »

jmopp wrote: post #364
tdfx wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high. I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk) than the long, drawn-out yo-yo lockdowns (where we lock down too late and open up too early - meaning community transmission remains high) we've been having. Better to rip the band-aid off quickly th…

> I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high.

I'm truly sorry you've had to go through that. My mom has a compromised immune system so she went through much of the same until she was able to get vaccinated. I still worry about what would happen to her with a breakthrough infection.

> I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk)

If that was a choice, I'd gladly take it. But Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam, etc. have shown that even the best lockdown implementations fail eventually. New Zealand may be the single outlier, but I'm not sure what their end game is as it requires completely sealing their country from the rest of the world, which is also unsustainable.

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

#422

Post by galaxyLogic »

mediascreen wrote: post #343
galaxyLogic wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely there are many contributing factors always. The question to ask is: "Would Sweden have done better had it implemented lockdown like its neighbors?

In hindsight, would they still make the same decision, if (and when) a new equally deadly pandemic rises again?

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

#423

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

kybernetikos wrote: post #396
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, it all sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

Actually in terms of Orwellian nightmares, normalizing mask wearing in public is an incredibly significant blow you can strike against the surveillance state.

I mean, on the one hand, you're not wrong.

I suppose one "solution" is one of those fake masks that looks real, but does nothing. Technically compliant with the letter of the law, but still striking a blow, with the bonus of hiding your face.

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

#424

Post by sandos »

astrophysics wrote: post #383
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…

A huge challenge in Norway, was that all our retired ethnic Pakistani people panicked and booked flights from Pakistan to Norway. They didn't trust that Pakistani hospitals would handle the pandemic. Sweden probably has a lot more foreign residents with swedish citizenship than Norway? Even though we have relatively few immigrants, at times, more than 50% of all the covid-infected belonged to these groups. https://ww…

I firmly believe that to be part of the answer, our "CDC" also said as much in 2020. Lots of clusters of infection popping up in parts of the population that lives very tightly and in large family groups, and those are predominantly immigrants and their kids. Im not sure how it looks in the third wave though. That and the care homes for elders were a big problem early on, but lately it seems to be a more general spread which is probably even harder to stem.

I have not yet seen anyone try correlate socio-eoconomic status and/or overcrowding to infection in a nice way?

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

#425

Post by eurasiantiger »

Nemrod67 wrote: post #379
dendriti wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't doubt you have Swedish family, I would like to see your data for the French economy being "killed". Certainly the economy contracted somewhat, but they seem to be doing just fine now.

this comment shows how half of the West's population has entered a foreign dimension. Do you really think the economy only "contracted somewhat"? Can we trust any statistics from people that depend on them to be good?

We absolutely cannot trust anything claimed by the crooks in power.

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

#426

Post by sandos »

sandos wrote: post #424
astrophysics wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge challenge in Norway, was that all our retired ethnic Pakistani people panicked and booked flights from Pakistan to Norway. They didn't trust that Pakistani hospitals would handle the pandemic. Sweden probably has a lot more foreign residents with swedish citizenship than Norway? Even though we have relatively few immigrants, at times, more than 50% of all the covid-infected belonged to these groups. https://ww…

I firmly believe that to be part of the answer, our "CDC" also said as much in 2020. Lots of clusters of infection popping up in parts of the population that lives very tightly and in large family groups, and those are predominantly immigrants and their kids. Im not sure how it looks in the third wave though. That and the care homes for elders were a big problem early on, but lately it seems to be a more general spre…

Actually it turns out our "CDC", folkhälsomyndigheten has a report on just these factors:

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...

Mostly in swedish.

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

#427

Post by kenneth »

thebruce87m wrote: post #417
kenneth wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I do trade the statistical risk of killing myself for some statistically greater benefit pretty much every single day and every action I take, from driving a car, to traveling for work, to any number of recreational activities like surfing or skiing. Your argument is the precise fallacy I'm arguing against — risks and benefits should be quantified and weighed. The fact that it takes 50 man-months of quarant…

“… each life cut short by 10 years on average” https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...

Yes, lock up 6000 people for one month to save one life that had 10 years left.

Still not worth it to me.

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

#428

Post by thebruce87m »

kenneth wrote: post #427
thebruce87m wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“… each life cut short by 10 years on average” https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...

Yes, lock up 6000 people for one month to save one life that had 10 years left. Still not worth it to me.

Ok, how many years would be worth it?

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

#429

Post by mikem170 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #334
mikem170 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you know that the same number of people have died in Sweden and Norway over the last four years? [0] For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up. They are tied over the last four years. More people may have died of covid in Sweden because there were more old vulnerable people in Sweden. [0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Stud…

So? Being vulnerable marks you as ok to die? The argument would only work if both countries had the same measures and there died more people in Sweden.

I didn't mean it as an argument. Just throwing an additional fact out there. It seems to be relevant, given the impact that covid has on people over 60/70/80/90 years old.

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

#430

Post by mikem170 »

thebruce87m wrote: post #418
mikem170 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make sense, except for the countries that did lock down and did worse. It would help a lot to have a satisfactory explanation for that, too. Geography by itself is not enough to eliminate the doubt sown by that contradiction.

Timing. I sat in the UK for weeks looking at what was happening in Italy and wondering why we weren’t doing anything at all.

Yeah, the lockdowns in the UK were interesting, particularly were they would announce them ahead of time, giving everyone time to travel and/or bar hop.

I also thought it was interesting that the delta wave seemed to disappear in the UK without the benefit of lockdowns. The same in India. The same in India. I've been wondering if these waves of infections come and go without much regard for typical lockdown measures (outside of full-on communist China and New Zealand lockdowns, which may not be practical in most other places).

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