Sweden’s Relaxed Approach to Covid-19 Isn’t Working
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
300 deaths per million isn't that many really. That means 3000 persons per death, significantly hurting 3000 persons quality of life for several months just to save a single life which 90% of the time is above 70 and therefore doesn't have many years left to live isn't worth it. If locking down 3000 persons for 3 months makes everyone who died live 10 years longer then we say that 75 years of lockdown is worth 1 year of life. So a person would happily spend almost their entire life (75 years) in lockdown just to live one year longer. I don't believe that at all, nobody would make that choice. Just quitting smoking would save way more with way less effort.
And that example was with 10 years per death, most who are dying were already on their deaths door with less time left than that. Also we assumed everyone would survive if we did lock down, which is very unlikely.
Vietnam's quick action means that they're starting to reopen now, whereas we're going to be locked down for months yet.
Wrong, with SARS-CoV-1 "immunity lasted between three to six years" [1]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200424144554/https://newsnetwo...
The keyword there is lasting, we know immunity exists we just don't know for how long. If a vaccine could be distributed to enough people in a short enough time frame (we're talking billions and months) it could still wipe out the virus. But if that can't be done then mandatory vaccines for travelers could work.
> ...so what is the lockdown for again?
To keep the number of infections manageable and/or eradicate it entirely, it was never about stalling time for a vaccine.
I think it will work out 'ok' for Sweden only because COVID isn't that-that bad, but if death rates were a little higher and R0 a bit higher it could have been a disaster.
Specifically: " They do not need to be coerced into a lockdown because they can be trusted to act properly." This to me is ridiculous - it's not 'trust' that matters, but policy: if restaurants are open and many people go there ... well, that's hugely different from 'restaurants closed'. Same thing for almost everything else. How can you 'trust' people to do the right thing whey nobody knows what the right thing is? Even certain behaviors like hand-washing and masks need to be propagandized and 'nudged' in order for people to take them seriously.
It may very well be that 'soft shut-down' in the long run is the right balance ... but I'd be wary to claim a big win on this if it was mostly a guess.
Taiwan and Korea are clearly the winners, in the West I suggest it's Germany.
Spain has 550 deaths per million, Germany has 90. Most of the rest are in between.
UK, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Netherlands etc. - not so good at all, though Switzerland did a good job of getting things under control after a breakout.
E. Europe has fared well, but there are lower testing and some questionable governance so well have to take a deeper look.
Sweden's position is untenable and possibly unethical given the unknowns, it was a huge gamble.
they will be tested, quarantined for two weeks, tested again, and then only if they test negative they will be able to interact with the rest of Vietnam. It's a hundred times easier than controlling a disease running wild in the population.
With this scenario you get no tourists and no business trip. Can you really call that re-opening? For how long such measures can last?
In the end, the Vietnamese will have more freedom than the Swedish. When countries that have put the virus under control agree to reopen borders against each other, Sweden will be left out.
You don't seem to understand that the more a population builds up immunity, and the less the virus can circulate in this population. So Sweden might end up being the place where you're the less likely to get the virus, if any.
Plus, for people under 65 and no pre-existing conditions, the risk from Covid-19 is negligible. Peaople under 65 represents a lot of tourists and business people already. I personally would go to Sweden without the slightest worry, but that's just me. In the end everybody will assess the risk by themselves, like grown-ups.
> In the end, the Vietnamese will have more freedom than the Swedish
Freedom within the country? Freedom to travel in other countries? Freedom to open their border and welcome foreigners? What do you mean exactly?
As long as the virus circulates in the world, and the population of a country was never exposed to it, then the epidemic is just waiting to happen. I don't see how a country like VN which has presumably not build up immunity at all can be in a good position.
If the virus disappears completely from the surface of the planet, then that's great news for VN. They will have managed to keep the virus out, and to safely re-open the borders. A great success.
But if the virus doesn't disappear, and lingers around for years, Vietnam will have to maintain draconian measures at the borders for a very long time. This will have a cost, and yes it hurts the economy, you can't deny that.
> When countries that have put the virus under control agree to reopen borders against each other
I don't know how you will define "put the virus under control". Good luck with that. And good luck handling all the travelers with two nationalities and two passports.
Sweden's claimed success versus corona is more likely false advertising, similar to china's, than a reality.
Who's measuring the cost of lock-down? I think it's going to show to be very costly (perhaps net-negative) as time goes on. Cancer, heart attacks, strokes, deaths of despair, economic disruption, etc.
It seems to me the countries that are emerging well right now locked down hard and early. The ones that are in a lot of pain took a laissez-faire approach at the start.
You can err on the side of caution, or err on the side of risk. Sweden has err'd on the side of risk and it is looking like that was a bad choice.
Every week that goes by Sweden imposes more restrictions. Soon they will have as many restrictions as the rest of Europe.
That's not true. Can you name any new restrictions imposed the last few weeks?
This is a super simplistic view of reality. I get that my rights are limited and contingent on circumstance to some extent. But violating the right to assembly should be treated much more seriously than you are leading on.
I wish everyone who believed as you do would "assemble" at the graves of those who died because of them.
Yelling fire in a crowded theater is actually protected by the 1st Amendment, per the Brandenburg v Ohio ruling.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
Here is what was actually written by Holmes:
> The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.
I maintain that my argument remains unchanged based on the full quotation. Your rights do not trump (hah!) public safety.
I am interested in public safety. And it's really frightening how any well-intentioned critique of lockdown ends up with responses like yours that sound like "how dare you consider that, you inhuman, dangerous fool!"
Government already has the authority to impose these lockdowns as a public safety measure. There is no additional "police state" power being created here de novo.
If you want to reopen the economy now without considering these things, then, yes, that does make you an inhuman, dangerous fool.
That's explicitly what's being suggested. What else is a centrally-planned, police-enforced, compulsory lockdown and shutdown of the civilian economy? What's worse is indefinite house confinement.
Again, I repeat temporary, public health measure, where criteria for lifting said measures are specified in advance. Your rights have no bearing on this. You have no right to endanger me or my family. You have no right to promote the spread of a disease that's already killed 60,000+ people. You have no right to force people back to work to be so endangered.
I can walk outside and practice social distance. That doesn't endanger you or your family. I think that's what's so weird about the unreasonable risk-aversion some people are advocating. It's like healthy people have become complete OCD agoraphobes. The air isn't poison and humans won't be exterminated. Have a sense of proportion: the consensus upper range of the IFR (1%) means an overwhelming majority will survive, and beyond that, most of the deaths will be older people and the unhealthy.
I'm not proposing that all lockdowns be abolished completely across the country. I'm arguing that there's severe consequences and precedents set with lockdown and that reasonable precautions and practices could effectively mitigate disease spread and allow economic activity and reasonable freedom.
That's correct. And, to my knowledge, none of the lockdown measures in the US prohibit walking outside. Your previous claims of "indefinite house confinement" were made in bad faith.
> most of the deaths will be older people and the unhealthy.
So, these people are somehow worth less to you than young, healthy people?
> ...reasonable precautions and practices could effectively mitigate disease spread....
And, what are these "reasonable precautions and practices"?
>... and allow economic activity and reasonable freedom.
Economic activity is not prohibited. What is prohibited is unnecessary face to face interaction. Your freedom is not relevant here. What is relevant is containing the spread of the most serious public health threat in a century, and you're coming dangerously close to saying we should sacrifice certain "useless" people because you feel protecting them infringes your "freedom." You have a civic obligation here. Take it seriously.
Edit: yes, and Holmes was wrong — and the decision overturned. The Brandenburg precedent establishes the "imminent lawless action" test. Promoting the opening of the economy (notwithstanding the death count) fails this test, as it is manifestly not "lawless" to spread disease by living your life. If you had smallpox and accidentally spread it to me by going on about your own life, you cannot be held liable for that.
If that were the case then literally no-one would be going to work at the moment.
What I disagree with is the argument that even entertaining the counterargument (that the deaths are some how "worth it") is tantamount to daylight murder. We have the right to entertain that tradeoff, and we also have the right to exercise it if society decides to.
Second of all, we entertain this tradeoff all the time.
If we just all stopped driving cars, we would save about 35,000 lives per year. It would likely cripple the economy (until we can find alternatives), but we all just decide that it's worth it to not cripple the economy. It's an example of us sacrificing lives for economic activity (or in your words, "profit").
Maybe the tradeoff is actually wrong (and it could be!), but it's by no means illegal to make that tradeoff...
In your own words, "legality" isn't everything. Moral rights aren't absolute, nor are they objective — different people have different morals.
There is probably no moral framework in which slavery can be justified.
There are LOADS of valid moral frameworks in which economic vs number of lives cost/benefit tradeoffs are made.
Many things can be true at the same time. The world isn't as simplistic as you seem to make it out to be.
Let me put it to you this way: my parents are in no danger from you crashing your car. They are if you go out and start resuming "normal activity" to increment your fake numbers in a computer. Is scoring imaginary points really worth endangering my parents?
You seem to have an inordinate amount of trouble finding a single justification for endangering people at this scale, even though there are apparently LOADS of frameworks that would say it's okay. Why is that?
Your parents have a non-zero statistical probability of dying from a car crash, the same way that they have a non-zero statistical probability of dying from COVID due to "normal activity". The probability of the latter is undeniably higher than that of the former, and you appear to consider the former to be acceptable.
I mean no disrespect to your parents, but you have to accept that for some people, they draw the line differently, and the probability threshold is within their limit.
> You seem to have an inordinate amount of trouble finding a single justification for endangering people at this scale, even though there are apparently LOADS of frameworks that would say it's okay. Why is that?
I'm going to emphasize "At this scale", in your statement, because you're implicitly arguing that THIS scale is unacceptable. I'm simply arguing that, while that may be true for you — and for the record, it's also unacceptable to me — you have to understand that different people have different acceptable thresholds. You think that one loses the moral right to entertain the deaths of innocent people at some arbitrary threshold. But it's arbitrary, and unique to you.
at some point the number of deaths is high enough that you decide that "the scale is different and this can no longer be justified". I'm simply stating that this limit is arbitrary, and debatable.
Assuming that is the case, do you really believe that people don't have the moral right to entertain any amount of deaths for "economic activity"?
If so, this is the least enforceable violation of your version of "human rights", possibly in the history of humanity.
You have to accept that I and the majority of others have a different point of view (I’m not an absolutist about it).
This simply isn't true, and I'd argue that lockdown will directly or indirectly kill more people than it will "save".
In other words, saving economy is about saving lives, and less to do with "profits".
And then it becomes a matter of who gets to decide which set of people dies - "the old and the weak" or - in arguably greater numbers - everyone else (while their liberties get stripped away in the process).
Mind you, lockdown doesn't solve the problem, but only slows it down, namely the amount of people it will save is arguably rather small compared to numbers of people who will die from the economic damage.
a) economic depression will directly or indirectly kill people
b) lockdown doesn't "solve the problem" - it merely slows it down
We can argue all day about exactly numbers of how many people will get killed by the economic damage, but if you want to take away rights and opportunities for people to provide for themselves and their families, the onus is on you to prove that the lockdown will save more people than it will kill.
And at the end of the day - it's still a question of which set of people is going to die - whatever those numbers might be.
The law is our way of tempering the natural right.
The same moral framework under which you have the right to contribute to killing 35,000 people/year because you want a quick/convenient way to get to work everyday.
Do you not see the difference? Try a little harder to grasp reality.
If we all started driving our cars again, the overwhelming probability is that someone will eventually get into a car accident and die, and in aggregate we've observed that to be about 35,000 every year.
If we all resumed a "normal life", the overwhelming probability is that 60,000+ people will die from COVID.
This is absolutely untrue.
> In order to achieve herd immunity, scientists say that a community would need to have at least 60% of its population infected. That’s the lowest estimate I’ve been told. Other scientists have told me 80% to 90%. The reason this percentage isn’t precisely known is because it depends on things like exactly how contagious the virus is and also whether people who have been infected are immune forever, or if they lose immunity after a while, which researchers also are furiously working to figure out. [0]
With an infection fatality rate of 0.5% (which is on the conservative side), resuming normal activity means between 1.5 and 4.5% of the population will likely die. This is not an insignificant risk at all. In contrast, 35,000 dead from traffic accidents is .01% of the US population. This is precisely why your so called "analogy" is invalid. Why do you not realize this?
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[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/what-antibody-studies-can...
Right, so you are essentially making a tradeoff! You have decided that losing 0.01% of the US population is, to use your framing, an "insignificant risk". I don't disagree with that.
Your original argument was that we simply do not have the right to promote or otherwise further actions that will unnecessarily cause the death of innocents, even if there is an economic tradeoff to be had. I argued that we absolutely have the right to make tradeoffs with lives, we do it all the time. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, sometimes it isn't.
You have just argued to me that "the analogy is invalid" because in one case a lot of people die, and in the other case far fewer people die. You are essentially making the same tradeoff, under the same moral framework — only your boundary for what constitutes an acceptable number of deaths is different.
This is a difference in degree, and not kind.
I have not. I have stated that a moral framework that could theoretically justify driving cars does not also justify releasing lockdowns. I have made no normative statement about Americans driving cars. Please show me where I have, if you disagree.
It's the same moral framework, you're just coming out of it with a different decision based on the number of lives impacted.
> I have made no normative statement about Americans driving cars. Please show me where I have, if you disagree.
Your words:
"resuming normal activity means between 1.5 and 4.5% of the population will likely die. This is not an insignificant risk at all. In contrast, 35,000 dead from traffic accidents is .01% of the US population."
You've implicitly shown that there is a line you draw at the number of lives lost that you feel is unacceptable, and that's somewhere between 1.5-4.5% of the population. 0.01% of the population is acceptable to you (it is acceptable to me, too). Drawing this line is a normative point of view!
And my fundamental argument is that different people have different "lines". Your "line" isn't magically the universally correct one. We need to have the discussion to understand all of the "lines" we might be able to draw (ie what are the varying degrees of lockdown), what everyone's personal "lines" are, and then try and come up with the acceptable "line" for society.
Again, I note that although you say there are LOADS of frameworks that could justify this, you have not yet even articulated one. Why is that?
And I'm arguing that '150-450x as many deaths' is an arbitrary limit. If you can justify 0.01% of the population dying in car accidents on the basis of "economic activity", can you justify 0.02%? 0.1%? 0.3%? 0.5%? 0.9%? 1%? 2%?
Where did it stop being justifiable by the same argument? My argument is that there is no objective line, it is strictly subjective. THAT is the moral framework.
And, what if I believe even one death for the sake of economic activity is too many? What of your argument, then?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallac...
There is also an argument to be made that society spends a lot of resources[1] to keep automobile carnage low as it is. It would stand to reason that society response to something even dangerous would be proportionate.
[1] We have extensive and complicated vehicles laws. We have traffic cops performing surveillance 24/7. We ban dangerous drivers. We require cars have crash protection. We design roads to be as safe as possible. Goes on and on.
The death projections from reopening account for the existing amount of COVID testing, people wearing face masks, self quarantining, and random sample tracing.
The economic damage isn't proportional to the extremity of the measures, but of that multiplied by length of time they are imposed.
Second of all, I'm not really sure where you got "5,250,000+ deaths per year", because current projections with reopening of the economy is about 161,000 by Aug 4[1], and that's about 5 months since the outbreak, so let's call that 386,400 annualized. Let's say we get a vaccine in 2 years, for a total of about 772,800 deaths. That represents 0.2% of US population.
I want to make it clear that I, personally, do not think that it is acceptable for 0.2% of the US population to die, but I want to try and convey to you that it is entirely within the realm of possibility for REASONABLE people to conclude that 0.2% over a one-time 2-year interval is "okay", if they already think that 0.01% of Americans dying per year is already acceptable — because at that rate you reach the same 0.2% figure over 20 years, and it continues to grow unbounded.
> And, what if I believe even one death for the sake of economic activity is too many? What of your argument, then?
It's totally fair for you to have that opinion! But the vast majority of people do not believe that, and you absolutely cannot argue that people lack the moral right to believe that 1 death for the sake of the economy is acceptable.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-some-people-be-affect...
Regarding 5.25M deaths, I showed my work upthread on that. It's 1.5% of 328.2 million (approximate current US population). This is what the likely result would be if we just "resumed normal activity" and waited for herd immunity, which may or may not come.
> you absolutely cannot argue that people lack the moral right to believe that 1 death for the sake of the economy is acceptable.
Why not? No one has the moral authority to choose to end my life besides me.
Because it is practically unenforceable, and almost nobody considers 1 death for "economic activity" to be unacceptable, so by extension means that everyone holds an immoral world view, and everyone is violating your supposed natural human law...in which case, of what use is that law?
If everyone is evil, then nobody is evil.
To some people, opening the economy is “imperfect”, but acceptable.
Today is my birthday and my wife is waiting for me, so I’ll have to tap out.
Your idea of a level-headed response is letting people die straight up to the coronavirus.
Don’t you have parents, grandparents etc that you’re worried about?
Edit: lots of downvotes with no discussion. Disappointing.
None of these politicians have an interest in bringing attention to the complete tragedy that happened under their watch re: the most vulnerable.
Their reasoning was that other people their age were still visiting their business.
Edit: are you downvoting my parents decisions? Or my anecdote?
That’s among the many problems with this attitude. At what point do we stop treating healthcare workers as cannon fodder?
Besides which, that ignores the fact that strokes from the disease are killing people of all ages. And that we don’t know the long-term impact on the health of victims yet.