RFI:
I'm interested in learning more about an alternative strategy to the lockdown.
I'm interested in learning more about an alternative strategy to the lockdown.
Sweden is criticized heavily, but if their strategy works, they could have very little SARS-CoV-2 in the next few months while the rest of the world constantly re-surges because the lockdown didn't really stop anything, just delayed it.
We have no idea which one will be true. Predicting the future with math has never worked for the stock market. Why did we think it would work here?
If that's the case, then the question is not "did we really need to reduce activity that much" but "could other countries have achieved the same low social contact rates without enforcing it?"
Current deaths per million population: Sweden 156 deaths/mil, Norway 63 d/m, Finland 33d/m, Switzerland 165 d/mil; overall populations Sweden 10 mil, Finland 5.5 mil, Norway 5.x mil, Switz. 8.5 mil.
Sweden not doing well compared to Norway & Finland but it's doing better than Spain, Italy, France (446 deaths/mil, 399 d/m, 310 d/m). If you look at Sweden's daily numbers it varies a lot in a kind of repeatable way. That's apparently attributable to private labs are closed on the weekends and there's a delay in reporting (similar things in other countries); some countries report 1 day late to add up everything too.
Doubling per day time [2], [4], [5]. This is more complicated but Sweden is growing faster than comparisons. I don't have exact current numbers.
Predictions of total deaths [3]: Sweden 5,890 and Switzerland 1,584 (recall pop is 10 mil vs 8.5 mil). Notice Sweden has many more deaths per capita. Norway 280 expected deaths (5+ mil pop). Sweden will have disproportionately more deaths than Switzerland (pop adjusted Switzerland 1584-> expected 1863 per capita (1585*10/8.5). But expected deaths is 5,890, 4000 more!
1. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden (etc)
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-confirmed-deaths-si...
3. https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden
4. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/
5. https://www.economist.com/news/2020/03/11/the-economists-cov...
I hope this was useful, hopefully not too many typos!
Daily numbers made me react as well, they say it's a post-weekend thing. Perplexing to me but then that's what rolling averages and trends are for, I suppose.
Only two of Filmstaden's cinemas are open and they are by far the biggest cinema chain in the country. So to say that movie theatres are open is pretty disingenuous.
There was never a law that forced them to close though, they took that initiative themselves after the government started recommending that large crowds should be avoided. The same goes for all the ski resorts which are now closed.
Sweden's approach is also heavily based on the idea that people who have any symptoms are able to stay home from work. In countries where the workers' rights aren't as strong, that is much more difficult to achieve without stricter regulations.
It's relatively close to what's being done in Sweden, so I guess we'll at least end up with something of a test-case in retrospect.
I'm guessing you would need to wait for immunization to be developed for restrictions on high risk people are loosened?
You can't quarantine vulnerable people completely. If everyone gets it, every bag of groceries is going to be covered in COVID and an enormous number of quarantined people will die.
You can't tell who's going to die from it.
You can't have everyone getting sick at once. The death rate will go up tremendously if nobody can get treatment when they have treatable symptoms. This is what "flattening the curve" means.
We don't have enough protective equipment, medical supplies, hospital beds, healthcare workers, or even morgue space. The only tool left is staying inside, and so that's what we're doing now.
"Herd immunity" uses the word "herd" because we don't normally use it to describe actions taken toward human beings.
Sweden absolutely bungled their response and have 10x the number of deaths from this as compared to their neighbors who shut shit down.
Yes you absolutely can. The workers interacting with the quarantined subset of the population could use PPE to avoid transmitting it to them. Packaging on groceries, as well as the grocery bag, can easily be disinfected before being transferred to the quarantined individual.
2. We're not going to train minimum wage workers and quarantined vulnerable individuals to follow sanitary procedures to any adequate degree.
3. We don't even have enough trained medical workers to treat dying people, so no they aren't going to make the deliveries. This problem will only get worse if you go all "herd immunity" because a shitload of people will be in the hospital being triaged because they were classified as "non-vulnerable"
The only option the US has is quarantine, because it is a failed state.
Of course quarantining part of the population is hard, but I fail to see how it is harder than quarantining the whole population
Even if we did have tests, at some point nearly everyone is going to have the virus- especially delivery workers. There will literally not be enough people to make clean deliveries.
Quarantining the population is easier for us because the majority of us have dwellings already. We do not have tests or ppe.
There are also other ways to sanitize these distributions channels, e.g. we know the virus can only last so long on cardboard etc.
I disagree strongly that securing a fraction of our population against a disease is less feasible or practical than what we currently are doing
>especially delivery workers. There will literally not be enough people to make clean deliveries.
Will have had
I don't see why training delivery workers to follow sanitary procedures would be infeasible either.
Whatever costs/challenges in ensuring no disease transmission from the majority to the quarantined minority pales in comparison to the challenges posed by completely collapsing the economy by requiring everyone to be quarantined.
>>a shitload of people will be in the hospital being triaged because they were classified as "non-vulnerable"
The chances of a person infected with the coronavirus ending up in critical condition or dead from COVID19 are vastly smaller if they're under 45.
Couple weeks? Sure.
3 months? Barely, it seems.
1 year? No. It just won't work.
(I don't think we'll get to that point, but I think that the point stands: quarantine is a short term fix.)
Some experts in Italy have called for quarantines up to 24 months until there is a vaccine. The net effect this has done is just to scare the population, at this point.
I hope we don't have to go that route.
Just as a random factoid, somewhere I was just reading that someone was doing testing of surfaces in a hospital, and on average they found maybe 80% contaminated with the virus, but the floor of the pharmacy was 100% even though no patients had been in there...
Other objects were not as high as I recalled, but computer mice in the ICU were 75%.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article
Also see table: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885-t1
I'd argue that no, you should not be. Because if you get it, you will most likely require care and overload hospitals, which is what the whole point of that (partial) quarantine is. Either that or you forfeit your right to healthcare, which has loads of moral issues
I was also comparing lockdown vs partial lockdown, which I feel still does more damage to more people to be total
On a particular topic. This hardly qualifies as suicide attempt. Just increased risk. Maybe the same as selling alcohol to people knowing that many of them will end up driving drunk or many other similar things.