Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That is not the case for many other countries. For example, the UK had almost twice the number of excess deaths as Covid deaths in a few weeks in April. That indicates that Covid deaths were under reported in the UK. There are also some indications that Covid deaths have been under reported in other countries.
In other words, comparing countries by their Covid deaths/capita rates is meaningless. The statistics are likely completely wrong because different countries use different definitions of "Covid deaths" and different reporting procedures.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/may/29...
This is not to say however that the Swedes have done a good job. While their numbers are credible, their magnitude is still unacceptably large: 0.5/1000 Swedes have so far died of the corona virus.
Considering COVID has closed many of life's fun things, there will be an entire generation of people who have effectively "lost" a year of the things they hoped they would do in their lifetime. By stating open, Sweden might decrease life expectancy in years, but increase it in terms of 'things achieved in a lifetime'
(And we also have pretty good chances of coming up with a vaccine in about 1 year.) It's not "just the same amount of death, but slower, so the crematoriums don't get overwhelmed".
This is just wishful thinking. We've never had effective vaccines for this sort of virus. (The yearly flu vaccine is like 30% effective.) Sure lots of research groups are working on vaccines, but many of them are academics who have no particular duty to work on research likely to have an immediate payoff. The researchers who do have such a duty, i.e. those who work for private drug firms, are mostly developing treatments like the antiviral remdesivir. Effective treatments of various sorts are closer than any vaccine, for COVID-19. IMHO, the most likely eventual winner will be a scaled-up version of the convalescent plasma therapy, which unlike the current version will be able to produce effective antibodies without drawing blood from humans.
Efficacy is always a question, sure, yet it seems the spike protein is stable (conserved across mutations).
If the mRNA stuff works well then it'll likely work for the flu too. (It be easy to pack one shot full if flu strains.)
Covid (any vaccine based treatment really) is even more difficult as you need to wait for six months to assess transmission.
Technically, you don't. There are volunteers ready to get infected with SARS-CoV2 and I wouldn't put my money on "ethics" standing in the way in this case.
So, stability over e.g. a month doesn't guarantee stability over longer terms.
And also to avoid panic and shortages of essentials caused by mass avoidable deaths and work absenteeism, both of which would have been the inevitable and predictable outcome of attempting to carry on as normal.
IMO the argument is already over. In fact there shouldn't have been an argument at all. There was never a rational case for trying to avoid lockdown, or failing to test/trace, or setting up other basic mitigation measures - either on humanitarian or on economic grounds.
This is an awful way of thinking.
> There was never a rational case for trying to avoid lockdown
This is untrue. Many virologists and epidemiologists made rational cases against lockdowns. Sweden followed the strategy of Anders Tegnell, who is a renowned epidemiologist. The case for or against lockdowns was ultimately decided by the perception of public opinion, with politicians trading off the risk of "having done too little" versus "having done too much".
The New York times is spinning a narrative that Sweden, because of no lockdown whatsoever, had a really bad outcome. It's just not true. The amount of deaths controlled for population is lower than in Spain, France or the UK, all of which had a total lockdown. Their current fatality cases are near zero. Their economic contraction is half that of the rest of the EU.
This is cherry-picking. You can always tell if somebody is making a bad argument when they pick Norway - a sparsely populated oil-rich welfare state - for a comparison.
> The question boils down was it worth for a modest economical benefit allow 5000 people to die or not. Some people think it is okay, most do not.
No, that's an oversimplification. You are assuming that the lockdowns could've prevented these deaths, yet we have other countries that had strict lockdowns and that had similar death rates.
You also have countries like Germany and Netherlands with modest lockdowns and lower death rates.
There are a lot of factors at play here and the numbers are all over the place, but there is no evidence that lockdowns actually do better in the long run. Part of the problem is that most countries did do some form of lockdown, so Sweden is one of few in the control group.
It doesn't really matter anyway, I already admitted that countries like Germany and Netherlands did have fewer deaths with modest lockdowns. These are samples in favor of a lockdown.
However, there are also countries like France, Spain and UK that had the strictest lockdown, yet they had higher death rates. Those hint at strict lockdowns being no more effective than modest lockdowns when compared against Germany, or even being completely inneffective when compared against Sweden.
There is no clear correlation between having a lockdown and having fewer deaths, so you can't claim that Sweden would've had a far different result with a lockdown. That's just an unknown, there are many more factors at play.
Also, the costs aren't just economic. Lockdowns are a severe restriction of civil rights. There's a great deal of suffering caused by lockdowns. They can destroy livelihoods. They limit medical care. There's more domestic violence, more suicides, more depression.
I'm pretty sure that mandating driver's license to be able to drive, and passing laws and regulations to enforce the use and adoption of safety systems such as seat belts, air bags, and helmets, not to mention criminalizing wreck less driving, is a pretty radical change to society.
With covid19 all people is asked to do is wear a mask and practice social distancing.
I mean, Spain had to endure a couple of months of isolation and we don't see Spaniards complaining that it's the end of the world.
We could make those things permenant, it would really reduce road traffic deaths if noone could socially drive more than 5 miles, or drive to visit friends.
My mother is 77 at risk from COVID - does she expect the neighbors kid not go to school to keep her "safe"?
Or that a 20 year old not have fun at the beach from now on so that she is "safe"?
Of course not, not a least bit, and she told me that herself. I admire her for it. I agree as well. Everyone is responsible for themselves.
someone's mom and people in general only matter if they are scared
if they are not scared then they have no rights, their opinion does not matter and they must do what the scared people want,
being scared and weak gives you more rights than being strong
Yes, people die. That's true of all countries and all times. What we might call civilized societies have however strived to reduce those numbers as much as possible. This was done by trying to avoid violence, improving lifestyles and developing better medical techniques in order to prevent or repair diseases and injuries.
Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible.
> there will be an entire generation of people who have effectively "lost" a year of the things they hoped they would do in their lifetime
This almost doesn't merit a reply. A few months of not going to festivals and the cinema is by no measure a catastrophe. It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.
This is acting under the assumption that something can be done, that the thing done is effective, or for that matter, isn't harmful. There were, of course, many things done. Were all of them effective? Were some of them harmful?
Doing something harmful, like for example forcefully depriving many of a livelihood during a pandemic, can be considered immoral and irresponsible.
These are all measures that a modern state can take to prevent people from suffering economically.
I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Politicians are the last people you want doing this.
Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust. Now what? Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments. No payments? What happens to the securities and the organizations that own them? Banks, pensions, retirement accounts, etc? What happens to the mortgage market and the young family who needs to buy their first home?
Actions have consequences. It's nice to have ideas over the internet, but reality is a bit more complicated.
Not sure who you're referring to here.
> Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust.
Corporations are legal fictions that do not have a right to life. Let them go bust and save the individuals working for those corporations. Once the crisis passes, they will re-create the legal fictions and continue their work.
> Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments.
This should probably not have been allowed to happen in the first place.
In general valid replies to your comments are easily available. Your condescension is, however, tiresome, so I will not pursue this thread any further.
If an economic system can't cope with a relatively minor external stressor - and Covid is not nearly as dangerous or destructive as some stressors - then the problem is with the economic system.
Actions do indeed have consequences - and trying to use the wrong tool for the job because you can't imagine a better tool is possible is not a wise action.
What problems? There are no major structural problems yet. There will be major structural problems if OP's ideas are implemented because they're not sound. That's not related to the economic system, that's related to OP's ideas.
I'd argue that a 40% jobless rate is a major structural problem.
The real shame about this is that it's absolutely avoidable to a big degree.
At a cost? Sure, but I'd argue that it's exactly this, which a civilized society makes.
In what country? In the US, the unemployment rate is 11.1% right now?
That's like throwing all doctors in jail and saying there is something wrong with our medical system because it not longer works.
Politicians keep kicking the can down the road and it is not fair to future generations. Nobody seems to be talking about that.
If you let someone go bankrupt, lose their job, house, etc. they are suddenly not contributing to the economy and other people start losing their jobs. And that person then needs welfare payments anyway to avoid starving to death etc.
In the former case the government might borrow to pay for that, but if you borrow money, you have to borrow it off someone. Someone has to buy those bonds; e.g. pension funds.
"The young" will be not will be worse off overall; it has to balance out overall. Some of them will be creditors. The balance won't be evenly distributed, but future governments can decide by how much with tax strategies.
Compare to climate change, a problem we are very definitely kicking down the road to future generations.
The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the influenza season of 2018-2019. We could have sharply reduced that through quarantine measures. But no one wants to do that.
Once you accept that everyone is prepared to allow others to die preventable deaths for their own convenience, then all you are talking about is a matter of degree. It can't be immoral to believe 1 death is okay, but 2 is wrong. That's just an opinion. The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards.
> The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience.
It may be so. Those people are morally wrong however. This is a deep point that I have insisted on in other comments as well. Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society.
> The only difference between believing 70,000 is okay, and 700,000 is not is a gut feeling about how much preventable death is worth it to maintain our living standards.
That is not true. Deaths caused by the regular flu are deeply regrettable and should be prevented as much as possible. If you dig into the data however, you will see that the coronavirus not only kills many more people than the flu, but it also kills people who would otherwise have many more years left to live. Diabetes, a heart condition or age > 65 yrs. shouldn't be death sentences in a modern civilized society.
The reality is quite different. We accept a risk of death to ourselves and others in everything we do. You do it, too. Everything. You even risk death by doing nothing.
You could say "if it cost $1b to save this life, we should do it". But how many lives could be saved at $1b each before we run out of money? Then what? And what about the lives that could have been saved at $1m apiece?
If someone not willing to give up all of his assets to save someone else's life, is he uncivilized and morally wrong?
This a common, yet unrealistic, hypothetical. In reality, of course, death is inevitable regardless of the economic costs. Past a certain point everybody, so far, has died. The amount of things that we can do in order to prevent any given death doesn't scale with the economic cost, past a certain (quite low) point. Spending 1B on a person won't get you 1000 times better 'medical stuff' than spending 1 million; therefore, a trade-off of e.g. one life for 1B vs 1000 lives for 1m is illusory.
In practice all societies have limited resources. My position is, however, that those limited resources, in the case of an acute health crisis, should be focused as much as possible on mitigating that crisis, without having primary concern for the economic costs.
What's a preventable death? Everybody dies eventually, there's no such thing as a preventable death. There's delaying death, but everyone dies. Period.
I will give it my best shot at clarifying:
Preventable refers to what a given society can be expected to manage given its limited resources and given other moral constraints, such as not impinging on people's freedoms unnecessarily. A number of the terms I have used have vague meanings that can't be clarified (not by me at least) within the scope of an HN comment. A good faith interpretation of my statement would be that a society should hold saving lives as its highest priority, as long as this does not cause catastrophic costs or dystopian levels of population control. Some temporary economic costs and some temporary restrictions on certain freedoms should be accepted, I think.
That's my impression about the Internet as a whole these days...
> in this thread people are quite stubborn about interpreting things literally, or misinterpreting them all together.
My complaint is a bit different. I'd say "preventable deaths should be prevented" and people will interpret that as if it said "all". I reply that if I meant "all" I would have said "all".
Your case is a bit different, because you said "all" but did not mean "all".
That's not true. The flu seasons in 1968, 1957, 1918, and 1889 each killed over a million people worldwide, twice as many as COVID-19 in roughly the same timespan, and that out of a lower total population, and despite lockdowns and quarantines.
(Who is downvoting this simple truth? How is anyone going to discuss this issue if we can't even talk about basic facts?)
And why wouldn't I include 1918 in a list of flu pandemics that killed over a million people?
But even that simple statement of fact is suppressed, even here on HN, because this issue is so heavily politicized.
But that is corona with social distancing and very widespread working from home, so it isn't really an apples to apples comparison.
Casually? Sure that’s not good. But we weigh human life against cost all the time.
In the U.K. they value 1 QALY (Quality adjusted life year) at $50k. It’s very explicit.
People forget that economic activity is what pays for healthcare, welfare, etc.
You can’t ignore economics.
I'm willing to bet that you have taken many unnecessary car trips in your life. By doing so you have increased the risk to other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians of suffering a fatal accident. Sure, it's a very small increase, but surely that outweighs your selfish desire to visit your friends or go to a movie.
Casually weighing human life against economic cost is not acceptable in what we might call a civilized society.
It's not only acceptable, it's essential in order to make reasonable decisions.
Deaths caused by the regular flu are deeply regrettable and should be prevented as much as possible.
So, quarantines every winter?
Youre are going to have the same number of deaths sooner or later as long as the hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
Corona isn't going anywhere.
How do you know there's a vaccine on the horizon?
So I think this proves the argument wrong.
If you consider the other costs you're avoiding, long term issues for sick people, the cost of treating all these people in hospital, the potential for people to get sick with this multiple times (we don't know if you get any immunity by getting sick) then it's even clearer.
Hopefully a vaccine is discovered.
- Virtually no travel in and out of the country (goods still flow though).
- No gatherings > 50 people.
- Keep 2m away from others (except for "bubbles").
- Wash your hands.
- Masks in certain situations (not mandatory for most).
- Various limitations in place as to how businesses operate, e.g. distance between tables in restaurants, physical barriers, cleaning, one way aisles in stores etc etc.
Since I'm not the type or age who goes partying out in crowded bars or to packed concerts that stuff doesn't really bother me personally. Sure, it's no fun, but the alternative seems like a lot less fun. In my (global) company we all switched to wfh when this started and I'm fine with that.
There's lot of room for optimization/improvements. Travel might be ok to locations that have this under control, for example. We might find better solutions for keeping the transmission low. We could decide to clamp down harder and eradicate the virus locally so that we can trade off local restrictions vs. travel restrictions.
It's just between all the bad options here this seems to be the least bad. 2 years of the disease raging through the community until (maybe) there's herd immunity sounds so much worse. I'm pretty sure the Americans who think this is the way to go will change their minds come this fall assuming the current trend continues. Maybe I'm wrong... Let's catch up in December ;)
Even assuming there's never a vaccine or effective cure, this is not true: temporarily reducing the R number (lockdowns, distancing, masks) reduces the overshoot in the total number of people who get the disease (some proportion of which will die). It's the difference between scenario 0 and scenario 1 in the excellent https://ncase.me/covid-19/ playable models.
What I said: "temporarily reducing the R number (lockdowns, distancing, masks) reduces the overshoot in the total number of people who get the disease (some proportion of which will die)."
How are these "completely different"?
It will go back to its normal r value one society returns to normal.
There's no avoiding society returning to normal as people need jobs to pay rent and buy food.
> There's no avoiding society returning to normal as people need jobs to pay rent and buy food.
You've moved the goalposts, but even so, the later sims suggest other things that can be done with less invasive measures like test and trace, wearing masks and social distancing. These don't prevent people doing jobs. They do decrease the number of people who die.
We abort 600K fetuses in the US every year. By our behavior, life is cheap.
You are just making up some arbitrary standard of "civilized society" that doesnt exist and is meaningless.
Economists have determined that people value their lives at about 100K. The govt through policy values a human life between 8 and 10 million
Right now you could spend $100 to save a life of a child in africa, yet instead you spend that money on frivolous luxuries.
It absolutely isn't; it is complete nonsense.
Firstly, it directly conflicts with right to die; it asserts that if we can intervene in any suicide, then we should. How can stepping on the right to die be elevated to a gold standard?
Some people take risks, and those risks are fatal. Deaths in dangerous sports and other activities are easily preventable: just forcibly take away the right to engage in them. Closing off Mt. Everest to climbers will certainly prevent deaths. By your gold standard, that must be what should be done.
Preventing some deaths may even require lives to to be imperiled; someone has to be asked to risk their own life to save others.
No, no, no; live and let die is the gold standard.
People should be sometimes left to the consequences of their actions and circumstances and that includes dying. Obviously not always, and not as a rule, but sometimes. Often enough that "all preventable deaths should be prevented" is utterly preposterous.
Secondly, most of your post conflates me engangering myself my choice ( i choose a dangerous sport and suffer) vs someone else endangering me (unsafe building collapses on my head).
Yes, in reality a lot of people die driving cars all around the world no matter the amount of on board safety devices and yet cars are legal everywhere. There are countless similar examples.
Preventable is what people agree or tolerate to prevent.
I agree that it's a reasonable assumption. Ivor Cummings dives into some statistics a bit more, and it isn't so clear that the lockdown had the effect, rather that it might be do to with seasonality and the way the virus spreads. I am interested if anyone has any decent criticism of the numbers he bring up in that video, as they seemed reasonable to me?
Human life and economic cost are not separate things. The economy is a comprehensive (if incomplete) description human life. When we shut down the economy we cause millions to lose jobs, to lose incomes, to lose structure, to lose community, to lose activities that give their lives purpose and joy.
The economic shut down is killing people. It's also reducing quality of life and length of life. That's not to say it's not worth it. The effects of lockdown are hard to measure and no one can be sure if it's worth it or not. But this framing of economic cost vs human life as if it's just a little money is wildly inaccurate and damaging.
The collective response has been outsized to the actual risk of death, and I believe this is due to fear rather than sensible policymaking.
If it really was about reducing all cause mortality, most governments could do so much to reduce the primary causes of death, like heart disease and cancer, by banning things like cigarettes and enforcing healthier diets among the populace.
Imagine what banning sugar alone would do to the rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes in the US. But no one wants to do that.
Secondly, the flue has quite reason, like year 2000, taken more lifes in Sweden then what Corona has taken this year. And I would be surprised if that would be exceptional to Sweden. That not even consider there are more people living in Sweden today then 20 years ago. A couple of years earlier, the death rate per 100 000 was higher then Corona this spring.
Source, Swedish statistical agency. http://SCB.se/
And yes, there are some strong indications that there was Corona in Sweden in December, in Svärdsjö, Dalecarlia. A woman that has not been outside of the region got Corona signs on X rays of her lungs. And that I guess isn't exceptional either. So, we probably hade Covid-19 a lot earlier than we has thought. Which could explain the explosion of the spread.
This occurred in Italy, New York City, etc., and is now being seen in some cities in Texas and Florida. This condition is what incentivizes societies to lock down, not just the mere occurrence of a new disease.
If a society's healthcare system can handle a severe influx of serious Covid cases, then you typically have seen that government's restrictions lift.
Not Florida. An article from yesterday (https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2020/06/18/florida-has-l...) ominously claims that "less than 25%" of ICU beds are available in the state, but actually read it and see that 90% occupancy rates are normal, and only a few of those in the ICU are COVID19 cases.
Texas? Let's look at Houston, where for a month it's been "we'll be running out of ICU beds in two weeks" every week.
Italian and New York hospitals were overwhelmed because a) both places put sick elderly into old age homes. b) Like elsewhere early on, doctors put everyone serious onto ventilators in a mistaken belief that they should treat patients like they do ARDS cases based on blood oxygen levels. This damaged healthy lung sacs and caused long-term dependence on mechanical respiration that doctors found almost impossible to wean patients from, and other side effects like deep vein thrombosis; Nick Cordero is a recent example. This article from three months ago (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...) was completely vindicated in retrospect.
(And even NYC being overwhelmed was thankfully temporary. That's why the military hospital ship sent there was not used.)
The mean time between symptoms and death is 14 days (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...). 99% of cases where people with COVID19 stay in the hospital for months is because of b), and neither a) nor b) is happening now.
I agree that there’s a lot to criticize in how NYC handled their hospitals, and that in a pinch hospitals in Texas and Florida can scrounge up extra beds. But those hospitals are filling up.
0: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/07/health/us-coronavirus-tuesday...
1: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5efcd4b7c5b612083c5618d0?...
2: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...
There are 306 ICUs in Florida (https://bi.ahca.myflorida.com/t/ABICC/views/Public/ICUBedsHo...). As of today, 16.8% of all ICU beds are available.
As I said, a 90% ICU load is normal; hospitals routinely transfer patients elsewhere to maximize utilization across as many facilities as possible. Again, only a small portion of ICU patients are there for COVID19, and a good chunk of the remainder are people who postponed procedures during the lockdown.
COVID19 patients are not making up a large percentage of ICU patients at the moment; see, for example, the hospital in the aforementioned article with 100 ICU beds. Yes, the 100 beds are full at that moment, but only seven are COVID19 patients; no doubt some other fraction are patients who put off procedures during the lockdown. That hospital is sending new patients it can't handle elsewhere, and will also move some existing patients elsewhere when practical/safe. This is possible because there is no overcapacity on a regional or statewide level.
Cancer is a rather big problem. It taxes society quite a bit, costs a lot of money and in general inconveniences quite a lot of people that need to support or help cancer patients.
Would you agree then that perhaps it's a better idea to let cancer patients die rather than try and find cures or reduce the chances of dying? Why or why not? If you had cancer but of the curable kind, would you accept the state killing you because it inconveniences others?
Rather, my point was that it's hypocritical to argue that anyone that does not want to continue major disruptions is either immoral, uncivilized, or an absolute monster.
Everyone attaches some value X to human life, and some value Z to normal functioning. Not everyone values these things the same. But everyone certainly has a value, and almost everyone is okay with allowing many tens of thousands annually to die a preventable death in order to avoid disruptions to life. That being true, let's stop the moralizing arguments, and focus instead on why coronavirus is worse than other illnesses, and why it's worth it to continue our efforts to disrupt it.
In other words, my argument is really about language and rhetoric, not the coronavirus itself.
For example, being against the treatment of the Uighurs in China would be an example of moralizing if we took your argument to the extreme. The government in China simply places lesser value on their lives and since we all attach different values to human lives it's hypocritical to criticize their treatment.
You're avoiding the actual argument at hand in favor of nitpicking the rhetoric. Basically, tone policing. And I don't think tone arguments solve anything over than diversion.
Anyway, your point stands, but there are people who think covid deaths are no higher than a bad flu, and your numbers seem to mislead in that direction.
> Can you explain why the estimates on this page are different from previously published and reported estimates for 2017-2018? (For example, total flu-related deaths during 2017-2018 was previously estimated to be 79,000, but the current estimate is 61,000)?
> The estimates on this page have been updated from an earlier report published in December 2018 based on more recently available information. There is a trade-off between timeliness and accuracy of the burden estimates. To provide timely burden estimates to the public, clinicians, and public health decision-makers, we use preliminary data that may lead to over- or under-estimates of the true burden. However, each season’s estimates will be finalized when data on testing practices and deaths for that season are available.
Initially lockdown was to "flatten the curve", stop the hospitals an in particular the ICU beds from getting overwhelmed. That worked, and while it got close to breaking point here in Spain we made it through.
I noticed as new data emerged from Sweden - they hadn't spiralled out of control as many, including myself, predicted. Flatten the curve seemed to be forgotten about, and it turned into a pointless competition of who has the least cases, least excess deaths - pointless because this is far from over.
Or maybe we are past the worst of it already - the Diamond Princess cruise ship showed only 20% of the passengers infected - so maybe covid only affects 20% of the population.
Someone here mentioned how Vietnam handled it, they reacted quickly and had steep fines (for their income) and achieved 0 deaths and now it's 80 days since last infection was reported.
There are other countries that handled it really well: Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland.
I wouldn't look at any state in the USA for evidence of whether lockdown works or not, because it pretty much wasn't done here.
Probably impossible to estimate how many people died because of this, and how many will have their lives shorter because they didn't get treatment earlier. Here at local cantonal hospital, this has been recognized as a big failure of general directions given to the population, and is a huge problem for old people.
Its far from the trivialization you make out of it about some kids missing some festivals and parties.
Unless you're claiming that no civilised society exists, that's not true at all. A civilisation built around minimising death as much as possible would look very differently to any that currently exists.
Resources are always a trade off. People working at those festivals and cinemas could have went in to medical care pre corona virus. People building festival stages and cinemas could have been building hospitals. If festivals and cinemas didn't exist then that would be less driving and less road deaths.
At some level festivals and cinemas existing is putting some peoples fun over others right to life, corona virus or no.
>It's not fun, but suggesting that your right to fun should trump others' right to life is, again, uncivilized, immoral and irresponsible.
I would like a argument. Any. Instead there's just a bunch of people treating corona virus as this exception where you're sociopath to consider any other facet of life when deciding how to respond to it.
One death a year vs permanent lockdown? We won't lock down. 99% of society dying vs washing your hands once a day? We'll make hand-washing mandatory. The deaths from Covid-19 and the responses to it are somewhere between those extremes.
The important point here is: it's not a matter of moral principles, it's a matter of where on those scales you put the deaths/counter measures. Pretending that it's a moral argument (as in "you're immoral if you accept any amount of unnecessary deaths for non-essential things like going to festivals or having pineapple delivered to your door") is simply not working unless you (demand to) ban plenty of things.
But this is just a tautology now, as the entire question is what constitutes "reasonable."
That's not the argument he was making. And as a society we have to accept some negative externalities and weigh up the benefits, otherwise things like (recreational) road-trips would be banned.
In the past, generations have willingly sacrificed their lives at war, ostensibly fighting for the common good, yet today we can't even stomach a year without pedicures and dining out? That's pretty sad and gross.
What are your thoughts on a state of permanent lockdown in order to eliminate the tens of thousands of worldwide deaths that occur every single year due to the common flu?
Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health.
Total lock-downs might not be necessary. From what I can tell, the working from home-thing pretty much stopped this year's flu epidemic; one of my customers talked about sick-leave being down by over two thirds since the pandemic hit. They've already changed their policies so that anyone with cold or flu symptoms are required to work from home from now on.
> Perhaps life to most of the world involves balancing several factors, one of which is risk to personal health.
No doubt about it. However, this pandemic has shown us that there are plenty of measures that can be taken without major disruptions.
Personally, I'm all for telling people with a sore throat and fever that they should stay the fk away from things like sports events, even if it's just a flu in that specific case. The only reason the flu does go around like it does is because we let it. We don't have to.
Do you have any data to support that? For many people their mental health has a great effect on their physical health, and in a country like Sweden where a lot of people have mental issues already (including stress, loneliness, various forms of depression etc.), yes you could make a case that making people even more isolated by sitting at home would increase their stress and loneliness which has an effect on the health.
All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy?
I have octogenarian parents who I love deeply and would prefer to see live forever. I also have a young son. I would grind up my parents and feed them to my child if that's what it took for him to thrive. And I would expect my child to do the same for his children.
Stop moralizing, this isn't "right vs wrong". It's basically picking which demographic bears the brunt of an extremely unfortunate but naturally occurring phenomenon. I'm not at all sure we picked the right one.
In a "More or less" episode the insurance industry debunked that "an extra month or two": it's more like 5 years on average in a first world country.
That's some significant grand-parenting time.
Also, "flattening the curve" was not only about trying to save those old people but to not overwhelm hospitals and cemetaries. The system cannot handle so many excess deaths in so little time.
Your argument sounds like we should have let the virus go rampant and in 6 months:
1. let health workers go grazy
2. wipe out all 75+ people from the planet
Maybe the grand-children could give kisses of death to grandparents and problem is solved?
The big difference this time around is that the rich West is confronted with some of their organizational and political failures.
Grinding up your parents if that's what it took for your son to thrive is a false choice, your son will thrive regardless of whether or not your grind up your parents because it isn't the end of the world to lose a year of schooling. Just work a bit harder the next year and you'll be fine.
It's not clear yet whether the schools here will be opened this fall. A lot of it depends on the outcome of discussions like these - and the "save lives at all costs" crowd is pushing strongly for "no". It really doesn't help to throw around terms like "survival of our species" - there is no plausible scenario where the survival of our species is threatened by Covid-19.
One study found the average loss of life per COVID-19 death is 11 years for men and 13 for women.
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75
It's potentially a lot more if you let the virus get out of control. The hospitalisation rate is difficult to pin down, but could be something like 4% for people in their 40s. That proportion starts to get closer to the overall death rate if your health system is overwhelmed.
Among patients dying of COVID-19, there appears to be a considerable burden in terms of years of life lost
I don't think you are deliberately misusing statistics here, but this common confusion massively overstates the risk of infection in the same way that the early focus on Case Fatality Rates did. To be meaningful, those Years Of Life Lost numbers need to be multiplied by the Infection Fatality Rate.
I can't find an IFR for 75+, but the CDC currently has 1.3% for age 65+. The average 65yo has 19.1 years of life remaining (2010 stats, also from the CDC).
1.3% * 19.1 years = ~0.25 years, or about 4 months.
This is probably a conservative estimate - older people have fewer years remaining.
Look, if covid-19 actually reduced the average lifespan of the population by a decade, I'd be in a panic too. Thankfully, it doesn't.
You said "All so that 75 year olds can have an extra month or two of average life expectancy", which gives the impression that the virus is only taking people a couple of months ahead of their natural death; this is not the case if you look at the average. People are dying with years of useful life left.
You might also like to do that calculation for the worst-case scenario of hospitals being overwhelmed, to see the much more serious situation we're trying to avoid.
Extra years. There's plenty of elderly with additional risk conditions who could manage and live with them for years w/o the extra strain of a poorly understood high-impact novel infectious agent.
But the idea that vulnerability is confined to the retired is wrong. Excess death stats are also up in the 45-65 range. And I'm personally acquainted with cases 45 & under people are already looking at severe lasting health effects and have been informed of COVID attributable deaths in that age range a degree or two out from my circle. This is unsurprising at a certain breadth of infection no matter the relative difference in risks for younger demographics. Very small numbers across very large populations = large absolute impacts. Let it burn through the population without suppression measures and it's not going to look prettier.
And that includes the economic effects. They're bad. But the idea that we could have chosen not to have them is false. Once contact takes on additional risks, some large portion of people stay away from contact underlying many economic activities whether there's civil direction or not, because all transactions are still cost/benefit. The only way to stop that would have been to totally suppress knowledge of the pandemic or have crushed the disease itself from the start. Distancing measures and other civil restrictions we're left with are basically a question of how coordinated activity is, not a difference in the order of the impacts. That kind of reduction happens when people are confident they're safe and they don't present a risk to those they care about.
Also, while everyone whose career has crossed the last crash or two knows it sucks, it isn't clear the impacts move beyond economic:
https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-economy-life-e...
And while we're considering quality of life issues -- are we really saying that a year of public education is worth the tradeoff of having a parent or grandparent relationship? I think it's interesting that some of the societies that are doing much better than the West seem to have a culture of respect for the contributions elders make to their families and societies in general. I wonder if there's a connection.
And as for whether people should be moralizing: these are moral issues, which usually makes it a good time to do so. Apparently you agree, given that your own comment does. Which might even be appropriate if your moral case were the stronger one.
Edit: Note that USA is doing much worse since so many are dying there even though you lock down.
All gatherings över 50 persons are forbiden and we are to told to not travel IF not needed.
We still uphold laws, so the government bor riksdag can force lockdown om People. But can close Stores and restaurants that doesn't follow rules.
And about Corona deaths, we are probably have more correct reports of deaths than many countries, like UK. Which probably are under reporting.
That based on all deaths reporter. The exccess deaths compared to previous five years are about the same as the reporter Covid-19 deaths. And the över deaths in Sweden are in pair with Denmark, higher then Norway but lower that Finland and Scotland (yes, part of UK).
And Finland has Hard lockdown, so Scotland and Denmark.
Even IF you compare Copenhagen area with Skåne area (South part of Sweden) with about same population, the death rate reporter of Covid-19 is higher in Copenhagen. There are areas in Sweden that have lower death rates then Finland, on pair with Finland.
So No, you are basically ignorant of the death rates of Sweden.
And yes, death rates of Covid-19 in Sweden are still lower than some bad influenza years, like in 2000. Even through the population in Sweden was smaller then, total number of deaths in flue was Word. And letting children go to school was a good Choice, as Corona isn't pushed by children, many are better going to school then forced to be at home. And they are not loosing important time in school with their friends and some normalities.
And the all deaths are now down to under normal years. Most thanks to the changed in behaviour has almost erased the flue in Sweden.
Comparing total deaths data, without different rules to define IF deaths are Covid-19 or not, shows that the lockdown in UK, Denmark and Finland did not do much difference. Not compared to Sweden, with moderate and mostly informed population about how to defeat the spread of the Corona virus.
But, that isn't interesting to wrote about, I guess. As it could show that the lockdown is the only solution, that it also cost life and sufferings.
Links on demands.
I sure think not. So the comparisons are a bit moot.
trading 60 years of 30 year olds for 1 year of an 82 year old is a trade that probably no 82 year old would want.
It is more about catering to the sort of voter that is easily scared, exposed for the first time to the fact that life is indeed fragile and limited, a voter that looks at someone to protect them.
Old people are the pawns and "protecting" them is the spectacle of demonstrating competence in governing.
I really don't follow your argument. Do you believe young voters are totally indifferent to the idea of seeing their parents and grandparents die?
But like many diseases, the coronavirus is far more sensitive--the IFR for a 75-year-old is >100x that of a 25-year-old[1]. That's the reason why health care spending is near-universally assessed by cost per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) saved. To do otherwise would yield absurd results, paying the same to restore a dying child to perfect health as to extend a centenarian's life by another month of agony. Around the usual ~$100k per QALY saved and counting both the deaths and loss of quality in severe but non-fatal cases, I believe that masks, social distancing, remote working where possible, and closure of the highest-risk businesses (theaters, nightclubs, etc.) until a vaccine is available are likely cost-effective, but facility closures beyond that are not (except to any extent required to stop the medical system from getting overrun).
1. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
My mother _actually_ passed from cancer in May. I sure wish I could've spent more time with her before that happened despite any risks.
A grandparent might accept a 20% chance of dying, if it means regularly taking their grandchild to the park in the last few good years of life they have left. Most of the people at great risk of CORVID only have a few good years left.
Or, look at things like obesity or smoking or drinking (all of which might be getting worse - will people develop bad habits in quarantine?). People are willing to take risks (and overburden the health system) over lots of things, and we accept that the government shouldn't make it illegal.
Actually, why don't we just create quarantine safe old people's homes, and force them all into it? Then we can protect old people in quarantine, and let young people risk CORVID to build up herd immunity, then plunge the country into a brief elimination lockdown. It would be kinda inhumane to the old people we would be locking up (though people seem willing to take extreme measures anyway) but at least it would be quick.
I would most certainly trade the past six months for a normal life even if it meant that I would die six months sooner.
wouldn't you?
six months of isolation for a 1/100,000 chance of dying 50 years sooner,
turns out I take that chance of dying each time I climb a mountain, and I get back less value than what is on offer in your trade
would I trade getting out of six months of quarantine if the price was the chance of 1/100,000 of dying. Of course I would.
I contrasted that to the fact that I frequently take on much higher risks of dying (mountaineering) for a lot less payoff (it is fun).
(the 1/100,000 is an estimate based on existing data for my age group)
This is what's really frustrating about this whole "trade-off" argument: it's fine to make trade-offs for yourself, but you do not have the right to implicitly force your choice on others. If you sit within six feet of me not wearing a mask, my risk of falling off a mountain does not increase by any measurable amount. If you have Covid-19 and don't know it yet, the same cannot be said.
also where and in what way did the mask pop into this at all?
we are talking about what a person would trade aka risk vs reward
So this is not just about what is good for you, but instead what is good for the community.
For example, having you out of quarantine early might be good for you, but it will definitely not be good for many others.
We live in a society, and Covid19 is not just a question of personal choices.
Not to mention, people who have defied quarantine orders and have spread this to their loved ones can become depressed and suicidal, so quality of life for many who would spread this disease will become abysmal.
Human wellbeing is not fungible. It is not acceptable to let a significant portion of people suffer to prevent a moderate inconvenience to a larger group of people.
There too much unknown to dismiss what this disease can do.
Everyone keeps forgetting this is a NOVEL virus, between rare severe impacts to children, there have been neurological any circulatory issues so saying it only matters to the people who die I think is ludicrously naive.
https://theconversation.com/is-the-covid-19-pandemic-cure-re...
http://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publi...
Actually the current death rate are lower for last month then the mean value of previous 5 years same month. But I guess that doesn't fit the common view of how it should be in Sweden. Nor that the total death rate are in pair with Denmark and lower then Finland, with much harder lockdown.
Given how much higher they are over other nations—even taking into account excess deaths—I would say they have failed that metric.
The Swedes are betting that nobody in the world will be spared from COVID and therefore the delta in deaths is temporary. They are front-loading it while attempting to keep the economic impacts as low as possible. They anticipate the rest of the world will be contending with shutdowns, re-openings, shutdowns, re-openings, and when all is said and done, the death rate per capita will be the same the world over.
So far, they the Swedes have bet one way, much of the rest of the world has bet the other way. Time will tell, but it is much too soon to make that judgment today.
It's also a bet that medical treatments won't improve and a vaccine won't be developed.
It seems speculatively like this is due to age-linked expression of ACE2.
Partly because they are export dependant and nobody's buying & partly because enough swedes are staying home (not going to pubs etc.) for the economy to tank but not enough to avoid 10 times as many deaths as their neighbours.
So, yes, time will tell. But for now they are getting the worst of both:
Many dead and no economic benefit.
Do you think Corona is going anywhere?
If you have a look at the current infection rate in a lot of European (and others) countries, even reaching 50% of the population infected would take decades.
So yes, I believe that delaying is not the only possibility.
It's currently mandatory masks in public, keeping distances and washing hands, and no big crowds.
Life feels pretty normal over here.
I'm talking from the perspective of a European country with <100 cases/day.
A lot of places are starting to reinstitute lockdowns.
This is not how society works. We could drastically curtail the number of deaths by outlawing cars, alcohol, and social interaction indefinitely, regardless of covid, but we don't. Refusing to understand that tradeoffs are involved is not helpful.
vs.
> what an acceptable death rate might be
Maybe you just misspoke?
I will try to clarify this once more:
from an high level/abstract point of view, all deaths (I am now specifically referring to the coronavirus, but this works for deaths in general) should be avoided. This is obviously not possible in practice, hence some deaths have to be accepted. What can be considered acceptable is relative, but it helps to look at the countries that have managed to keep their deaths low and take their numbers as a yardstick for other societies.
- Nobody knows if there was some excess mortality here, because there's no monitoring.
- There were thousands of "suspected cases" in the official reports, which remained suspected cases and never progressed to a confirmed case or a confirmed non-case (as they would if they were tested) until they stopped reporting numbers.
- People with confirmed close contact with known cases were told to isolate and were only tested if they showed symptoms (this is also normal practice in many/most Western countries).
- The supposed "large" number of tests carried out in Vietnam represents only 0.2% of the population.
- A significant portion of those tests are of people who had to be tested anyway, rather than community testing (e.g. overseas Vietnamese arriving home; the large number of charter flights that were allowed as exceptions from Korea and other countries, for employees of large firms with factories in Vietnam - e.g. LG - who did not stop during the lockdown).
- The lockdown was largely not enforced, and while streets were much quieter than usual, there were many people outside throughout. Smaller bars and restaurants only closed for a few weeks, and of course nobody wore a mask inside them. Many informal businesses (e.g. street food) never closed.
I think Vietnam's "success" is largely down to some environmental factor (average temperature/humidity, sunlight exposure, the general "outdoor" way most people socialise) keeping the number of infections or the severity of those infections down, and I think the chances that COVID caused exactly zero deaths are almost zero.
"As in wartime, almost every sector, including aviation, healthcare and food production, has been mobilised and dedicated to containing the pandemic."
They fought the virus, not each other. They won.
- folks that are high-risk and quarantined are monitored (guards posted outside residence)
- if you fail to self isolate, you go to a gov’t camp
- all int’l flight have been stopped; only repatriation flights are happening
- for those foreigners who made it in before the flights stopped, they all went to gov't facilities
- if someone tests positive, they will lock down all the people around them for 24hr, disinfect common areas and test
> if you fail to self isolate, you go to a gov’t camp
There are a few instances of this, which of course the govt made sure were widely reported. It's very unlikely in general that they would know, though.
> all int’l flight have been stopped; only repatriation flights are happening
This is completely false, as you can verify on any public flight tracker website. The number of flights is greatly reduced, but they never stopped. Also, extra charter flights were put on for (at least) Samsung and LG employees to come from Korea, regularly, even in the middle of the lockdown. The "all international flights stopped" line was repeated many times in the local media, and most people here believe it, despite it being untrue.
> for those foreigners who made it in before the flights stopped, they all went to gov't facilities
Not true at all, I know many people who did not have to.
> if someone tests positive, they will lock down all the people around them for 24hr, disinfect common areas and test
They notify the people around them and tell them to self-isolate. They spray some bleach around. They do not test unless symptoms are shown.
Maybe there is a bit of variation across Vietnam? I’m just sharing what my in-laws observed where they live.
When I say “all international flights” stopped, I mean, you can’t just hoop on the next flight to Vietnam. Yes, there are still repatriation flights happening and flight for certain purposes, but “normal” air travel has stopped, no?
So regardless, would you agree that Vietnam is going far beyond a lot of countries in trying to control the spread?
Perhaps. My experience was with HCMC and Hanoi.
> When I say “all international flights” stopped, I mean, you can’t just hop on the next flight to Vietnam. Yes, there are still repatriation flights happening and flight for certain purposes, but “normal” air travel has stopped, no?
Actually, there were normal, scheduled flights throughout the lockdown. There are right now, there were last week, and there were every week before that. You can trivially confirm this on a flight-tracking website (one of the ones that goes on the ADS-B data, so you see actual aircraft tracks, rather than just a flight schedule website which may show you flights that didn't actually operate). Visa waiver, visa-on-arrival, e-visa and visa issuance for tourists completely stopped, so in practice a tourist can't board a flight to Vietnam, but a small number of flights have continued running throughout, indicating sufficient demand from people who are able to fly here (Vietnamese citizens, people with residence permits, people who were able to get issued non-tourist visas in their home country, ...)
> So regardless, would you agree that Vietnam is going far beyond a lot of countries in trying to control the spread?
I'd say they're pretty much on par with any of the places that aren't a massive failure. But I also think the question of which country did it better or worse is not very interesting, and mostly a pointless political distraction from useful questions like which control measures have a meaningful effect and which don't.
I was there in February, for around a month.
As a foreigner, I was regularly receiving SMS updates about covid infections. There was a website which detailed exactly when and where people were testing positive. Hotels and guest houses, if allowed to remain open, were being closed for deep-cleaning.
Buses and trains were stopped and my temperature checked, towns and islands were quarantined where someone tested positive, contact tracing appeared to be in full force and foreigners were requested to register their movements and check in daily(iirc) to a web portal.
Again, this was in mid-February.
Luck and climate seem to be factors, but Vietnam acted when they had a low caseload and handled outbreaks sufficiently well to keep R below 1. It wouldn't be all that surprising to me if there really were no covid deaths there.
I didn't post to score points against you or at all discredit your personal experience.
> I have to disagree with the idea that Vietnam didn't take it particularly seriously
I didn't present that idea, so I'm not sure how you can disagree with it.
Have a nice evening.
You could apply this to things like airport security and check how the sum of all the time passenger spend in line compares to the lives saved. My guess is especially in the airport example the lines have taken more human life than terrorists.
Similarly if I died of covid now, it isn't just the 40ish years of life ahead I lose, but the impact on my wife, children and wider family. I've seen friends lose 72 yo grandfathers - who could have provided years ahead of fun and good memories with their grandkids.
I find it impossible to have a reasonable discussion on the subject, even people in healthcare (I worked in a famous Dutch hospital). People are dug in, evidence-based medicine is a tool to improve statistics first, patient care second, and nobody knows what anything actually costs, despite the national DBC-accounting system which was invented for insurers. Hint: not even the Dutch statistics bureau can tell you what the total cost of Dutch healthcare is. I've heard this is very politicized issue, all behind the scenes of course.
South Korea would have had to neglect to report 99% of COVID-19 deaths.
At first, I thought it was the govt covering something up, but after so many months, along with closely monitoring things, I trust their numbers.
It is literally a source of national pride for them to have done so well, it would be very hard for them to hide things.
Quarantine, masks, isolation, cleaning, testing, contact tracing. ALL WORKED.
There's no plausible argument from counterfactuals here.
But let's pretend anyway - do you not think that even if a more virulent strain of Covid did arrive, country with proven measures in place has a better chance of dealing with the problem than a country whose current response is a chaotic shambles?
The measure of success is all past and current. If Vietnam loses control over covid, then we can definitely blame them for that. Why? Because they effectively controlled it in the first place.
If they continue their direction, they will be one of the only countries on the planet, not totally infected. Pretty amazing really. If they start experimenting and doing things differently, at least they've setup the protocols for managing things correctly.
Here in the US, we go through these bullshit 'phases' where we go from phase 2 to phase 3 and then back to phase 2. Well, anyone with half a brain could have figured out that wasn't going to work. At least Vietnam is taking this seriously.
They shut their borders entirely... we (the US), can't even do that.
Faking what? Demanding what?
When I arrived at the end of January (during the Chinese New Year) there were thousands of Chinese tourists mobbing the convenience stores buying up all the masks they could find. At the time I wasn't really aware of what was happening, but clearly they were a step ahead of the game, likely based on past history with SARS and news coming from friends and family back home.
It's pretty amazing how low the case count has been in Vietnam; some locals say, "don't believe the government", but you'd expect any outbreaks/deaths related to COVID-19 to have gotten out by now if the government were in fact trying to hide something.
https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
A good example is the child mortality statistics - the US counts babies born alive, but then die, but other countries just count them as stillbirths if the death happens with X period of time.
Not saying Taiwan is hiding tens of thousands of deaths, but you have to assume some wiggle room in the numbers.
On the other side of the world it was complete lack of leadership and even dismantling of the preparation efforts that were taken earlier.
Some may be due to the halt of the NHS for other stuff.
* https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
* https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country
Here is how they explain what the z-score is:
Very true. At the other end of the spectrum, consider North Korea, which is apparently reporting ZERO Covid-19 deaths and also ZERO Covid-19 cases, so its official infection and mortality rates are 0% and 0%.[a] If we were to judge only by those official figures, it would appear the country has done a truly incredible job at combating Covid-19.
[a] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-northk...
If you order an island evacuated because of an impending natural disaster and some people die in the evacuation they died from the evacuation, not the disaster. Just because your actions are lowering the overall body count doesn't mean the deaths are the fault of whatever disaster the people died avoiding.
The differences are quite a lot and worthy of consideration.
Would be cool to tally this up for all countries, to see who's lying about their COVID numbers.
Source of data: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
India is a way younger country than Sweden. This means, with the exact same deathrate-by-age India would see far fewer deaths-per-capita with all else being constant.
“The data also shows that in Sweden, which has adopted a different approach with no lockdown in place, excess deaths peaked at 46%.”
It is not the highest in Europe but it is very noticeable. In contrast, the surrounding countries of Finland, Norway and Denmark show almost nothing.
As for which figures to take, we don't know, they are all wrong. Each country has a different way of counting depending on what they think is important.
For example hospital deaths are very consistent. Hospitals generally have good reporting, testing, etc... good to see daily evolution, but it is an underestimate. Recorded deaths from nursing homes and at home are less reliable. Sometimes, there is no testing, so we are not 100% sure it is COVID, there may also be delays. The picture is now more complete but you lose a bit of consistency. Excess mortality reporting can also have long delays, and it doesn't care about COVID at all, so things like behavior change under lockdown can have an effect, the advantage is that it is the least likely indicator to miss anything.
And if you look at all the numbers, we can split Europe into the bad (Italy, UK, France, Spain, ...) and the good (Norway, Finland, Denmark, ...). And by all metrics, Sweden is in the "bad" camp.
> For Sweden the excess deaths almost exactly matches the number of Covid deaths, give or take 10%.
> The statistics are likely completely wrong because different countries use different definitions of "Covid deaths" and different reporting procedures.
And these country's are much in a lockdown still. Norway for example - you're not allowed to travel far north from Oslo. In comparison to many other countries, Sweden's tactic could go on for years while many others would and already have started to give up on theirs.
Norway is actually almost back to normal,except you can't have gatherings of over 200 people. It has been this way for almost a month now, and there have not been any increase in confirmed covid cases yet, which is surprising.
News to me and I've been here in Norway all through the COVID time. There was a period when we were not allowed to spend the night in a holiday home unless it was in the same kommune as one's usual residence but as far as I remember there was never any country wide ban on internal travel. There were a few kommunes who set up border controls that were most likely illegal but that's about it.
And resident status is not relevant here either. As long as you went in to quarantine on entry to the country (was 14 days, now 10), whether resident or not, you are free to travel where you like.
If you know that anything I have said here is incorrect I would appreciate it if you could provide addresses of web pages (Folkehelseinstituttet, osv.) that would set me right.
Because during the worse time, that was the kind of environment being reported around Stockholm. There were not enough people and a universal lack of safety equipment. Many workers also had to rely on the mass transportation system in order to get between homes. Elderly care, both private and state owned, often operate from a single cental point and fan out.
An immediate, thorough response makes all the difference.
Your "at the same time" statement is off by a few days and off by a few days makes a huge difference in outbreak severity. That's why you need to keep in mind that small numbers of infected people and seemingly short time intervals change the result radically.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with airports. South Korea has had less incoming travel restrictions than the US.
Sorry, that's wrong. The fact that there is uncertainty in data (which there always is) doesn't mean we can't make legitimate inferences from the data we have. Sweden is clearly, via many metrics (INCLUDING excess deaths), experiencing very elevated mortality rates due to covid. That's just obvious.
No, the science isn't done yet (and won't be for years, probably) to nail down exactly how much they're seeing. But we can ballpark it pretty well, and it's bad.
If there are excess deaths now and this disease disproportionately impacts the elderly, the assumption likely is that it's mostly picking people off early and that 1+ years from now we should observe a deaths deficit relative to the baseline years of 2018-2019. From there we should be able to start calculating the cumulative years of life lost.
Sounds a lot like comparing sprint velocities between engineering groups.
Honest question. I don't know the answer. I assume it's left up the physician's judgement?
If you have tested positive within 30 days before dying, that is counted as a COVID-19 death.
Yes, maybe that stage 4 lung cancer patient would die anyway, but then there are other deaths that are covid-19 but aren't counted. In fact no one would count is as covid cause in such obvious scenario.
BTW: also it's exactly the opposite to what you're trying to imply[1].
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200701125506.h...
This has upset a lot of physicians and pathologists, exactly because their own judgement is being overridden and they know it's broken the statistics completely. In the UK they are calling for a systematic review of all deaths attributed to COVID:
https://www.hsj.co.uk/coronavirus/systematic-reviews-to-disc...
The COVID death counts are hopelessly over-counted. This is why there's a cottage industry of people pointing out things like "COVID deaths" which mysteriously also suffered from being murdered, or drug overdoses, or undiagnosed leukaemia.
Then you get into the problem of care homes being authorised to report COVID deaths without any testing or formally trained opinion at all. In France, as soon as there is a "suspected case" in a nursing home (e.g. due to coughing), all deaths are considered "suspected Covid19 deaths", and as soon as there is a "confirmed case" in a nursing home (even if symptomless), all deaths are considered "confirmed Covid19 deaths":
https://covidinfos.net/covid19/deces-dus-au-covid-19-le-nomb...
Over-counting of COVID is absolutely rampant. The top voted post on this thread is claiming that all excess deaths must be caused by COVID, as if shutting down hospitals have no impact. In reality:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/25/nhs-treatment-de...
"More children died after failing to get timely medical treatment during lockdown than lost their lives because of coronavirus, new research by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) suggests."
Of course the numbers for children are small. For older people it's more extreme. In the UK emergency ward admissions halved, including for cardiac arrests. There's now a backlog of 2.4 million cancer patients awaiting diagnosis or treatment. The excess deaths from lockdowns will be with us for a long time.
For something as polarized as COVID? Good luck.
And why did we need social distancing and lockdowns? was it just to have people blow their heads off?
there's obviously some margin of error, but it's pretty safe to treat the unattributed excess deaths as being caused by covid-19
In Poland we had quite serious restrictions introduced very early on and we don’t see any excess deaths in the stats - march and april were actually below average in terms of mortality. Similarly in other countries with similar scenarios.
Sweden is currently seeing 20 to 25% more deaths in year that they would in a standard year. Though their covid deaths have slowed so that will likely be around 10 percent by the end of the year if they don't see further waves.
Also, lockdown saved people’s lives in other way - less accidents etc.
As I say, I believe lockdown, esp in the way that NZ/Australia/Vietnam/South Korea did - is the way forward - the more proof we have for that, the better.
I feel UK started too late, didn't put tracking in place, and gave very confused messaging. As an island nation, we should have had a head start in protecting our people but it feels like the economy was put first.
https://news.google.com/search?q=australia%20tower%20block&h...
It's completely insane, unbelievably nasty, truly evil. The virus is not dangerous. I'll repeat: the virus is not dangerous. Excess deaths in the UK, relatively badly hit by a series of bad decisions, matches the famous plague of 1999/2000. You probably don't remember that one, because nothing happened.
NZ meanwhile is now terrified of re-opening their borders in the belief that this NOT DANGEROUS virus can be kept out forever. They have no plan for how to do this without going full-on North Korea. It's also incredibly self destructive. The Virus Is Not Dangerous.
For someone like her to be breathless - is certainly a sign that something serious can happen to those that catch covid. This, while not happening to everyone is getting more attention now: Coronavirus: Thousands say debilitating symptoms last 'for weeks' - BBC News https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53269391
The common theme on the Slack group she is on, is that these are younger and healthy people, and that their covid was not particularly severe.
She also struggles to concentrate for any length of time, even reading a kids book to the children can be too much for her. There is no way she could work right now, and can't even do much more than supervise the kids for short periods of time - I am very lucky to have a flexible employer.
This appears similar to post viral syndrome or ME - and is happening at far higher levels than seen with our more common viruses like the Cold or Flu - though was also seen in people who caught SARs - it was not questioned that a percentage of those who had SARs were ill n months later, I'm sure in time it won't be for covid too. Just in tne mean time it means people believe the only risk is of death and that it will only affect the old and infirm.
Does COVID-19 cause breathlessness in a tiny percentage of people who caught it? Possibly, it's a respiratory virus after all. Does it cause loss of concentration? Hmm, maybe, who knows. The body works in mysterious ways. But if it can cause that then more or less any symptom at all is fair game.
Seen another way, do people with wifi sensitivity truly feel headaches when wifi is turned on? They certainly believe they do, their suffering seems to be real, yet we know their self-diagnosis cannot possibly be correct ... at least not without significantly rewriting the laws of physics and biology as we know them.
It may be that your wife should lose the Slack group and see a doctor. The risk is that the collection of symptoms she's reporting (which have no known link with respiratory diseases) actually have another cause and COVID is a distraction. It could be an undiagnosed case of something else that needs attention. We know that COVID is being spuriously linked in the media to all kinds of random conditions and symptoms, and especially when in a community of other sufferers, it's possible for incorrect inferences to be made.
Bear in mind you don't know how many people died OF covid, only those who died WITH it at the time of death, which is a totally different thing. Cases where there are no other obvious causes of death (e.g. amongst the young) are vanishingly rare.
There is some (epidemiologist) Spanish guy (I am writing from Spain) telling the Swedes that they were “overconfident”.
I look at the nunbers and think: this guy is at the very least dishonest.
Edit: A flattened curve may still have the same surface below it. Did Sweden keep it below critical IC capacity (are they keeping it there)? I guess that is an important thing to know.
The main piece of evidence is that "Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to contract by 4.5 percent this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent." Economic forecasts are ridiculously unreliable. In the US, economists forecast (on average) that 8 million jobs would be lost in May. Instead there was a 2.5 million gain in jobs. Not a single economist surveyed by Bloomberg though there would be any gain at all (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-06/may-jo...). The hard data we have on GDP so far: Sweden's GDP grew by 0.1% in Q1 2020 (0.4% annualized), Germany and the UK's GDP fell.
The other evidence is that unemployment has risen in Sweden and spending in Denmark has only fallen 4 percentage points more than Sweden. But Denmark has propped up employment by "covering 75 to 90 percent of all worker salaries over the next three months, provided that companies refrain from layoffs."(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/business/nordic-way-econo...). And from the numbers in the article, Denmark's unemployment rate has still risen proportionally more. Granted, Sweden has very generous unemployment benefits, but I'm not aware of a similar layoff prevention program.
In this case they want to paint the alternative path as wrongheaded and foolhardy. I’m glad someone tried something different in light of a lack of hard evidence. Time will tell if one or the other was better, but at least we’ll have baselines to compare against.
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Just because a few countries in Europe and the early big ones in China/SK have slowed down they act like it's over. Yet there's still plenty of very major outbreaks in South America, Middle East, India, Russia, south east Asia, some African. They all have upward hockey stick growth still. Not to mention the delayed US south/west wave.
It's far too early to pick winners/losers of COVID in the midst of the global peak, assuming this is actually near the peak. Let alone measuring the economic consequences.
It also doesn't delve very deeply into why Sweden's fatality rate is higher than average. It seems to imply that it's all because Sweden didn't implement forced lockdowns. But I am living in an area that also didn't implement forced lockdowns, and we have experienced virtually no deaths from covid in my city thus far. What measures specifically could Sweden have taken to save lives? And is there anything that they did well?
I have found a lot of the coverage on covid to be fairly sensationalist (ranging from "it's all a big hoax" to "the world as we know it has ended"). Does anyone have any suggestions for more rational, honest, and detailed coverage of covid?
It is taken of the area which has one of the lowest covid-19 death rates. Compared to its nearby city in Denmark it even has a significant lower rate of deaths.
It is taken over the wrong time period. Both nationally and locally in that area, the death rate is going down. The image is from a few weeks ago during the warm weather when the rate was almost the lowest point of the whole measure period of the pandemic. The trend in that region is still downwards.
It is the wrong demographic when talking about death counts. In Sweden the wast majority that died occurred in elderly care homes in low social economical areas, not young people on the beach located near expensive and hip restaurants in the second highest social economic area.
But it makes for a great narrative tool, which illustrates the editorial values of NYT.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/07/eu-cuts-economic-forecasts-f...
I also remember that the government made it easier for people to join the A-Kassa, the state unemployment insurance. Normally you have to have been paying the insurance fee for half a year or something before you're eligible for payout but I believe that requirement was scrapped.
Also, what will count is not the first few months but the entire lifetime of this pandemic. I'll be interested to see where countries are a year or two from now.
This isn't to say I support the Swedish government's strategy - I don't feel like I know enough to say what the best strategy is, although I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA and UK.
55k+ deaths, 296k+ cases, staggering numbers. Out of a 1.3M nursing home population (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm), which makes you wonder if the recent decrease in deaths is driven by the fact that the majority of the susceptible nursing home population has already been affected.
The USA does not have "no strategy", it just depends from State to State[1]. Every state has had some form of lockdown and school closure.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...
It's also, incidentally, how the EU works. There are open borders between member states — and while some member states "closed" their borders, this has been largely unenforceable in land crossings because there are no border patrol agents between every single land crossing between EU member states. Border enforcements have only been enforced at airports.
In the US, nationwide air travel came to a near complete stand-still during the outset of the pandemic, so inter-state travel was already at the same levels you had in the EU.
The US's strategy has been the same as the EU's, and it has been to let the member States define the strategy.
As of right now, 36 out of 50 US states have a lower per capita death rate[1] than France, Sweden, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland[2]. 15 States have a lower per capita death rate than Germany and Denmark, who have seen the best COVID outcomes in the EU.
The US, to date, has administered more tests per capita than Belgium, Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Sweden (to name a handful). This is not because the US has a nationwide testing regime, rather it's because testing systems have been administered at the State level, with varying strategies (some focusing on nursing homes, some focusing on drive-thru testing etc).
It's one thing to leave pandemic response to member countries like the EU does. Each country knows it's responsible for its own response. Money is budgeted and spent specifically for this purpose.
That's not the system in the US - or hasn't been. The Federal government maintains what, until recently, was the world's premier infectious disease-fighting organization - the CDC. The implication was that pandemic response occurs through this organization. In the past, this is exactly what happened.
You may recall the one state (Washington) earlier this year whose brave scientists decided to test for COVID on their own. They were told in no uncertain terms from the feds to stand down or else.
So the idea that this pandemic response is up to the states doesn't hold water. Had the states known that they'd be left twisting in the wind, they could have taken steps beforehand.
That's one likely outcome of this event (assuming it has a clean endpoint): states realizing they really are on their own - and acting like it.
While you're right that the Federal government has the CDC, every single US States has its own infectious disease/health agency[1]. Furthermore, the EU also has its own centralized disease agency[2]. Structurally, both the US and EU are very similar in this regard. The only key difference is that (to your point) the EU States may override the ECDC, whereas US States may not — certainly a worthwhile policy change for the US.
> So the idea that this pandemic response is up to the states doesn't hold water. Had the states known that they'd be left twisting in the wind, they could have taken steps beforehand.
But this is factually incorrect, States did take steps beforehand. By March 23, every single State declared a state of emergency, and 48/50 States closed their schools. By as early as March 9th, the States were doing the VAST majority of COVID testing[3]. As of right now, the US has administered more tests per capita than Belgium, Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Sweden (to name a handful). This is not because the US has a nationwide testing regime, rather it is because testing systems have been administered at the State level[4].
[1] https://www.ehdp.com/links/us-shas.htm
[2] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en
[3] https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1238574921346732032/photo...
It's only a matter of time until EU's agencies impose supremacy on its Member States. The EU supreme court is already starting to penalize member States for violating policies[1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecb-policy-germany-ecj-id...
The mess that's going on with ECB is an IMHO quite special situation (which also is an odd example for "already starting to penalize for violating policies". There is no "starting to", obviously EU law has enforcement tools - although the court itself can't use them)
Those appear to be general public heath agencies with names like: "Department of Health Services"; "Medicaid"; and "Department of Health and Environment". I don't see one mention of the word "infectious" to indicate specialty.
None appear to be a unit with a mandate along the lines of "Detecting and responding to new and emerging health threats"
https://www.cdc.gov/about/organization/mission.htm
or "Leading research to understand, treat, and prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases"
> Furthermore, the EU also has its own centralized disease agency[2]
"ECDC has approximately 300 staff and commands an annual budget of over €50 million."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Centre_for_Disease_Pr...
Compare with:
"CDC's budget for fiscal year 2018 is $11.9 billion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an...
Similar population, very different numbers.
> By March 23, every single State declared a state of emergency, and 48/50 States closed their schools.
I was alluding to steps that might have been taken many years ago. Like, for example, establishing rapid response teams. Like, for example, giving states carte blanche to do their own testing when needed and not be forced to wait around for the CDC to do something. Certainly not reprimanded for taking the initiative.
Lmao what, that’s your argument? That’s just what the states call it. Take, for example, the Minnesota Department of Health. Among other things, its main charter is “disease control and prevention”[1]. This is true across the board. Every single US State has such an agency, whose staff are currently working full time on COVID. “I don’t see one word of the word infections”. Come on, really? THAT’S the best you got?
> "ECDC has approximately 300 staff and commands an annual budget of over €50 million."
What’s your point? The EU has funded their centralized agency less than the US, so? That doesn’t change the fact that the US has a federalized structure similar to the EU, where the States have a similar level of autonomy as their counterparts in the EU. The US State health agencies fall under the purviews of the State governments, which are wholly independent from the Federal government.
> "CDC's budget for fiscal year 2018 is $11.9 billion.”
Take this and also compare the budgets to the state government health agencies. The New York CITY Department of Health, whose responsibility includes infectious disease prevention has a budget of $1.6 billion, with 6,000 employees[2]. That’s just for the CITY of New York!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Department_of_Health
"Border enforcements have only been enforced at airports." is absolutely not true. For example, I recall the international issue of making transit arrangements through Poland when back in March many people were stranded as the Poland-German border was suddenly closed; if I recall correctly, the agreed solution to repatriate these people was a police-escorted car column that was allowed to transit through Poland without these people being allowed "proper entry", but before that they were stuck for days in their cars as they could not get through the border.
This is a key difference between EU and USA - the Schengen agreement allows member states to temporarily "opt out" of the free travel, reinstate border controls and impose travel restrictions (up to a full closure of borders) for various purposes, and many EU countries did just that due to Covid; while in USA, as far as I understand, the constitution greatly limits the right of states to prohibit interstate travel.
The US States have been imposing varying levels of requirements on inter-state travel from other states. New York requires anyone entering from a set of states to quarantine for 14 days[1]. Maine requires visitors from a list of States to have been tested (I'm traveling to Maine and will be getting tested ahead of my trip)[2]. These are just a couple handy examples, but it's true across the board.
And finally this is all moot because, per my original post, the results really speak for themselves: the majority of US States have lower per capita death rates than the major EU member states, and a small handful have lower per capita death rate than the best EU member states (Germany, Denmark).
[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-in...
[2] https://www.maine.gov/governor/mills/news/improving-public-h...
Does it actually enforce this, or is it just an advisory? Has anyone been fined or arrested for breaking quarantine? Are they conducting papers-and-purpose-of-stay-please inspections at the interestates, prior to entering the state?
The only state that I know of that actually enforced quarantine is Hawaii, and even there, the beaches have magically filled with tourists over the past week... I'm sure all of them sat inside their hotel rooms for the entire two-week quarantine period...
[1] https://www.newsday.com/news/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-...
You repeat that a couple of times in your posts, I am curious where do you get that from? Germany and Denmark are not "the best", they are both above the median in the EU.
Even among the EU States with the fewest deaths / M — that is Hungary, Finland, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Croatia, Latvia, etc — you have comparable US States in Maine, Utah, Idaho, West Virginia, Oregon, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Hawaii.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/local-practical-apolitical-insi...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/22/8808032...
Which was one of most nonsensical measure and it is real shame that EC did not prevented that. It caused real problems for people living near borders and working in neighboring state, and for cargo transit.
Covid-19 prevalence was not homogenous inside each country and inter-country neighboring areas/districts were often more similar than far-away intra-country areas. Therefore, any movement restriction would make more sense on more fine-grained level, but doing it on country level is just political tool to mobilize nationalistic support.
Yes, but police with guns are pretty effective at overriding constitutional protections in an emergency situation.
It is mostly advisory but at least people I know are following required test and/or quarantine practices in going to Maine for example.
The Supreme Court has directly addressed this in the case of disease epidemics and found that, in the absence of specific Congressional action preempting such regulations, states are free under the Constitution to respond to epidemic disease (and several other kinds of crisis) by enacting and enforcing travel restrictions, even though they impact interstate commerce.
While no state has adopted border closures for containing COVID-19, several have adopted quarantine policies affecting interstate travel and adopted border checkpoints as part of the enforcement mechanism.
That's wrong. Most land borders, also within the Schengen area were closed and only a small amount of people, i.e. citizens, workers were permitted to cross.
Things are slowly opening now within the EU. But that you could just waltz over any old land border is flat out wrong.
Different strategies apply for different states, because they have different elderly populations, different density characteristics, and different health system capacities.
Further, we still don’t know which approaches are the best, since we’re still learning about the disease. The fact that there are 50 separate approaches being tested affords us a wealth of data to operate on to shift strategies. As you said, fighting a pandemic is in everyone’s best interests, and states can and will change their strategies to minimize suffering.
An example: Governor Cuomo employed a fairly disastrous nursing home policy, which is largely what caused New York’s staggering death rate (at this moment, the highest in the Union). To be fair to him, he didn’t know that the virus would have this effect, and upon seeing the results from other states (FL, TX) which specifically protected nursing homes, course-corrected his own State’s strategy. This is a win for everyone, in the long run.
> In Florida, all nursing home workers were required to be screened for COVID-19 symptoms before entering a facility. On March 15, before most states had locked down, DeSantis signed an executive order that banned nursing home visitations from friends and family, and also banned hospitals from discharging SARS-CoV-2-infected patients into long-term care facilities.
> Instead, states like New York, New Jersey, and Michigan actually ordered nursing homes to accept patients with active COVID-19 infections who were being discharged from hospitals.
> The most charitable interpretation of these orders is that they were designed to ensure that states would not overcrowd their ICUs. But well after hospitalizations peaked, governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo were doubling down on their mandates.
> As recently as April 23, Cuomo declared that nursing homes “don’t have a right to object” to accepting elderly patients with active COVID infections. “That is the rule and that is the regulation and they have to comply with that.” Only on May 10—after the deaths of nearly 3,000 New York residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities—did Cuomo stand down and partially rescind his order.
Cuomo’s doubling down: https://nypost.com/2020/04/23/nursing-homes-cant-reject-coro...
Thankfully he has since walked back all of this, and New York is in much better shape.
Neighboring states and counties should be coordinating schedules, travel restrictions, and stay-at-home requirements. Here in the Bay Area alone San Mateo, Santa Clara and San Francisco counties had conflicting requirements for how far away from home you could be and for what reasons.
Take New York, for example. Its high death rate can be largely attributed to Governor Cuomo's disastrous decision to force nursing homes to accept COVID patients from hospitals. He has since walked back that strategy, and New York continues to maintain a phased lockdown strategy with a structured re-opening plan with measurable criteria[1].
Governers Inslee, Newsom, and Kate Brown have been receiving (well deserved) praise by the media for their structured approach to handling the outbreak[2].
Governor DeSantis deliberately focused Florida's COVID strategy on nursing homes, deploying the National Guard to the nursing homes, and prioritizing testing resources in LTC facilities[3]. To this date, Florida has among the lowest deaths per capita in the Union, and lower deaths per capita than most of the EU[4]. As a result of this, even despite a recent increase in cases, their death rate remains mostly flat — especially relative to the same metrics in most other States[5].
Between March 16-23 (at the outset of the outbreak), every single US state ordered a state of emergency, 11 had stay-at-home orders, 30 activated the state national guard, and 48 closed their schools[6]. By as early as March 9th, the States were doing the VAST majority of COVID testing[7]
As of right now, 36 out of 50 US States have a lower per capita death rate[8] than France, Sweden, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland[9]. 15 States have a lower per capita death rate than Germany and Denmark, who have seen the best COVID outcomes in the EU. The US, to date, has administered more tests per capita[8] than Belgium, Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Sweden (to name a handful).
It would take the most uncharitable reading of the situation to conclude that the US member states have been any more "reactionary" than typical peer nation-states.
[1] https://forward.ny.gov/metrics-guide-reopening-new-york
[2] https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
[3] https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-ro...
[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
[5] https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1279967210224705542
[6] https://twitter.com/COVID2019action/status/12421349564632268...
[7] https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1238574921346732032/photo...
A lot of state actions seem to have been driven by a strategy like that, but a lot seem more like "people got tired of lockdowns and we kinda hope things might not get bad if we reopen, so we're reopening".
This isn’t unique to the US, the entire world is playing a giant game of economic chicken with COVID, and the entire world is beginning to re-open, even without a vaccine or any sort of “plan”.
Just like the EU, the US is a mixed bag. You have States like Germany with exemplary planning and strategic decision making, but you also have Italy’s and Spain’s. You have States like Washington, California, and Utah with exemplary planning, but you also have New York’s and Louisiana’s.
As with any collection of generally autonomous governments (especially where the power to enforce lockdowns and issue curfews is vested), strategies can vary, outcomes can vary.
Each State has its own government, and each government has its own infectious disease agency (each with billions of dollars in funding), a chief executive, and a legislature. People forget that individual American states have GDPs on par with sovereign countries. California is comparable to the UK, NY to South Korea, Texas to Canada. The US State with the lowest GDP per capita, Mississippi, is comparable to Portugal.
At the outset of the outbreak, the vast majority of US States initiated systematic responses comparable to that of peer nation-states. Most citizens of most states ARE demanding a clear strategy from their State governments, and that's what they're getting.
The CDC provides an advisory role, and has no authority to issue lockdown mandates, close businesses, close schools, or issue testing or mask requirements. The US States may rely on the CDC advice, but it can also choose to ignore it or supplement it with the recommendations of their own State disease control agencies. Keep in mind that the CDC and the FDA both dropped the ball multiple times during this outbreak (dragging their feet on approving new testing, flip flopping on mask policy).
While it would be awesome for the Federal government to coordinate the perfect COVID response, the US is set up in such a way that the States don't need to rely on such an ideal.
Check that ref again; Florida is ranked at almost exactly the midpoint.
While Florida is "ranked almost exactly at the midpoint", it's because it's part of a cluster of data points that have almost the same deaths per M.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Washington and below all have close to equal death rates, and marginal differences are probably hard to attribute to any specific set of policy. This, of course, should not detract from the commendable numbers we see in Utah, Hawaii, Vermont, Texas, Oregon, etc.
Just look at the data: the drop-off between Florida and Oregon (spanning 23 States) is equal to that between Mississippi and Colorado, which are adjacent data points.
Once his strategy to protect the vulnerable failed dramatically due to asymptomatic carriers (and the fact that people make bad decisions), it was too late for him to back down and it’s been Iraq war all over again. One day he is criticizing other countries saying that what they are doing is not sustainable and then in the next breath complaining that his strategy has been misrepresented and what he is doing isn’t different from what the rest of the world is doing.
It’s been unfortunate to watch his inability to admit his initial mistake lead to so much unnecessary suffering and pain.
However, I'm more appalled by the government's complete mismanagement. They have completely pushed responsibility onto this single man, who cannot be held accountable in public elections. His job is to be a key advisor. The politicians are the policymakers and the only enforceable decisions they've made is pretty much to prohibit gatherings of more than 50 people and close down high schools.
I don't know how these things work in government, but relying on the opinion of just a single expert might not be the best strategy to win here. It's unlikely though that policy makers will come out in the worse shape here than they were before because even though they might have failed (a big if in the long run), they've relied on the advice of the experts rather than their beliefs.
"The virus will not spread in Swedish society under the current circumstances. We might see a few cases." (February)
"A large proportion of the population will gain immunity, this will lead to herd immunity. No patients will have to be triaged away." (March)
"The number of ICU patients and infected elderly is stabilizing. Our measures in society are proving effective." (March)
At some point, a responsible and reasonably intelligent person will realize that maybe this particular expert is lacking in expertise and the two dozen or so of other domestic experts (all of them virologists, epidemiologists, professors in medicine etc.) that are fervently recommending stricter measures might have a point.
Swedish politicians have a great knack for avoiding the responsibility they ask for in the elections, and they're really good at shifting blame. I sure hope they won't get away with it this time.
Others in the general population who are at serious risk of complications, such as elderly and those with preexisting conditions, should also isolate themselves. As I gotta say, I have done.
But I suspect that it will turn out that general lockdown is neither good enough, nor worth the long term economic consequences. Except of course that those long term consequences will arguably mitigate global climate change.
Hang on, this is an article showing that a looser lockdown still ends up with your economy hammered anyway. This should not be surprising, analysts if the Spanish Flu pandemic showed that cities that locked down later and lighter actually suffered more economically. This is because the higher infection and death rate, and larger number of people caring for sick relatives. People ended up Locking themselves down anyway out of fear, and the epidemic dragged on for longer.
Now we know this wasn’t due to special conditions back then, it’s true now too. There simply isn’t an option to ‘choose the economy’.
The lockdown affects behavior at the margins. And at the margins, the economic gains are linear to the additional activity due to not having a lockdown, but the growth of the virus is exponential.
Then the fact that the virus persists longer means places without a lockdown that did not drastically reduce the spread of the disease continue suffering economically.
Well, there is effectively no "looser lockdown" when you're part of the EU, and even more economically tied to the rest of Scandinavia.
But anyway, the most important point is that a general lockdown that doesn't adequately protect the elderly, and others with preexisting conditions, won't reduce the death rate very much.
Obviously that doesn't happen to everyone but it appears a significant proportion of those getting ill have serious symptoms some time after the illness, with no clear end in sight.
Maybe she carries that susceptibility sequence from Neanderthals. It'd also be good to focus on isolating people with that and other relevant genetic markers.
Easy.
Or lockdowns, easy accessibility to testing and good contract tracing. Which has worked well in lots of countries
Has it really? Lots of people in LTC facilities have died, no?
I for one would like to avoid getting this altogether
It will be very interesting to see what we learn in a year or more, but it does appear that there is the possibility of physical for healthy people - on her slack group (with over 7000 'long haulers') some people are showing heart scaring, some lung damage, some kidney issues. The only commonalities for most is that while they felt ill with covid, most were not dangerously ill. And many are resting negative to the antibody tests as it appears their T cells fought the virus. The research can come too soon for us.
The previous government gutted budgets for care homes which lead to chronic understaffing. When the pandemic hit, the current government enacted a fairly strict lockdown but still did nothing to help the situation in care homes, which was worsened by caretakers staying home by fear of catching the virus. This in turn lead to patients being neglected and to caregivers working in both "cold" and "hot" facilities, causing even more outbreaks.
Heard on the radio today that we have less educated people working with elder care compared to our neighbours and that this could have made a difference too.
It is not just bigger than Sweden, official deaths in Spain are 27.000, the real number (taking seasonal death rate) is way over 43.000, making it the biggest per million deaths rate in the (Western) world, as Belgium (the one with the biggest number) did consider the seasonal rate.
By the way, in Spain the gobertment "resurrected" over a thousand people, going from 28.750 to 26.830 overnight.
Remember that Spain did nothing because the socialist-communist government did not want to cancel the women's day march the 8th of March and waited until 9th for starting to do something. They announced that and waited another week before implementing what they had announced.
While doing nothing, they minimized the problem, and told the people not to worry, they were in charge, only a couple of cases were expected. TVs joked about coronavirus and denounced other countries attitude against Spaniards, putting them on quarantine for staying in infected countries.
So Spain has the most deaths of the Western world because they waited almost 2 weeks letting more than a million people(100.000 positive PCRs test) get infected before doing something.
The lockdown made that million people only infect from 5 to 6 other million people(it could infect more than 40 million). If was extremely painful for the economy and made the country temporarily a dictatorship of the socialist-communist that put them in that position in the first place.
New Zealander here, our general lockdown went very well and enabled us to isolate clusters of transmission and prevent it becoming community transmission. While two of our clusters were rest homes, several others were not - a school, a St Patrick's Day celebration at a pub, and a wedding, are significant "not rest home" examples.
So yeah, I think your focus on rest homes is too specific.
It turns out to be pretty much impossible to keep out of aged care if there is community spread.
Not all elderly are in rest homes, either.
I don't know of anywhere with widescale community spread that has been really successful at protecting the elderly.
Care workers have to go in and out of elderly care facilities. We still don't have much data on how good COVID-19 testing at tracking pre-symptomatic cases, but the data points at "certainly not 100% accurate".
Even if you tested _every_ care worker before they entered the building, you'd likely miss some asymptomatic cases who could go on to transmit to the elderly. Nevermind the fact that earlier in the pandemic, the kinds of near-instant tests we have now (allbet with unimpressive reliability) weren't available.
Money doesn't just buy people.
You'd essentially be drafting them.
In every country (except maybe Iceland which doesn't have a standing army), the military has plenty of medically trained soldiers who are used to doing these things away from home for months
Seems far more reasonable than locking down entire countries for months, asking people to forego friends and family (without even mentioning the consequent unemployment).
You wouldn't need to force anyone with a gun. A five-fold increase in wages - untaxed - would be more than enough incentive. The cost would be a drop in the ocean compared to the damage wrought by the measures adopted so far.
No need to use a gun. Just a strict contract.
… which is no different from other countries. I seem to recall articles comparing the numbers, and the proportions seem similar in many places.
> Also, what will count is not the first few months but the entire lifetime of this pandemic.
Considering only the improvements in treatments made between March and now, it seems fairly evident that a strategy of front-loading deaths was ill-considered. Even if all countries eventually end up with the same percentage of the population infected (which is far from certain), it's likely that those with a late wave will have considerably fewer deaths.
* Some medication which appears to be effective, i.e. dexamethasone and remdesivir
* Proning
* An increased focus on avoiding blood clots, e.g. by using blood thinners.
It's heartbreaking to read this article from three months ago (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...) and realize that everything those warning against overuse of ventilators turned out to be correct.
Their’s was demonstrably the best strategy and everyone else is just making excuses.
Without the same testing capacity, this strategy simply wasn’t available in most other countries. However now that testing capacity has ramped up, we should be able to employ more efficient lockdowns from now on. It’s still not a magic wand though, Germany’s economy has still suffered significantly even with a relatively efficient lockdown.
Also, the choice to offshore medical supply infrastructure was a deliberate one by many wealthy countries. That this was foolish and short-sighted is not any more of an excuse than anything else with their poor responses.
But yes: Vietnam still did great, most likely thanks to very early intervention (as early as January).
Lots of very different countries have beaten the virus in different ways. Apologists for the failed US response have to resort to special pleading: "it's not fair to compare the USA to South Korea ... or Taiwan ... or Germany ... or Australia ... or New Zealand ... or Japan ... or Vietnam ... or China ..." American exceptionalism at its least fine.
For New Zealand they have an extremely widely geographically dispersed population, which you can think of as built-in demographic social distancing. They also locked down early and there was strong popular support for the lockdown.
It's really pretty ridiculous to expect radically different countries with completely different geography, demographics, medical systems and lockdown policies as though they're all assumed to be equivalent as a default. Specific local conditions can have a massive effect. But anyway I'm not even sure I understand what your point is Why do you think these countries outcomes were so radically different from, say, that in New York, or Lombardy? Or what's happening right now in Texas?
I don't know the answer, but is this actually true? Sure, the density as measured as a ratio between population and land mass indicates a dispersed population, but is the population not centered in a handful of cities?
A quick search indicates that Auckland, a single city, contains a third of New Zealand's population.
My point is that many countries with wildly different conditions have successfully suppressed the virus, which I think suggests that just about any country could have suppressed the virus with the right policies. At least, one should not confidently assert that there is no way the USA, western Europe, etc could have successfully suppressed the virus.
The young are less likely to get sick, those who don't get sick are less likely to spread the virus. Youthful demographics are not irrelevant to shutting down viral transmission.
I have had the impression that the age effect on sickness and transmission is much less than on mortality, but I admit I don't remember any specific data on that.
Countries with SARS experience were quick at developing and communicating those strategies. Other countries like NZ and Australia were not absolutely quick but were quick enough because the virus got here later.
One of the reasons other countries locked down like they did was to give themselves time to figure out what actually needed to be done to save lives.
Saying "well if they had done this other thing fewer people would've died" means they made the wrong decision. Full stop.
In fact, this is a complete repudiation of the Swedish experiment because the one thing they did say they would do was protect the vulnerable. It was the only goal they had. And they failed miserably.
And it failed.
You can't go back, and re-write history, now, and blame the elderly care homes for the failure of the strategy. They weren't the ones setting policy.
There seems to be a drive to discredit the inalienable human rights approach, in this case by implying it was a financial decision; but i have to say i am impressed by the way they have handled this situation, the only response on earth that involved treating their citizens like adults.
https://theconversation.com/tracing-homophobia-in-south-kore...
That's simply wrong. I am allowed to drive a car, which is inherently dangerous to pedestrians (140,000 accidents per year in the US). I am allowed to have a lot of (or all?) contagious deseases in public, which is dangerous to the elderly and immune-compromised. I am sure there are many more examples. Small dangers are everywhere. I am all for wearing masks but let's not make up stuff.
For most society level problems we are OK as long as most people behave responsibly most of the time, so this approach is great. We can inform our citizens and they can enforce good behaviour amongst themselves by tutting and grumbling in a disapproving way.
This is not true of a contagion. Occasional "just this once won't hurt" violations are enough to break containment.
That's why the countries that enforced strict measures early — suspending individual freedoms — have had better outcomes for their health and economy.
Fighting a contagion is like hygeine in a kitchen. You know which surfaces and utensils are clean or dirty, and you don't put the dirty things back with the clean things until they've been cleaned and dried.
In the same way, you try to establish regions where a contagion is/may exist/is not, and then expand the clean regions. If people have their inalienable human rights, then you can't do the basic containment strategy, because your clean regions keep getting contaminated.
Sweden is somewhere in the middle -- they are being criticized, yet other countries in Europe which locked down have ended up with a higher per capita death rate.
Why is it that Cambodia and other nations in southeast Asia have negligible deaths despite doing very little to combat the virus, while countries in the EU which locked down have way more deaths per capita?
Somehow the models about the spread and death rate of this virus seem to differ on a geographical basis, and that needs to be explained.
At this point, any analysis of the pandemic that does not attempt to tackle this problem is selectively ignorant.
One possible explanation for this is the kind of strain carried by the index case(s).
There are dormant strains and there are virulent strains of the virus, so the kind each country gets determines the kind of symptoms and this in turn shapes the initial reaction of their health care system.
Asian cultures have take the virus much more seriously than European cultures and regardless of government policy that is going to be a major determinant of how much the virus spreads.
Put in another way, two countries can apply the exact same policy against the virus but have diverging outcomes because of public opinion of the government, of the virus, and of their fellow citizens.
And echoing the comment about behaviour, the difference between the culture of say, Norway and Britain, is vast in some respects.
Or even the likes of Germany and Italy, which are neighbours.
I think Austria and Switzerland would like to have a word with you.
But if you travel to North Italy in the summer, you see so many cars with German license plates, you wonder about the geography!
I stand, corrected.
One explanation could be different cultures, or just geographical proxomit to Italy and France that were harder hit than Germany and Austria. This would also explain that Germany has higher rates in states that are close to the French border.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...
Compared to both Sweden and Britain, Norway reacted quicker and harder, with way more testing than most other countries. As it got out of hand, even more restrictions like shutting down a lot of business types, public transportation, schools and travel was added. Working from home was also recommended and used by basically everyone who could. Long after this happened in Norway, things where mostly as usual in both Sweden and Britain, despite the number of infections climbing fast.
This is new to me :)
Your point stands of course..
System 1 thinking in action.
It's just wrong to say they are being "lax" here. If any other country would have tried the same means, it would hve failed utterly. Just as you say -- two countries doing the same policy could get very different outcomes.
Japan had a strong preexisting culture of wearing a mask when going out in public if you're the slightest bit sick.
> countries that locked down (e.g. EU countries and the United States).
The early EU countries (Italy, France, Spain) and the US didn't lock down until far too late when their local epidemics had already spiraled out of control.
The US in particular locked down far too late, too little, and has now re-opened despite still having a huge number of active cases and community transmission. On top of that, it sounds like a large number of people there are still refusing to wear masks.
> Why is it that [...] nations in southeast Asia have negligible deaths
I'm less sure here but I'd guess it's a combination of age demographics (fewer very old people who are most likely to die of the virus), lack of testing/reporting, and higher overall death rates due to disease which masks the effect somewhat.
The stereotypes of some cultures being more cold and wanting to keep their distances is grounded in reality. In e.g. france or italy having very close contact for example when greeting is the norm. I can imagine that it helps to spread the virus.
Others don't have to adjust too much.
For instance, in Denmark, each and every dead person that is tested positive for Corona virus, count towards the death toll, even if they died from something obviously different. Even dead people is sometimes tested. It's not the same in all contries.
We will not have the full picture until we analyze the excess mortality rate on the other side of the pandemic. Then we can start to see what did the countries lowest excess death rate per capita do different.
The only solid metric for COVID-19 deaths is excess mortality, that is, the actual number of deaths - the statistically expected number of deaths (e.g. extrapolating from the last 2-5 years).
This metric is independent of testing capacity and malicious actors like politicians just outright lying to the public to try to save face. You can "hide" dead people, but doing so is much harder than hiding COVID-19 related deaths.
You can't conclude from this metric what the source of all these extra deaths are, but if they are not caused by COVID-19, every alternative explanation I can think of is even worse than a global pandemic.
https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking...
https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
One interesting thing is that COVID-19 lowers the mortality rate in the mid-to-long term. It disproportionately targets the weakest, so in the next couple of months and years, less people than the expected average will die, because the weakest are already dead, and that will lower the mortality rate per capita for one generation at least. At some point, it will hopefully raise again, and that too will be due to COVID-19, because the reason for that will be that we wouldn't have a recent-enough COVID-19-like event.
---
Point being, one should be careful when comparing mortality rates and absolute death counts. One needs to factor in both to get the full picture, and for rate, the period over which the rate is computed is very relevant.
If that is the case, how much can the lockdowns really help? I'm on board with slowing the disease down and giving the medical community 6 months to get their bearings. But it has now been 6 months and the question is "what is going to change going forward?".
We know we can't make vaccines on demand - we still don't have one for herpes afaik.
According to this [0], Sweden is 5th in Europe but given that you have Italy (first outbreak in europe), closely followed by the second, Spain and the incompetent response of the UK Government, this only leaves Belgium, which seems to count pretty much all deaths.
In other words, not a great showing at all
Lockdown is a last resort measure, not the first response.
All things considered, Sweden is doing remarkably well but if you compare it with its scandinavian neighbours rather than with Italy or the UK then things look appalling.
They already had masks on when others questioned their effectiveness and to this day, 95% people wear masks outside.
They have hand sanitizers on pretty much every shop entrance and chairs are placed with certain distances apart.
They don't wear shoes at home and public spaces don't have litters all over.
They don't hug and kiss frequently like some countries do.
Some stop visiting restaurants when they read news that daily infection count goes over 100. (Not 10,000.)
Apparently they don't riot shouting in the middle of the outbreak.
How about that they have been acting clean before covid happened and government not exactly handling the situation strictly wasn't really the cause of the difference in death rates?
Also interesting is that they have a train system with packs of people squashed in a cabin but the infection rate is still low and someone needs to prove/disprove the BCG vaccine theory.
I might be missing something, but what does this have to do with COVID?
Who wears shoes at home? Especially their normal, outdoors, day-to-day shoes?
In Sweden the wast majority occurred in elderly care homes located mostly within strong mass transportation distance. (The image in the article is almost ironically capturing the wrong demographic in the wrong location in the wrong part of Sweden, in a time period after the one for which they base the article, but it is eye catching so for nytimes I guess that is the editorial guidelines that they will use).
Japan with a large portion of the population being elderly, and with a strong mass transportation system, I do wonder why they have so few deaths. Maybe they imposed very strict testing and restriction for all workers getting anywhere near such places? Maybe they use a lot of automation in elderly care resulting in significant less human contact and exposure? Cultural difference?
Finland did one thing that Sweden did not. They closed the capital. No one in, no one out. I am not sure how the elderly care homes outside that zone managed in regard to finding replacement for employees, but it seems to have been an effective measure. They also seem to have implemented rules for zero visitors.
The stated objective of the lockdown was not to overwhelm the ICUs. As far as I know the ICUs in Sweden have not been overwhelmed. So how is that a failure?
As for the economic impact, given the amount of life support injections into the economy, I think the real economic impact of the shock is yet to be seen. Defaults are only starting to rise.
The low mortality rate and managed ICU capacity isn't the whole story. there is a large population of recovering and recovered that have serious complications, that seem random and are unproductive to our society. Blood clots resulting in amputations. 90 day recovery time periods. Other unknown and randomly targeted blood oxygen issues.
The mayors and governors and public health ministers are reacting to that in their own municipalities and countries. The outcomes are not equal, the variables have many different names between jurisdictions, and therefore the stats are not easily collectable. But for people on the front line and getting briefed by those on the front line, they see something horrible that they need to move the goal post to "cases" instead of just deaths and ICU capacity.
1) You're making some significant claims, and should therefore have significant data and evidence to back up your claims. Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable. What percentage of them had a blood clot and serious damage? What percentage of them currently have persistent long term damage? If you're making the claim that these things are such a serious problem, you should have data that backs up how common the problem is, and how bad it is.
2) How different are the complications from the normal complications that the flu/pneumonia/etc. can give? Tens of thousands of people get the flu, have complications, and die every year. Tens of thousands of elderly people get the flu, and have long-term damage for the rest of their life. As a society we don't care about that at all. Are you saying covid does more damage, or has more complications? If so, where's the evidence comparing the level of damage/complications?
It's my theory at the moment that this "complication" talk is just another viral "meme" that's mostly driven/spread by people just repeating what other people said, which spreads like wildfire, but never has any actual data backing it up. Of course there are people that have had serious complications. But there's people that have had serious complications from every disease. And it says nothing about how common it is. For example, if 0.00001% of people that get covid have to have a limb amputated, yeah that's horrible, and yeah it'd be great if we could just snap our fingers and make that not happen, but is it really something to focus on?
> Over 3 million people in the US have tested positive for covid. What percentage of them needed to have a limb amputated? That should be easily verifiable.
Okay, how would I do that?
The mean time between symptoms and death is two weeks (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...). Anyone with symptoms is in two weeks, three at the most, either going to be at home wondering what the fuss is about—the vast, vast, vast majority of cases—or dead.
for some reason the term 'early adopter' comes into my mind
As one who foolishly bought not one, not two, but three first-generation Apple notebooks, you are not wrong.
To be clear, I was in favor of the lockdown at first and I still am in favor of keeping things like bars and casinos closed but it’s become clear that the virus doesn’t have much affect on younger populations and that the death rate has been dropping. Here in Michigan, while our daily new cases is still creeping up, our 7 day moving average of deaths has continued to plummet.
We had a pretty strict lock down here and people followed it better than I expected they would. I’m not sure what to think but I do find it odd that 2 similar sized populations took radically different approaches and ended up in essentially the same spot.
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-in...
That was something expected before the lockdowns. The lockdowns were sold as a way to buy hospitals time, by flattening and slowing down the spread.
How can you even compare Swedens rate until the whole thing is over, everywhere? A flattened curve will take longer. Sweden purposely chose the frontloaded, higher initial rate.
Is it possible Sweden just has a healthier population than Michigan? Life expectancy in Sweden is about 4 years higher than Michigan. This also means their population skews older, but means people are healthier on average.
I mean, of course the virus "discriminates" in the sense that there is a huge disparity in mortality rate between age and pre-existing condition groups.
Sure, it can infect anyone but it's obviously false to act like the effects are equal across demographics.
But they can be a great vector of infection to others.
Without knowing those distributional statistics at different levels, all you get are lies and damned lies, not statistics.
About 50% of the deaths in Sweden have occurred in Stockholm per the Financial Times[1], which has a population under a million. Just by looking at a smaller geographic division - a city/metro area - we get near an order of magnitude higher per capita case rate and mortality rate.
At the same time, San Francisco County - comparable population to Stockholm - has had 4023 confirmed cases and 50 deaths. Alameda County has a population about 60% larger, and has had 6,991 confirmed cases and 140 deaths. So, it is possible to have a comparable population and a comparable density to Stockholm, Sweden and yet have many times fewer cases and deaths.
We could go back and forth until we're blue with why that might be the case, but I can tell you empirically, looking at some Bay Area counties versus Detroit or Stockholm, it is possible to have many times fewer cases and deaths than they've experienced. And that is a tragedy that is unfolding every day in those places.
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06...
- Closed high schools and universities.
- Banned gatherings of over 50 people.
- Banned visits to nursing homes.
- Reduced restaurant capacity and required social distancing in restaurants.
- Recommended social distancing, working from home, and avoiding unnecessary travel.
If you look at mobility data you'll see that even in the absence of official lockdown policies people were already changing their behavior to protect themselves, and the difference between Sweden and other places is not actually as big as people think.
For example, do Michiganers have the same level of access to quality medical care as Swedes?
What are the smoking rates in Sweden compared to Michigan?
What about the housing quality?
Etc. etc. etc.
In other words, there's a lot of variables at play here.
Wait, with all due respect, 5420 deaths on 10 million people? On a country left completely unchecked? That doesn't sound like the impending doom I thought the virus would bring.
I thought the novel corona virus had a death rate of about 1% to 2% and a bigger spreading rate that was bigger than 1, if no measures were taken. So, I'd expect between 100,000 to 200,000 to have died. I'm really happy that didn't happen. It also makes me curious as to why. Is it because of Sweden's demographics (people living alone)? Or is it because the virus isn't as deadly as we think it is?
How come 0.05% died and not 1% to 2%? Isn't this evidence that the coronavirus isn't as big as a threat as we thought? I mean 0.05% deaths is 40 times smaller than 2% deaths.
It's awful what happened, but the highest flu season in The Netherlands, for example, killed an estimated 9444 people [1] on 17,280,000 people, which is slightly higher than what the Swedes had to go through now (also rounded to 0.05%). I know that the novel coronavirus is not a flu, but if this is it, then well, I've seen worse, apparently.
I know the virus isn't done, but it had months to roam free in Sweden. One would expect it would double up every 5 days in terms of how many people would be infected.
Edit: they did need to maintain social distance apparently. I wouldn't call that "doing nothing". Sure a lot more can be done, but I feel the media are framing the Swedes a bit inaccurately. Belgium seems to be way worse (9774 on 11,460,000 people, ~0.1% is getting truly uncomfortable)
[1] In Dutch, unfortunately: https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland
Because the 1% death rate is a reference to people catching the disease, not the size of the population. Sweden as of now appears to have about 73k officially confirmed cases.
Swedes still voluntarily distanced and closed down, hence the economic damage mentioned in the article. Given that there is no widespread immunity still with total infections in the single digits, those deaths will eventually go up.
I'm not sure if the American attitude of indifference is taking hold here now, but 5000 deaths when 4000 of them could have been avoided is no matter to brush aside, it's in fact a straight up disaster. This is an unprecedent amount of needless death in modern Swedish history.
In The Netherlands, the worst flu seasons still have a higher death toll than corona. I hope it stays that way for everyone.
Do you have a link to the statistics please? I think you're comparing two different methods of counting death. I think for covid-19 you're counting people who died after testing positive, or people where covid-19 is listed as the cause on the death certificate. But for flu I think you're counting excess mortality.
One big question would be why they chose April 2020 as the comparison point rather than May or June -- did the number of deaths per month in Sweden actually drop?
(I haven't read the article closely, and don't have a horse in this race --- I just thought it was apropos. Feel free to tear it to shreds if appropriate.)
When people say "covid is like flu" sometimes they mean "flu is a big deal, and a bad flu year kills lots of people". (I agree with that).
But sometimes they mean "flu isn't so bad, it's a bit like a cold, doesn't kill so many people".
You're right though, I think something different was counted. In one case it was covid-19 deaths vs excess mortality. A sister comment rectified it, fortunately. It took this source [2] that references the excess mortality of the Dutch worst flu season and covid-19.
Then you get:
> De oversterfte in week 10 tot en met 19 van de COVID-19 epidemie was 9.768
> De oversterfte tijdens de 18 weken griepepidemie werd geschat op 9.444
(I think you can gather which is which but you could use Google Translate to be 100% sure)
So COVID-19 is actually higher and in 10 weeks rather than 18 weeks. And also, now that we're comparing a bit more apples to apples (The Netherlands), then we have to take into account that an "intelligent lockdown" (whatever that means) has taken place.
We had less death per 1 million than the Swedish as we were on 6132 at the time of this comment with covid related deaths.
So in conclusion, I made a few subtle errors that ultimately really add up. I wish I could still edit my top comment, I am happy I could already admit one error I made (that Sweden wasn't 100% roaming free), but using different units of measurement (covid related deaths vs excess mortality was another one).
[1] In Dutch, unfortunately: https://www.rivm.nl/monitoring-sterftecijfers-nederland
That's far higher than all regular flu seasons, although nowhere near as bad as previous flu pandemics.
[0] http://jogh.org/documents/issue201902/jogh-09-020421.pdf
> De oversterfte in week 10 tot en met 19 van de COVID-19 epidemie was 9.768
> De oversterfte tijdens de 18 weken griepepidemie werd geschat op 9.444
Anyway definitely not 25% worse.
That's the guess at least. But we don't know. The argument for being careful about covid-19 isn't because we know it's more dangerous than other things, it's because we don't know.
It's still novel, we've only been tracking it since last December. The flu been around for a long time. Maybe we'll live with covid-19 for a long time, or maybe we'll find a vaccine.
As it seems right now, it's deadlier than the flu and we weren't really ready for it, so it caused a ripple effect of problems. No matter if a country implemented a quarantine or not, they took a lot of damage one way or another.
It's too early to make any conclusions around this, time will tell what was the best way considering the circumstances
> instead one should only "stay home if feeling sick"
My understanding is that this isn't true, but maybe you're being a bit pithy and I misunderstood - it's true that there weren't any bans or strict stay-at-home recommendations, but there were definitely recommendations for people to limit time outside of the home. Even in March Swedish employers were encouraged to implement remote work and Swedes were discouraged on travelling within the country.
There are also two other important reasons to have locked down early in the pandemic: - with time, we have already learned how to treat patients better and reduce mortality. This includes proning, dexamethasone and remdesivir which will reduce deaths. So exposing people to it in spring 2020 will produce very different mortality outcomes compared to fall or spring 2021 - We also have important therapeutic advances happening in monoclonal antibodies, and of course phase 3 trials of vaccines.
I would bet that, with some luck, other European communities avoid ever accumulating the deaths Sweden did.
Finally, it's more than deaths: many long-haul COVID patients are facing permanent disability and diminished capacity. The statistics aren't capturing this yet, but collectively, I think it was very foolish to have tried to push for herd immunity so early in a pandemic.
Belgium counts all suspected deaths as well, including those that have not been tested for COVID-19. Which means Belgium is the country closest matching their excess death with COVID-19 fatalities. The Netherlands, for example, leaves about 50% unexplained due to their counting.[0]
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-the-challenge-of...
Overreporting is possible too. Ireland is at 150-160% according to recent reports [0].
[0] https://www.thejournal.ie/covid-19-deaths-ireland-hiqa-51404...
For some reason MA is now being held up as "the exception to America's coronavirus failure":
https://theweek.com/articles/923075/massachusetts-exception-...
The doubling days started out at around 2.4, stayed stubbornly in the dozens for many weeks, then rise, to now averaging well over 400. The original terrifying exponential growth has clearly been halted.
New levels of opening ("Level 3") are now happening this week - gyms, movies, restaurants, all w/large spacing requirements. In the few times I've gone out (making heavy use of delivery), seeing generally very good mask compliance - 75-90%, but less on one recent trip, which is worrying.
I'm concerned about the opening, but confident that the plan is really data driven, and this is as far as they will go until a vaccine, and they'll quickly roll back if numbers slide.
source: MA resident, track & analyze data daily.
According to rt.live, we started March 3rd with an Rt of 2.22 and were already in a steep Rt decline by the time Baker issued the stay-home request on March 24rd (Rt 1.22) and got below Rt 1.0 a week later on March 31st.
Baker issued his mask order May 6th (Rt 0.88) and we've been bouncing around at that since although we're creeping up now from our low of 0.75 around when reopening started and been slowly ticking upwards since late May to Rt 0.98 now.
A few weeks ago we had the lowest Rt in the nation, now we're only 5th lowest. Hopefully the start of Phase 3 this week won't push us up over 1, but I suspect it will.
The chart of inferred infections by date seems to show very strong correlations to the lockdown measures: * very steep rate of rise in cases until 24-March * a bit of reduced slope right at the date * sudden peak/drop-off about a week later on 01-April * steep decline, then flatter decline during lockdown * then, a week after lockdown ends / next phase, around 25-May, the declining slope flattens
And the Rt starts to increase again in the last week of May
So, yes, the re-opening is looking very much like it's increasing re-transmission rates. Today just hit 1.01 on that chart.
Interesting times ahead. New England overall has relatively flat growth rates. Let's hope they continue measures to keep it that way!
So, this is likely of no practical value and some kind of data artifact. Best guess is spread before testing, and testing rates ramping up as it spreads, logging new cases at rates faster than they are actually being created, and normalizing to actual Rt rates as the testing catches up
That said, like elsewhere along the Northeast Corridor, outcomes have not been great overall especially in poorer immigrant communities. But that doesn't align nicely with a narrative that bad outcomes are a result of bad government policy or kids going to the beach or whatever.
As Nate Silver has noted on multiple occasions, we'll probably come out of this maybe not understanding why results were so different in different places or, at best, understanding that the differences are due to factors that couldn't realistically have been controlled for.
An antibody study[1] indicated that 7.3% of Stockholm has been infected, but that number is 1) from April and 2) is going to be higher than average because Stockholm was harder hit than the rest of the country.
[1] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/nyheter-och-press/nyhets...
Naive death rate is deaths/totally cases of infection, not deaths/total population. Most of Sweden never contracted covid in the first place.
A first approximation of Sweden's covid death rate would be around ~7.4% to date (almost certainly lower in practice bc total infections > officially diagnosed)
That would be almost 200 000 were it to be in America, and that's quite a lot of people to die in 3 or so months.
More than Vietnam+Korean wars put together and those wars lasted years.
So it's not a small number.
On a more personal note, I live in Sweden and I am not a Swedish citizen and I can say that things aren't "Business as usual here" and plenty is being done to stop the spread of the COVID 19. I can't say I 100% agree with the policy but I also don't think it's the huge mistake people make it out to be.
I have linked below an explanation for the strategy by one of Sweden's top epidemiologist and the one that's often credited as the architect of Sweden's strategy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-28/sweden-s-...
https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and-risks/disaster...
Both the Swedish 'no-lockdown' and the Dutch 'intelligent' lockdown are government policies that actually work locally because the government trusts that the population will follow the guidelines given (which they do for the majority).
Equally when I discussed with Dutch and Swedish people (anecdata) they all believed their national strategy was correct because they trusted their governaments competence and the science advisors that were being consulted.
I think many of these strategies cannot be translated to other countries were there isn't a shared trust level, i.e. population trusting the government's competence, and equally the government trusting civil society (biggest example being the US).
Also, the higher death rate is normal and acceptable, in a tradeoff against deaths caused by confinement and the unnecessary prolongation of the epidemic. Herd immunity will arrive earlier, and lockdown-caused deaths will perhaps make Swedes survive more and better.
Now vote me down.
This isn't to take position for or against Sweden's policy here, but there are far more variables than simply excess deaths (or DALYs) and economic impact.
I am from Portugal. In first 2 months we were considered an example on how to deal with an pandemic.
Today, our best business partners, I list UK in this scenario, does not give Portugal a safe destiny badge.
People tend to overcome rules. UK people are flying to Spain an then get a bus to Portugal.
Today's news was about 2000 students from Netherlands partying in Portugal, Algarve.
I am a young and healthy person AFAIK, but my mother is not. Neither my father in law or some of my closest friends.
Any death caused by irresponsible behaviour should be treated as an law infringement.
I really don't care if I get Corona. Pretty much I do, or in this case, I don't do, is thinking about people that does not have the chance of saying: fuck it.
It's the world we have, but I am sure it's not the world I wanted.
Bare with me: any death that could be avoided they should be avoided. And we could avoid alot of deaths if we think about others, an not that much about ourselves.
60 years ago you didn't have internet, lot's didn't even have light or bathroom in house.
Divorces are up with confinement. Are those people really meant to be together?
Don't look to much to your belly, and look around. Learn how to respect others without expecting the retribution.
You will feel great when you give up something you think it's aquired by right to something you think it's just right.
Best
And that is because none are based on sound science but are guesstimates at best yet are paraded around as the product of the best minds in the world.
Much is made about the growing anti-science sentiment in the world, the rushed pseudo scientific justification will only strengthen that.
Give it a year and most of the justification will be walked back, it will turn out that wearing a mask is actually detrimental to public health. It boggles the mind that people assume there must be no ill effects to breathing through a mucus-laden cotton sheet filled with microorganisms captured from the air, ...
Tell that to the millions of people who go skiing every year, or the people who work in hospitals all day long, every day.
I wash my mask every time I use it and I rotate through several of them. Nobody is asking you to wear a dirty mask.
nurses change their masks all the time, nobody skis every day for eight hours, (FWIW the vast majority of people skiing don't wear masks over their mouths)
> I wash my mask every time I use it and I rotate through several of them
Like every hour? If not good luck with that, it is a pit of infection, a wet and warm substrate for bacteria and fungi.
Do they? Are you a nurse?
> nobody skis every day for eight hours, (FWIW the vast majority of people skiing don't wear masks over their mouths)
Show me the statistics on that.
> Like every hour? If not good luck with that, it is a pit of infection, a wet and warm substrate for bacteria and fungi.
This is the most inane argument ever. You're basically saying those same exact bacteria and fungi magically don't go into our airways without a mask?
Masks magically breed this within a day? Also... who says they are bad? Hate to break it to you, we are FULL of bacteria.
Seriously, take a step back and think hard about your logic. Something in your brain isn't firing correctly.
in a nutshell stuff that would leave your body when you exhale will now be trapped on the inner side of your mask where it gets more and more concentrated, far more concentrated that what normally enters your lungs, the new stuff gets deposited on top the old, building it up to form a biofilm unlike any other part of the body
The microorganisms in the warm and wet environment breed, bacterial growth happens fast, doubling times can be 15 minutes. Within an hour you got yourself a bacterial colony right there in front of your mouth, every breath you take is filtered through that mucus laden bacterial colony
People have been wearing face coverings since the dawn of time.
Can you tell me the number of deaths attributed to wearing a mask? I can't even google it since all the things that come up now are recommendations to wear a mask.
> in a nutshell stuff that would leave your body when you exhale will now be trapped on the inner side of your mask
If you want to take the 'it is just a flu argument'... I'm more worried about catching covid than I am about the microorganisms coming out of my own breath. They are already in me, in a very concentrated form.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v...
The actual death toll was 5,400, and now the deaths are declining precipitiously. Of course every death is a tragedy, but the harm done from a national lockdown, which includes youth missing out on a year of school, and thousands of small businesses being destroyed, would have been more of one.
Like Michael Levitt, who's the 2013 Chemistry Nobel Laureate for research in complex systems, says, society has forgotten that people die.
10,000 people per million die every year in Sweden. That rate increasing by 500 is not that abnormal - it happens in bad influenza seasons. If every one was forced to stop working and shelter at home for months every time an infectious disease temporarily rose the death rate by 10%, it would lead to disaster over the long run.
90% of deaths in Sweden have been of those over the age of 70. If the statistics are anything like those in Italy, almost all of these victims had pre-existing conditions.
This is not to lessen the tragedy of their death. This is to point out that most of this tragedy predated their coronavirus infection - their life expectancy was already very limited due to other factors.
The news keeps showing Swedes walking in parks and down streets, but that's not how people catch the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile, people were working from home and mass gatherings were banned; the public were trusted to figure out the details, but they're not idiots. It could have worked.
What was everyone doing in Sweden that people weren't doing in Finland and Australia? Or were there less visible differences, in surveillance and contact tracing maybe, that haven't been so widely reported?
That remains to be seen; if Sweden’s peers can prevent flare-ups, it looks like Sweden was wrong.
Arguments in favor of minimal restrictions include: avoid exhaustion of compliance in the population; avoid disrupting the economy, and negative effects on economy likely will affect population health; …
Who knows how many times other countries will go in and out of lockdown in the coming years, and how long that will drag on. Melbourne just fully locked down again due to a rise in cases.
It's clear every country will eventually give up and go with Sweden's approach because they'll run out of "free" money, it's just a question of how long they will drag it out, or if a mass-produced vaccine can be effective and arrives in time.
Or, well, they could still order it. But since it would have been illegal, it could not have been enforced in any way, as it would also be illegal to follow any order to enforce it.
Some politicians wanted a lockdown, but soon found out that Swedens crisis response laws are not triggered by disease, at least not unless it's a clear threat to the continuation of the state as such. Covid IS serious, but this far it doesn't look like a civilization ending disease.
The virus cant be stopped so sooner or later other couties must open up and then they going to get more death. Just look at Spain that open up now had to lock down a reginon now with 200.000. Saying Swedens way is bad right now is far to early to conclude, when the pandemic is far from over. We have to wait at least a year or two.
I don't know how many people died as a direct result of the Great Depression but based on what I've been told by relatives the suffering was considerable with deaths due to lack of food, homelessness and despair. I do know that the Nazi party would never have come to power in Germany without the world economic collapse. They were a minor party on the wane in the late 20s only to get their second wind in the elections following the crash. It's also possible the Japanese militarist would never have come to power without the Great Depression for more complex reasons. WWII was the result at the cost of 45-70 million lives. Economic catastrophes are not just about money -- they have life and death consequences. I wish more people would have taken this into consideration before they carpet bombed the US economy to combat the pandemic. I guess they figured that no matter what, the US was safe from the kind of civil unrest that gripped the Weimar republic. A strong man taking control of the US? Fascist and antifascist battling in the street? That could never happen here.
The economic gains part of it is not really relevant. Today each country is exposed to the global economy. If everyone else has economies that are broken then that will trickle over to Sweden inevitably. But that doesn’t mean that it is not worth pushing for Sweden’s strategy. If more countries did so, perhaps Sweden would collect economic gains.
Sweden is #6 by deaths/population according to this page: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
This would indicate that the swedish response is among the worst. Several countries with comparable health systems have a death rate which is many times lower, for example Germany. This saved many thousands of lives.
What am I missing?
Nations which have held down infection numbers with shutdowns have, of course, flattened their curves. But they may well suffer from second/third waves which will hike up their total numbers.
The fact that spread in New York has slowed down compared to other states that weren't initially hit hard implies that there's some immunity effect going on.
Fewer infected is always good news[1], in Sweden or anywhere else--it means fewer dead now, more infections pushed until later when treatment will probably be better, etc. It's weird to see low infection rates twisted around as if they were bad, "evidence that herd immunity may not be possible". This is particularly true when the prevalence is compared to herd immunity from a model assuming a well-mixed, homogeneous population, which we know overestimates the herd immunity threshold (though not by how much, since estimates of the heterogeneity of the coronavirus are even more uncertain than those of R0).
Finally, herd immunity is a gradual process. Even in a crude homogeneous SIR model, you may approach it asymptotically but never get there. This is good--the only case where a disease "burns itself out" abruptly is when there's big overshoot, which implies many avoidable deaths. Perhaps that kind of overshoot could be desirable in a population of young people, if the small excess mortality in the young people were more than offset by their decreased ability to spread it later; but that's a narrow needle to thread.
For the avoidance of doubt, I believe Sweden did a bad job protecting elder care facilities (though many places that locked down did too), and I disagree with their position on masks. Their response otherwise seems reasonable to me, not obviously better than stricter approaches but also not obviously worse.
1. Unless you know the death count and you're looking for the denominator for your IFR, since more infected then means lower IFR. That was true early in the epidemic, before the first high-quality serosurveys, but not anymore.
They did flatten the curve[0], they kept their cases within hospital capacity (by banning gatherings over 50, reducing restaurant capacity, having people work from home, etc)
What they never did was crush the curve, which is the strategy most other countries switched to once they realized it was feasible
[0] https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/03/22/science/11SCI-VIR...
The long-term success of Sweden's approach appears to hinge on this question. What evidence is there which supports that their hardest hit locales have achieved herd immunity?
Of course, it could be that these rather small measures have pushed r0 a bit under 1 ever since March. But there have also been reports that for each person tested with antibodies, two more are actually immune, which would put the immunity at maybe 30% two weeks ago. At least it's in the right ball-park, as some have proposed that herd immunity could be reached at much lower percentages than previously thought.
Their situations was strong argument for other countries to lock down much sooner.
Source: https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/
15 days ago Sweden was experiencing about 20 covid deaths per day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#De...
I'd hold back from making grand proclamations in the middle (beginning?) of the pandemic.
For US data, I like how this table compares deaths from covid, flu, and pneumonia against the total deaths for all causes each week. I especially like that they show the ratio of current deaths vs the average of the 3 years prior for the same week.
The downside is how the data is slowly updated as each state trickles in data, so the most recent 4-8 weeks look lower now than if you check back later.
Still if you look back to April, flu deaths each week were in the hundreds, while covid deaths 9-15k. Saying it is 10x or more worse, doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
What really grabbed me is that the total US deaths in April from all causes was +40% compared to prior 3 year average.
If those extra deaths weren't from COVID-19, what were they from?
The first debunking of it I found:
Generic "flu" deaths are also counted the same way. Why do you think Covid deaths should be counted differently?
Then more importantly, it looks at the overall death rate. Because even if you completely ignore the covid count, the fact that there are so many more people dying than normal should grab people's attention.
Some quotes:
“Under these conditions, there does not seem to be a significant difference between the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 in OECD countries and that of common coronaviruses (χ2 test, P=0.11). Of course, the major flaw in this study is that the percentage of deaths attributable to the virus is not determined, but this is the case for all studies reporting respiratory virus infections, including SARS-CoV-2.”
“Under these conditions, and all other things being equal, SARS-CoV-2 infection cannot be described as being statistically more severe than infection with other coronaviruses in common circulation.”
“Finally, in OECD countries, SARS-CoV-2 does not seem to be deadlier than other circulating viruses.”
"less than 4000 deaths for SARS-CoV-2 at the time of writing"
That paper is worthless.
As of the Mar 19th 2020 issue of the Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.
Even without reading the paper, I can tell you that if this analysis were to be repeated, we would get different results, given that we are now (four months later) at 540,000 (confirmed, which is definitely an underestimate) deaths, rather than 4000.
According to Camilla Stoltenberg, the Director-General of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (Folkehelseinstituttet), similar results would have been achieved in her country without a lockdown. She bases that statement on a study by her institution.
The study collected data on confirmed cases of coronavirus registered in Norway, the number of hospital admissions, the reproduction rate, etc. At the beginning of March it was feared that one person infected with the virus would infect four others. Only strict lockdown rules could bring that figure down. This hypothesis came from the Imperial College in London and gave forecasts for a number of European countries, including Norway.
Virus never spread as fast as was feared
In their report, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health now comes to a completely different conclusion: the virus never spread as quickly as was feared and was already on its way back when the lockdown was announced.
‘Our conclusion now is that we could have achieved a similar effect without lockdown. By staying open and taking a series of precautions to prevent the spread. It’s important that we admit that. Because should the number of infections rise again in winter or should there be a second wave, we have to be honest in our analysis whether such a lockdown has proven to be effective’.
According to Stoltenberg, who is herself a doctor and the sister of former Norwegian Prime Minister and current NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, such draconian measures should only be announced in the future if there is an academic basis for them. And that was missing now, according to Stoltenberg.
https://businessam.be/noorwegen-lockdown-was-niet-nodig-om-c...
Except in the US, in Italy, etc. where it's spreading or it has been spreading exactly as fast as feared.
"The figures are questionable
Angelo Borrelli, the head of Civil Protection, who announces the latest figures every day at 6 p.m., said Saturday night that the 793 new deaths have been caused “by and with” the coronavirus. “We count all the dead, we make no distinction between with and by the coronavirus.” However, one wonders whether these daily figures reflect the situation correctly. The dead are said to have almost all had one or more other diseases, which leaves a question mark as to exactly how deadly the coronavirus is. At the same time, it has become clear that a large number of people who die at home (which is often a retirement home) do not undergo a coronavirus test."
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/22/als-italie-het-voorland...
"On Friday, April 24, 2020, Vittorio Sgarbi, a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, denounced what he claims are false coronavirus death statistics. Sgarbi feels that fake statistics are being propagated by the government and the media to terrorize the citizens of Italy and establish a dictatorship.
The member of the Forza Italia party slammed the closure of 60% of Italian businesses for 25,000 Chinese-Coronavirus deaths from the floor of the legislature. “It’s not true,” he said. “Don’t use the deaths for rhetoric and terrorism.” According to the National Institute of Health, 96.3% did not die of coronavirus, but of other pathologies stated Sgarbi – which means that only 925 have died from the virus and 24,075 have died of other things claimed Sgarbi, “….the virus was little more than an influenza. Don’t lie! Tell the truth!”"
https://rairfoundation.com/italian-leader-slams-false-corona...
Anyway, in the real world excess mortality in Italy was drammatically higher than even the worst flu seasons especially in the worst hit regions.
"A report on the coronavirus by the German Ministry of the Interior was leaked on May 9th 2020 by officer Stephan Kohn to the magazine Tichys Einblick, one of the most popular alternative media in Germany. The report, on which a dozen or so doctors and professors from various universities in Germany have worked, states that “the state has failed in the coronavirus crisis in an almost grotesque way.” In a press release, the scientists concerned stated that “the observable effects and consequences of COVID-19 do not provide sufficient evidence that it is more than a false alarm in terms of health effects on society as a whole. The new virus has probably never posed a risk to the population in excess of normal levels […]. The people dying from corona are mainly those who are statistically dying this year because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies are no longer able to withstand random daily exposure (including to the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation). The danger of COVID-19 has been overestimated. (No more than 250,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide within a quarter of a year, compared to 1.5 million deaths during the flu wave in 2017/18). Of course, the risk is no greater than that of many other viruses. In all likelihood, we are dealing with a global false alarm that has gone unnoticed for a long time.”
They also didn’t have anything positive to say about the ‘protective’ measures of the German criminal government. “The collateral damage [because of the measures] is now enormous and far greater than any observable benefit. […] Just a comparison of previous deaths due to the virus with deaths due to the protective measures prescribed by the State […] supports this finding. Much of this damage will continue to manifest itself even in the near and distant future. This can no longer be prevented but can only be minimized. […] The shortcomings and failures in crisis management have consequently led to the dissemination of unsubstantiated information, and thus disinformation, to the public. […] The State turned out to be one of the biggest fake-news producers in the coronacrisis.”"
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/das_corona_papier_wissenschaf...
Prof. Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, University Professor for Medical Microbiology (retired) University of Mainz
Dr. med. Gunter Frank, general practitioner, member of the permanent guidelines commission of the German Society for Family Medicine and General Medicine (DEGAM), Heidelberg
Prof. Dr. phil. Dr. rer. pol. Dipl.-Soz. Dr. Gunnar Heinsohn, Emeritus of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen
Prof. Dr. Stefan W. Hockertz, tpi consult GmbH, former director of the Institute for Experimental Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University Hospital Eppendorf
Prof. Dr. Dr. rer. nat. (USA) Andreas S. Lübbe, Medical Director of the MZG-Westphalia, Head Physician Cecilien-Klinik
Prof. Dr. Karina Reiß, Department of Dermatology and Allergology University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein
Prof. Dr. Peter Schirmacher, Professor of Pathology, Heidelberg, Member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
Prof. Dr. Andreas Sönnichsen, Deputy Curriculum Director of the Medical University of Vienna, Department of General and Family Medicine.
Dr. med. Til Uebel, General Practitioner, Specialist in General Medicine, Diabetology, Emergency Medicine, Teaching at the Institute of General Medicine at the University of Würzburg, academic teaching practice at the University of Heidelberg
Prof. Dr. Dr. phil. Harald Walach, Prof. Med. University of Poznan, Dept. of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Visiting Professor University of Witten-Herdecke, Dept. of Psychology 4
Most people in Sweden are taking plenty precautions and isolate on a voluntary level, highly encouraged by all institutions. However, if you are stuck inside with abusive parents or are getting depressed by the isolation, you have the choice to go out.
As others have mentioned, the true failure has been in elder care. How the virus was allowed to ravage care centers is completely unacceptable.
In many cases I think the consensus in Sweden is that the government doesn’t have the right to keep people at home or force people to wear masks. The current government had to push to get legislation passed that allowed them to shut down primary schools and preschools, if needed.
When this is all said and done a lot of countries are going to have evaluate what all of this has meant for their democracies.
The only feasible path to economic recovery is:
1. Keep the borders closed. Mandatory & monitored quarantine for anyone entering.
2. Lock down, test & contact-trace until the virus is basically eradicated. Mandating mask use outside of abodes or any other measure will help speed this along, too.
3. Open up, but keep borders closed except to places applying a similar approach.
The swifter the action, the easier it all is.
it was pretty clear from beginning it won't have big impact on their economy either way
> Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment.
Almost every interview available with Anders Tegnell (swedish equivalent of Anthony Fauci) mention that the international community prior to covid had agreed that following a strategy similar to the one sweden are following now is the best choice. Somehow this translates to an "unorthodox" strategy. Never mind that during previous epidemics, like SARS, the current Swedish response was "the normal response".
> It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.
I am really disturbed by this sentence. While it is technically correct that no lockdown has been imposed on the swedish people by the government, saying that life has "carried on largely unhindered" is straight up dishonest.
Ever since February or March there have been regular press conferences with the FHM ("swedish CDC") broadcast over public radio (and obviously you can listen to it on internet and in their app, with push notifications). The hospital system has almost completely shifted to handling covid, nationwide. Most companies have tried to shift their work to peoples homes as much as possible, just like FHM has suggested. Buying groceries online has increased by a large margin. Even the cars at my local supermarket are now practicing social distancing! Swedes, overall, have really taken the gravity of the situation to heart and made changes in their life to protect their community.
> but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.
This misses the most important points about the swedish strategy and shows a lack of knowledge about swedish economy and EU economy. The goal of the swedish strategy has been to preserve peoples health as good as possible. Locking everyone in their homes for several months is not a strategy that is resillient. It increases cases of domestic violence, people losing their jobs cause negative effects as well. The number of deaths related to covid have to be compared to overall deaths, but most importanlty the overall health. The goal was never to gamble peoples life away for the economy!
The article jumps straight into saying that Sweden did not gain anything, economically, from having no lockdown. Well of course not. How could a country with focus on exports and services thrive economically in a pandemic? If the inner market of the EU is as good as closed, who would make the bet that an export focused country would be thriving? Sweden is dependent on other nations, especially in the EU and Scandinavia, so of course the economy wouldn't fare well.
> Sweden put stock in the sensibility of its people as it largely avoided imposing government prohibitions.
This is factually wrong. From the 27th of March it became a criminal offence to organize events of 50 or more people, down from the 500 that was decided on the 12th of March https://www.regeringen.se/artiklar/2020/03/forbud-mot-allman...
This article is an example of poor journalism. It misrepresents the situation in Sweden, while containing crucial factual mistakes bordering on misinformation while also trying to steer american policy making in a specific direction.
The amount of deaths in Sweden from Covid19 have been very high and many of the deaths has been completely unnecessary. This is nothing else than a cruel state sponsored murder on parts of the elderly population. Its also likely that the actual death toll is significantly higher than reported since many of the elderly dying at institutions was never tested for Covid19 In-fact at many regions of Sweden autopsies has been suspended during parts of the spring. The recommended treatment for these elderly has been injection of morphine (yes to elders with breathing difficulties).
There are stories of staff sometimes opening the windows while elderly confined to their rooms grasping for air. Family was not allowed to visit but staff was moving without protection gear between the rooms of sick and healthy ( because in Sweden the government early decided that masks are ineffective ways of protection ). Its still the official stance of Sweden that masks does not help against Covid19. But apparently sneasing in your armpit and washing your hands helps. In the beginning this was applied also at the institutions for the elderly. Some heroes objected and bought gear and significantly lowered the death rate early on. Others followed the advice from the "experts" as a good swede does. And the result sometimes was 50-75% dead in the total population of residents at the care facilities.
The Architect behind these state sponsored acts of murder is a man called Anders Tegnell. And you will be surprised to learn that this is the second time this very dangerous narcissist has been causing suffering and deaths in Sweden. Back in 2009 during H1N1 influenza (swine-flue) he was the person responsible for the purchasing and injecting the unsafe Pandemrix vaccine in the Swedish population as head of the vaccine department. Today it has amounted to a total of 600 then children and youths developing narcolepsy. He spent the following years defending the government against the victims who was seeking economic indemnity from the Swedish state medical insurance. When the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet later acquired emails of this mater he was caught on record emailing that the goverment agency he was working for at the time "was at a point of no return politically".
He was then recruited as the State Epidemiologist of the Public Health Agency of Sweden in 2013 as a thank you for his service. Now in 2020 he is directly responsible for the deaths of about 5500 swedes. You could argue that he is also responsible for some of the deaths in neighboring countries where there have been imported cases from Sweden.
This person already before the beginning of 2020 had caused 600 direct cases of mistreatment can now add 5500 deaths to his CV. And likely 1000s of people with lung-damages, muscle damaged and other severe trauma damage from intensive care. There are also reports of increased diabetes onset among Covid19 survivors and the ME/CFS that will likely be the result for many who got the disease.
If you are interested of the numbers and statistics you can check https://c19.se/ it has deaths and infected on a regional level. It can be helpful to understand that the city of Stockholm has had 2344 officially dead and 21490 official cases among its population of 975904. Tests results of antibodies have been reported in ranges from about 10% - 17%. But since testing was not allowed for most people until very recently the numbers can be either spot on or very off.
I was just poking at rough figures last night out of curiosity regarding when the other end of this arrives in terms of 60% herd immunity for the US. Just pulling numbers out of my ass, like 200,000,000 for 60% and an avg infection rate of 100,000/day. With those figures it's 5.5yrs before 60% gets infected. We're at more like 50,000/day last I checked, but who knows how accurate that is.
Either way, it looks like this is going to be a life of masks and social distancing for a long time. Hopefully a vaccine arrives in volume before 5+ years go by.
In Sweden people still seem happy to go out to bars and restaurants, even in the middle of a pandemic. It's non-stop work for the government to shut down venues that are crowded beyond the allowed covid19 congestion regulation.
This whole "even if restaurants and bars were open, nobody would go to them" narrative just doesn't bear out in reality.
We're seeing the same thing in the UK now as well.
Nowhere does it have any proof of restaurants losing all their customers. It says that economists predict a contraction (that hasn’t happened yet), that consumer spending at one point was down 25%, and that the manufacturing sector had to shut down due to supply chain issues.
I never said that restaurants have lost customers, just that there is still a very significant amount of people willing to go out anyway.
The Google Mobility report shows that retail & recreation (which includes restaurants) for Sweden is currently down only 1%!!! (workplaces -40%, transit -25%)