https://i.imgur.com/oiybcsx.png
Sweden will easily pass France in the next few days, yet new infections are now 500% greater than those of France.
Again, please keep in mind this is a per capita chart.
For this reason alone, we are unlikely to know the effectiveness of Sweden's herd immunity for months if not years.
The epidemic is already over in Sweden:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#De...
(more up to date graph: https://lockdownsceptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG_...)
Yet a much lower level of infected population than conventionally understood has been reached. The models that assume the virus will continue to grow until 60%-70% have been infected are therefore wrong, reality itself is proving that.
There are now a whole lot of theories being explored as to why this is.
[edit: someone complained about the original graph link not matching worldometers. It's worldometers that's wrong so I replaced it with a Wikipedia link, which sources its data direct from Swedish health authorities. I left the lockdownsceptics link because it's a bit fresher]
We don't know. Covid19 leaves some people with long-term, perhaps permanent damage. You might lose working-age tax-paying people from workforce, having to pay them disability allowance, and this might offset part or all of your savings in pensions.
Other than geometric tidiness I see no point in your comment.
In fact, it ignores the denial of service impact that an epidemic has on a national health service, and plays down how it advocates for a population culling.
Perhaps it's time to relearn the basic principles and merits of "flattening the curve", not to mention the benefits of gaining some time until a vaccine is developed.
Sweden (or any other country to be honest) is nowhere near herd immunity, which kicks in at 60% (though some studies seem to have pointed to a lower number around 45%/47% something like that, anyway), Stockholm I think is around 10%, maybe 15%
And even when you reach 60%, there's still an infection inertia
I think it's fine for Sweden to have tried their approach, at these times, there are no real right or wrong answers, and Sweden's population probably is a little more sensible than most other countries.
There are systematic statistics on overall excess deaths which will include people whose deaths are a short term response to lockdown, so we can pretty conclusively say that lockdowns reduced short term excess deaths. They don't account for future excess deaths due to situations like cancelled operations you mentioned or different responses to a second wave, but they don't account for future deaths of COVID survivors where cardiac and lung damage caused by the disease is a comorbidity either.
As a more straightforward example, it's simpler to compare countries with closed pandemics - say Iceland or New Zealand. Iceland has much higher deaths per capita, but they didn't lock down nearly as hard (groups limited to 10, schools open for kids below age 10, etc.). If you do the math, Iceland lost about 120 extra years of life, or something like ~3 hours per person. Is depriving everyone of additional liberties for a month worth increasing life expectancy by 3 hours?
The case for France vs. Sweden is a bit more complex, since Sweden, even though it isn't locked down, will be "unsafe" for large numbers of people longer. The raw math and projection models suggests Sweden will lose an extra 1-2 days of life per person, but more analysis is needed to really understand benefits and costs.
That "3 hours" mean that you're likely to loose one of the relatives or friends who are in high risk group. Suddenly a month of lockdown is worth to give your loved ones years or even decades.
Not even close. For example, no one I know has been directly hurt by the coronavirus. And neither has anyone they know, including my friend from Wuhan.
(Why "directly"? I do know someone who had a mental breakdown related to isolation.)
I suspect you don't know the fate of everyone known by everyone you know.
Certain information is significantly more likely than average to be broadcast. Do I know what those people are doing? Do I have any idea who they are? No.
But I do know they haven't been hurt by the coronavirus.
Not arguing one way or the other, but I most certainly would not call it likely. Germany had more deaths than Iceland per capita and none of my relatives or friends are or know anyone even infected, let alone dead.
In Germany, you’d need to know about 440 people to even know someone who has been confirmed infected, in Iceland still around 200. To know someone who died, you’d need to know 9,661 in Germany and 36,363 in Iceland.
Personally I'd rather not gamble wether I'd end up on tragedy or statistics side.
Edit:
> does it makes it a media hoax
Honestly, you completely lost me there. Did you read some other comment and attributed it to me?
edit2: FWIW, I wear a mask when going to the store despite it being only required inside, one of maybe 5% of people who do that. And that’s in a city of 200k with 0 known active cases.
I have a feeling as things open up, more people are going to have my experience.
The problem with "extra years of life" metrics is that they artificially play down the death wave on older segments of the population, as if those dying from covid19 who happen to be older than 40yo should not matter to society.
The consequences of this nonsensical pick of statistics indicators is that a death wave of thousands of people per day that happens to hit harder on the > 40yo segment is watered down with "all this just to gain 3 hours of life" nonsense, as if all the coffins were only piling up because instead of being delivered on scheduled they needed to be delivered 3 hours earlier.
It does seem to me that a more just system would consider "time lost" as a metric since surely it can't be binary.
You're the one trying to quantify the value of life.
To me, my parents and grandparents are more important than your 1yo son/daughter, so YMMV.
Still, you're missing the whole point. The point is that it makes absolutely no sense to downplay an epidemic just because it hits hardest on those suffering from pre-existing medical conditions or being over 40. The coffins piling up on makeshift morgues make it quite obvious that the real effect of the death wave is not anticipating death by a couple of hours, and it matters nothing if those doing the dying are sick, old, or disabled.
According to that logic you should have all 7+ billion people working that whole week to keep this person alive.
Would the man-hours spent saving that person have to be exactly the same as saving someone who has further life expectancy of 70 years?
So once again is that choice also appropriate if 7+ bln people have to spend 3 months working in order to save your dad? Obviously a lot of other people die because if they have to work 3 months saving your father it means the doctors are not saving other people, we won't have food etc.
I'm trying to show that there must be a line drawn somewhere and it can't be binary.
> You're pretending that the economic dislocations are do to measures to combate the virus instead of the virus killing people. Countries that acted swiftly and forcefully are returning to normal right now. While countries that are handling the way you want are seeing no end to this. Meaning you are 180 degrees wrong, your way kills people from the virus. You way kills people via extended economic dislocation.
1. I haven't made a choice on what is the best option.
2. There's no "my way", all I'm saying that these aspects should be considered and math should be ran and it is possible that another option could be better, a combination of some options etc. And in order to determine what is the best way should be using calculations.
3. It should also be discussed how to do these calculations. Should we consider death as a binary or should we consider "time left", "quality time left". How do we calculate loss of life, time, resources that stems from people unable to be productive etc, because certainly there are consequences to that.
4. I'm trying to prove that this should not be binary and there should be a line drawn somewhere considering all the pros and cons from the both sides, assigning weights to those and trying to predict what is best option from that.
These discussions should still be held even if it's not about coronavirus, but other similar decisions as well.
And otherwise, assume there is a fire and you are in the middle of a corridor. On one end there is your mother, on the other there is some 1 year old you don't know in any way. Which would you rush to save first? I know I would rush to save my mother before the 1 year old.
Wrong, the implications is that it makes absolutely no sense to state that society should just let old people die simply because you're so self-centered that you even fail to register the devastating effect of an epidemic just because you believe it doesn't affect you personally.
You are bringing out facts such as "coffins are piling up" etc, this fact could be true if in one morgue in two places in the world there were coffins piling up. Maybe these morgues can only handle 5 deaths at once and now there's 5 more for each?
You need to quantify things to understand how bad they are. Otherwise these statements are meaningless.
You are essentially quantifying - any statement you do you is actually quantifying. For instance if you bring out the argument about coffins piling you seem to be considering potentially 10 deaths (which could cause coffins piling) to be the same as the whole world population dying.
I'm stating the exact opposite: that crudely abusing statistics to pretend that people over 40 don't count for nothing because they will die in a few years is abhorrent, and downplays the real impact of the whole covid death wave.
There's a lot of math and viewpoints that should be considered here. It does not seem to me that proponents of lockdowns are even doing any maths, it seems like they take it for guaranteed that lockdowns are the only choice.
This analysis is flawed, because it compares the entire cost to only parts of the gain. Economic depression because no-one dares to go outside of fear for their lives, has for instance negative value too.
We can’t know this number conclusively until a few years from now. The pandemic is still ongoing and does not have a flat distribution of impact over time.
So all this analysis is based on a false premise.
Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually, it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl. Sure, you have to impose some restrictions in order not to overload hospitals and whatnot, but anything beyond that is just extending the suffering (both making living harder and ensuring it will go on for a longer duration), is it not?
I would also add that delaying the spread also contributes to making it progressively harder to get the disease to spread.
France has already lifted many of their lockdown restrictions.
> Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually,
That's a big assumption, and not necessarily correct.
First, we won't all get it - herd immunity means infection rates max out at something like 60% to 90% of the population. I understand this maximum is to some extent a function of how fast your infection rates rise due to a sort of momentum effect.
Second, we may be able to suppress maximum infections indefinitely (or until we get a vaccine or treatment) with tracing, local lockdowns and so on. It's not clear if this is an effective long-term strategy, and is disputed by some epidemiologists, but seems to be the leading preferred strategy by most experts.
> it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl
The problem is that you can't really adopt half measures. That's linear thinking, and it's an exponential curve. You either keep the reproduction rate above 1 or below 1. Above 1 you get an accelerating increase and eventually overwhelmed hospitals. Below 1 your infection rates start halving.
Luckily, the measures required for keeping R<1 don't seem to be too intolerable. Spain, Italy, France etc. have managed to squash their epidemics and are getting close to having something like normal society back.
I don't believe Levitt's interpretation. I certainly hope it's true, but I don't think it is. He seems to believe containment measures have no effect, which is implausible to me.
He's just talking about the stats, without giving a biological hypothesis for why infections would top out - that seems to be coming in an upcoming video that hasn't been released yet.
I'm also a bit sceptical about his conclusions. The effects of containment measures aren't really visible in the curve, but e.g. Sweden has a much worse exponent - increasing the chance for more outbreaks will also change the parameters for Levitts curves. I think Germanys curve got very slightly worse recently (shops opening - masks didn't compensate). But I'm not sure if masks did anything at all - there is no clear trend-break in the growth-rate of Germany. Also masks may just keep a local population infectious for a longer time - increasing the risk for visitors.
One biological hypothesis is that covid-19 spreads in local clusters - and has a hard time to move to other places. (e.g. it might need 20 minutes of close-contact talking) The growth-rate is shrinking exponentially (something that Levitt noticed, and can be seen everywhere)- each outbreak locally is trapped and doomed to fizzle, because it is competing with itself - it's just not mobile enough to move to another location before it burns out to maintain a constant R=1.
"Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually" is not a reasonable assumption - it was the worst case scenario that the world has avoided and (as it seems) will continue to avoid. It's reasonable to expect that if we solve this issue through a vaccine in 2021, then by that time perhaps 10% of the world's population will have contracted COVID-19 and almost everyone else will not. And the expected difference between Sweden and France is going to be that by the time that we have a solution, one of them will have burned through more of their population for no good reason.
If you start with 10 cases and immediately take action like Taiwan, you have 7 dead. If you start with 10 cases and do nothing like Sweden, you have 4500 dead.
It couldnt feed its citizens without an economy.
Also note there's no exponential explosion in the rate of infection in Sweden or anywhere else that is opened its economy like the model for quarantine predicted to flatten the curve.
It's reached a steady-state in all of these places.