A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid
sebastianrushworth.com
sebastianrushworth.com
So numbers going down and death rate staying low should be partly connected to this. Also, Sweden is quite a different country to begin with. Sparsely populated and half of all households are single person. So this ‘doctor’ is a bit careless while he tells the world to do like Sweden. It might end up much worse.
I think the big differentiator is that for California at least, people have been staying at home since late March, with the exception of essential workers (~20%?). Many are working from home, but many are unemployed too.
So while Sweden still did a lot, the distinction is pretty large with regards to disruption to "normal" life. A year or so when we look back, it will be interesting to see how big of an impact that decision had!
I wish we had the technology to broadcast images from far away lands. Alas ..
Indeed; both Sweden (https://ycharts.com/indicators/sweden_unemployment_rate) and Norway (https://ycharts.com/indicators/norway_unemployment_rate) have experienced anomalous increases in their unemployment rates that seem clearly linked to the pandemic.
If the article's thesis is correct that Sweden minimally-disrupted the status quo, then we would have expected to see little employment response.
assume there won't be any effect does not make sense in interconnected EU economies
I also don't understand when he says there is/was no social distancing. That is totally not my experience here, a lot of people were working from home and commuter trains were quite empty.
The main problem was that the authority leaders don't believe in wide testing, PPE for nursing home workers or asymptomatic transmission, I guess.
A lot of people also bring their own beliefs about what is appropriate to the interpretation and discussion.
they obviously don't distance (by definition), but economic indicators suggest that Swede's do behave similar to countries that went into formal lockdowns. GDP in the second quarter was down 8.5%, which is not far off from the 10% in Germany or the US.
Just like in other EU countries, it is now the younger population which seems mostly affected, and thus the mortality is lower - which is ultimately some good news.
Summer holidays are now almost over though, so people are traveling home from vacations abroad, are going back to work, schools will start up soon and people finally get access again to health care (good luck seeing a doctor in July in Sweden). The impact remains to be seen, but it would be surprising if most other EU countries see infections increasing but not Sweden.
I remain pretty skeptical of this Swedish exceptionalism, so my guess is this blog post will not age well.
Sweden's death rate is down to zero today and has been trending down since mid April. Summer Holidays did not start until late May where deaths were already half of what they were in mid April. This post isn't aging, it's already aged.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Worse than 2019, which was an exceptionally good year, but most probably below the ten-year average. Might even land below the five-year average.
No, it isn't.
Sweden has fairly laggy reporting of deaths, with the deaths often taking several weeks to show up in statistics, so at any given date, deaths attributed to the last few days are always dropping to close to zero.
I looked into this a bit in mid-APRIL, when somebody claimed that deaths were dropping to zero. At the time, substantial revisions occurred for about three weeks after the date, and occasional revisions for about four weeks.
(It's entirely possible that similar phenomena occur in other countries; Sweden is the only country I looked at in detail).
Don’t take my word for it, see for yourself at https://morberg.github.io/covid-notebook/covid.html
GitHub repo here: https://github.com/morberg/covid-notebook
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
Downtrend in average deaths per day continues, currently at 6/day.
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
Any uptick at all is concerning. In fact, a flattening of the decline is concerning.
The implied thesis in the linked article is that Sweden has reached a level of herd immunity due to widespread T-cell responses, and that life in the country continues as normal.
If that is the case, then we would expect the infection curve in Sweden to follow a classic logistic model -- which is more or less symmetric. A rapid rise should be accompanied by a rapid fall.
An asymmetric curve or one that has a "second wave" of any size tends to refute this theory. It would suggest that there was in fact some meaningful intervention that changed: either the initial infection was among a different group (i.e., what the US saw with infections first dominated by New York and then later by other states) or there was an effective policy response that has begun to wane.
What one should expect, afaik, is a Gompertz curve - the derivative of which, depending on parameters, often rises quickly and drops slowly.
Michael Levitt calibrated a Gompertz model in April based on actions taken until that day, that predicted 5000 dead by 1-jul matched reality incredibly well - whereas the WHO/Ferguson model at the same time predicted 96,000 dead by 1-jul based on the same data.
Annual lockdown month happened:
https://hejsweden.com/en/swedish-holiday-dont-work-in-july/
Schools even close for ten weeks, and those will be over soon.
Case count will oscillate up and down as restriction levels and individual comfort levels oscillate. As we approach herd immunity, the oscillations will dampen while following a downtrend.
The cases/day downtrend is still very much intact, and while it could reverse, it is premature to be concerned.
Czechia has 200-300 daily infections and we have like 30 hospitalized patients also in country of 10.7M, so there is pretty much zero chance of dying from COVID, from those 390 people who dies in those 4 months (where usually dies around 40000 people from all causes) had other issues and coronavirus was unlikely cause of death
my guess is people who fell for this mass hysteria will be very quiet in year or two when we will look at yearly death stats and see mere blip because of COVID, where just cause of death may temporarily shift to COVID, but in the end total numbers of death will remain same. UK stats shows already for 6 weeks lower than 5 year average mortality and number of excess deaths is shrinking
In fact, more daily infections without more deaths are a good thing. It means the virus is not as dangerous as we thought and we're closer to herd immunity/the end of the pandemic.
Let's count how many people are in ER and how many die.
The conspirationist in me can't help but think that COVID has been the scapegoat for the worst financial crisis in this century.
While we look at meaningless COVID stats and debate wether we should wear a mask, we don't look at the real culprits for the current financial crisis that will take decades to heal (if it ever heals fully).
>Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.
Actually it might very well just be half a year until we have a vaccine. Multiple candidate vaccines are in phase 3 and they are already being produced en masse, ready to be released if the vaccines prove to be successful. And it's not like other countries in Europe "shut down completely" and remain shut until today. In Germany people are leading their normal lives, the only difference being that people wear masks in super markets, register on a list when visiting a restaurant and there are no mass events/discotheques. Remaining at this status for half a year or maybe a year to prevent tens of thousands of deaths seems extremely doable.
The swedish GDP is down 9% despite them (according to the article which is misrepresenting a lot of things) not locking down at all. Even if Germany took a completely different approach (which would have led to a New York Style situation in the whole country) there would basically not be a difference in gdp numbers.
Even if true, it's still less down than any other European nations, and the only one not in a recession, because you're not taking the previous quarter into account as well.
> Swedish GDP is up this quarter, as about the only nation in Europe
so... is it possible to talk about the estimated gdp right now or not? Because those two statements don't fit together.
You're casually talking about the deaths of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people.
_Of course_ your government cares. They _also_ care about needless death. They're trying to walk the tightrope.
If you want a look at a country that just goes: Eh, whatever - check out sweden, and the US.
Which have at least as much economic damage, if not far more.
You couldn't be more wrong.
I should note that I'm not saying it's unreasonable of people to be hesitant to take this particular vaccine, given how it is being rushed. Even scientists have said that there is not currently enough evidence of safety/efficacy that they would feel comfortable taking it or giving it to their families. [2]
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/sunday/coronaviru...
Even if a vaccine is approved in Q'21, due to manufacturing, supply chain and just general operations issues, it's going to be a while before a large part of the population is vaccinated.
I assume they'll prioritize medical workers and the elderly, then start working through the rest of the population. It wouldn't surprise me if it takes another 6 months to vaccinate less than 50% of the population (which, to be fair, may be enough).
We're probably looking at end of 2021 for enough vaccinations to happen for things to go back to "normal".
That's another year.
We'll be dealing with this virus permanently and it will likely be years, or decades, until there's a good enough vaccine for it to be safe for to return to the way they were.
In the mean time, things will change enough that going back to the old normal won't be an option by the time it's eventually safe enough to do it.
In my eyes, that is the best case scenario.
That pushes out herd immunity to late 2022.
The positive thing is there a lot of vaccine in development. I feel confident we'll find one that's at least somewhat effective.
the new normal is going to be with us for a very long time, so adjust and plan accordingly.
it has already been half a year.
taiwan didn't go into lockdown but the country respects social distancing and masks and is very adamant about quarantining, tracing and cleaning.
do you think the average american citizen will adhere to any of that? forced quarantine for 14 days if you are infected or fly-in while a phone app afterward traces your movements to make sure future outbreaks can be traced? will people wear masks? will people maintain the social good over the individual? (answer for the US is apparently not)
i don't know culturally how sweden viewed these things but from what i can tell most people at least tried to maintain some form of social distancing. some swede can chime in here and correct me on that.
but what they've said about the nordic countries though, is that sweden's economy has shrank the same size as denmark's[0], while denmark which went into lockdown, suffered 8x fewer deaths, 5x fewer by percentage of population. that is the effect no lockdown has had on sweden.
also as a discussion to that both sweden and denmark's new cases are slowly creeping up, but denmark's is at about a quarter (~100/day) compared to sweden (~400/day).
[0]: 4.5 for sweden, 4.1 for denmark. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...
In the end our high mortality rate can't be overlooked. We need to change our strategy for future similar pandemics. That said, I think the most interesting stats to look at when deciding what we should have done differently is the breakdown of deaths per age-group. Less than 100 deaths are among people younger than 50. So almost all of our ~6000 deaths were among the elderly. That is what needs to change. Next time we need to be quicker at protecting the old. Otherwise our strategy could have worked, the rest seem to be able to build up their defences to the virus.
The average number of people who die of influenza in the US is about 35,000. So we should expect 350,000 deaths and then we'll be all good?
The average YLL for people infected with covid is vastly smaller. You still don't want it, but the actual number is measured in months.
This is one of the worst headlines I've seen recently. The actual study measures years lost only of those that died. By that metric, if I cross the road today and get hit by a bus, the headline would be "crossing the road can cut life span by 40 years or more". There is zero valuable information in that headline.
My only issue with this title is that can- which is wrong and makes the title meaningless. The news is that on average it does cut lifespan of ten years.
Note that's quality-adjusted years of life for people who died with/from/by Covid-19, not of all those infected, because the majority of those infected lose 0 years of life so there's not much information in that metric, either.
So, yes, it does make sense to ask "how many years a person who died of Covid-19 could still enjoy had they not died of Covid-19". Just looking at how many people died of those who were infected simply ignores the fact that many people who die of Covid-19 would otherwise have gone on happily being productive and valuable members of their respective communities - and not shuffling, moaning zombies held together by arcane necromancy, waiting for a gust of wind to disintegrate. After all, while Covid-19 is very dangerous for people over 80, it is also quite dangerous for people over 50 and over 60, and those are ages where many people haven't even retired from their careers.
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[1] Not a direct quote, rather one from memory. I can provide the source if needed, it's a video of an hour-long interview with Ioannidis on youtube.
- 60% of the population get it - the IFR is 0.6% - Everyone who dies loses on average 10 years
it's 60% × 0.6% × 10yr = 0.036yr. That's less than two weeks. How much more are you willing to sacrifice for less than two weeks of lifespan?
“Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway. That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality.”
It’s just empirically true that dying at 80 is different from dying at 20 if you’re assessing the impact of a pandemic. I guess it needs to be pointed out that “different” has a distinct meaning from “way less tragic.”
It is surprising to hear someone who is supposed to care about the bodies and minds of people be such a cowboy when it comes to their lives. If it's not a big deal for people over 80 to die because "quite a few [of them] would have died this year anyway", maybe we should stop admitting people over 80 to hospitals and save the costs of their care? Does that really sound like a sensible proposition?
I am reminded of the Italian scientist, Rita Levi-Montalcini who receivead a Nobel prize in physiology of medicine at 77 and continued to work and make contributions well into her last years of life until she died at 103 [1]. Of course there are exceedingly few such exceptional people, but my point is that it is perfectly possible for someone to enjoy many years of a productive life after their 80'th birthday and perhaps we should be doing more to ensure that this is not such a rare occurrence, rather than assuming that all those old fossils are dying anyway and leave them to it because them young 'uns wants to go out dancin' and drinkin'.
After all, most people plan to grow old anyway. How many of us are comfortable with the idea that, in our old age, priority will be given to "the economy", not to mention the very economy we worked our arse off to keep going while we were young? What is this economy anyway, Moloch?
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This is miles from what he says. He is arguing for the adjustment of a statistic. He is arguing that Covid has had a minimal affect on the death rate and even smaller when you adjust for how many of the dead would already have been included in the much larger baseline number of expected annual deaths because they are over 80 and X% of those over 80 die each year even with no Covid.
I’m not even sure I agree with him on this or other arguments but it’s clear he values the life of the elderly. As an ER doctor he probably treats many (and many with Covid) each day. I think he’s earned the benefit of the doubt on valuing life, more than most of us here who treat and save no one.
>> “Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway. That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality
My comment:
>> If it's not a big deal for people over 80 to die because "quite a few [of them] would have died this year anyway".
Though I should perhaps not have paraphrased, I believe my comment captures the feeling of the doctor's statement well. Yes, he is making a point about mortality rates. Also, he's making the point that 6,000 people dead is a mere blip on mortality because most of them would be dying anyway. His entire post is a declaration that Covid-19 and the deaths from it are not a big deal because most were very old and on their way out anyway.
Don't forget the '17 flu seasons was 65k deaths in the US. So we're at a little under 3x right now. So yes, Covid is worse, but we don't bat an eye at 65k deaths due to the flu.
This is simply not true in general. The vast majority of people who come down with covid have a minor illness, and many of them do not even realise what it was. I have three friends who had positive tests and no symptoms beyond those of the common cold. All of the available data supports this being the normal case, and serious complications being either a rare case of bad luck, or a result of underlying illnesses.
> a good amount of those discharged form hospital are looking at permanently reduced lung function
If you have any respiratory infection serious enough to put you in the hospital, you're probably looking at a longer recovery and possibly at long-term reduced lung function. But the relatively young & healthy mostly don't end up in hospital with covid, just as they don't end up in hospital when they get the flu.
Selecting only the most serious cases (hospital admissions) and talking about their outcomes is not useful for drawing general conclusions about the pandemic or the way countries have chosen to respond to it.
1) Only as long as they are old people. The moment flu kills even a couple children, everybody goes apoplectic.
2) I suspect that one of the takeaways from Covid is going to be that viruses (even flu) cause a lot more long-term damage than we give them credit for. Nobody was funding brain or circulatory scans for flu patients--we're going to get some of that data as a side benefit of all the Covid analysis.
And the flu certainly can cause long-term damage.
"Other possible serious complications triggered by flu can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscle (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure (for example, respiratory and kidney failure). Flu virus infection of the respiratory tract can trigger an extreme inflammatory response in the body and can lead to sepsis, the body’s life-threatening response to infection."[2]
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm [2]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/symptoms.htm#complications
How can we compare Covid numbers to the flu when the US has gone into lockdown, schools closed, everyone that can is WFH. No concerts or sporting events
totally different circumstances
Sweden might be a more accurate comparison since they didn’t go into full lockdown and it’s at 10x
In the last ten years we (in the US) have lost +500,000 people to the flu.
For some reason the people that died from the flu must be lesser in value because nobody did anything about it.
You would think that a single year of 65k deaths would be enough for everybody to wear masks the following flu season. And yet?
No economic shutdowns. No masks. No restrictions on schools. Literally nothing other than vaccines that mostly don’t work.
How is that an argument for less-drastic measures?
The "with shutdowns, masks and closed schools" line also assumes the effectiveness of all those measures, and ignores the glaring problem that they simply kick the can down the road -- there is no appetite for shutdowns and closed schools until the end of 2021, but a vaccine could easily take that long (if not longer) to be generally available -- assuming any of the current vaccine candidates work well. So what, exactly, is the plan?
For flu you're using sophisticated statistical modelling of excess death combined with community surveillance of use of primary and secondary care. This will tend to overcount.
For covid-19 you're using "died after testing positive for covid, or with covid mentioned as the cause on the death certificate". This will tend to undercount (even when taking into account the slight overcount involved in people who die from other things after a +ve test).
I think this so called Doctor is just trying to push a narrative and links to no research or sources for any of his assumptions or data.
This article has no credibility.
What Covid-19 made me realise is that there are tens of thousands of lives we could be saving each year by adopting some simple behavioural rules that definitely do not need to harm the economy. For example, stay home when you have flu-like symptoms, don't touch your face, wash your hands thoroughly, sneeze into your elbow or a handkerchief and get rid of it immediately and so on. No need for lockdowns or anything- just keep in the front of peoples' minds the fact that diseases can be carried around, are carried around, by people doing normal people things all together in a big place with lots of people.
In fact, I believe I've seen signs advising such measures to curb the spread of disease around the London Underground and I think also the Paris Metró, but I've always, until now, ignored them. When I had flu-like symptoms I've always soldiered on and went to work because that was expected of me and that's what my coleagues also did- and more than once I actually got sick after noticing someone sick at work [1].
Well, no more. Not for me anyway. I had no idea. But now I do.
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[1] And one time I got a real nasty stomach bug after I used the toilets after a coleague who had just recovered from a similar infection. I do always wash my bloody hands after, but it seems he didn't and well, there was one door handle in the loo. Yeeew dude. Yeew.
See "Figur 1" https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/0ad710ef37...
Have been taking hour walks in the sun since May.
Never have I gotten so much sun before! Feels great
Still do what I can at sunrise and set
This is basically deliberate disinformation. In April and early May Sweden had 30-50% excess mortality. And this was despite actually stopping the virus through soft lockdown. What the full count would have been had they let the virus rage unchecked is hard to say, but he's comparing the numbers from a virus that was stopped relatively early with the normal numbers of deaths for a whole year. Do the same exercise for April and it doesn't look good at all.
The reality is that more than 5000 people died unnecessarily in Sweden through failed government policy. And that's before we start counting the adverse health effects on the people who survived.
Now possibly all these countries will be able to keep their low rates, but I'm concerned about the future: number of cases is on the rise again in Europe as a whole and increases in deaths will probably follow within the next month. I think we're still a way from being able to make a final reckoning.
The do-not-lock down case is mainly that we won't be able to control it until there's a vaccine, so lock down or no, total deaths will be similar. This isn't bourne out by the figures. Countries that allowed a larger spike initially have had much higher mortality rates (e.g. Compare the UK and Germany with now similar infection rates but very different mortality rates). Flattening the curve genuinely does seem to save lives.
The UK was keen to play the herd immunity game until they realised just how many people that would kill.
That leaves us with improved treatment. We clearly don't have a miracle drug, but my impressive is that doctors know much better now than a few months ago what actually causes Covid-deaths and that they are now far beyond just supplying oxygen according to treatment recipes for completely different illnesses and hoping for the best. I expect the implications of this to become the center of heated debates any day now.
That said the number of dead over the whole crisis are high, and that should not be overlooked. We need to change out strategy for future similar situations. Imo we should have protected the elderly better since that's were the large majority of deaths were (less than 100 of the deaths were among people younger than 50).
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=swe&areas=nor&are...
Excess mortality is the best measure, because it accounts for the impact of the disease, as well as the impact of actions taken to fight it (not all of which will be good).
Looking only at covid deaths is therefore misleading, as it only optimizes for that one thing. Looking at the big picture is the better way to make policy.
> "That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality."
This sounds wrong to me for several reasons. First of all, it's silly assuming that other countries are shutting down their economies without a very good reason for doing so. As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & death rate was growing so fast, that it was putting hospitals & morgues way beyond their capacity. At the same time, the situation was keeping non-COVID, hospital-worthy visits out of the healthcare system, thus creating a massive public health problem.
(Let's not forget the improvised hospitals, improvised morgues, etc. These were very real.)
It'd be interesting knowing why somehow the COVID cases 'vanished' from this doctor's hospital. But instead of looking into why this happened, this doctor is just saying "turns out that the problem went away, so in the end it was good that we didn't bother too much about it".
And the thing is - we're not through it yet. Thankfully the death rate seems not being as bad as we thought it could be, but this could very well be down to current measures such as isolating elder people, testing at-risk populations, higher awareness levels, and the fact that the average infection age is now much lower than it was in March. So, now, healthcare systems are not collapsing.
There's a myriad of variables that likely affect the virus spread and outcome. For example, the age and characteristics of the populations where the virus is spreading, how population is distributed around the territory (and its density), how frequently this population "comes together" (social behavior - ever seen a swede profusely hugging and kissing?, public transportation, remote working…), and so on.
And when it comes to the healthcare system capacity debate: Sweden frequently put elder, infected people straight in palliative care (http://archive.is/VC5vb), bypassing hospitals. Other countries did admit elder people into hospitals, thus putting more strain into the healthcare system, which later on prompted a lockdown to prevent said system from collapsing.
I certainly wouldn't want to assume that governments only ever do the correct thing, or the thing that is in my best interests, so I think it's reasonable to ask questions.
> As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & death rate was growing so fast, that it was putting hospitals & morgues way beyond their capacity. At the same time, the situation was keeping non-COVID, hospital-worthy visits out of the healthcare system, thus creating a massive public health problem.
The UK enlisted the army to build enormous field hospitals and staffed them with doctors and nurses from other hospitals. Most of them closed after seeing only a few patients, since all other hospitals were operating far below capacity. Emergency rooms were ghost towns. Meanwhile, all elective surgery was cancelled, reducing the quality of life for thousands of people while doctors stood around waiting for the promised influx that never happened.
It seems to me that the response in the West has been largely reactionary, driven by fear and public opinion, and disconnected from any real analysis of what genuinely works and what the long-term plan is -- with the possible exception of Sweden, who despite all the "they don't care" rhetoric you see in other comments, not only put a lot of analytical care into their approach, but discussed that analysis openly.
Many countries had problems with care home workers abandoning their jobs, for example to return to their home countries before borders closed. There are some quite horrific stories of the terrible conditions created in care homes in some of the places with excess death spikes.
The imagery of ice-rink morgues etc had a similar effect. There was no real demand surge for morgue space, but undertakers were refusing to work until they were supplied with ample PPE because they thought they would be infected by the bodies with a killer virus. Same story in Bergamo. So then a sudden shortfall in PPE was converted into a shortfall in funeral capacity, even though at that point there was no sudden tsunami of bodies. This then led to more panic especially amongst health system workers.
It's very hard to disentangle what really went on here.
I think it makes sense to isolate anyone who tests PCR positive for coronavirus, right?
Also, is it 100% sure that asymptomatic people will not transmit the disease? What if they are just pre-symptomatic? Where do you establish the cut-off?
Asymptomatic is being used as a different classification than pre-symptomatic in the literature. Asymptomatic means you never develop symptoms. Pre-symptomatic means you haven't yet but will. Pre-symptomatic phase is not long though. Typically just 1-3 days, I think, from the latest literature.
Given the tiny window of time that exists when people are infectious and might not know it, and given the very low likelyhood of a PCR test being done in exactly that time, and given that PCR testing has a lot of problems (e.g. triggers even if your body has destroyed the virus), and given that nurses and doctors are pretty important, I can't see it being useful to actively test in hospitals. It's everywhere by now anyway.
Is that true? Are all the schools closed? Are most people working from home? Are most businesses shutdown?
That's not what I've read (outside this article).
What does that mean? As a scientist myself, 'science' can basically never say anything definitive about reality. Not for something extremely well measured and controlled like GR, and especially not something where the evidence on the ground and influencing factors (policy, social opinion, culture) shift with a frequency on the same order of scale that our measurements can be tallied.
You can't have a scientific response to the virus when you don't know what the asymptomatic transmission rate is, or what the true death rate is. As can be seen here it does not go well when they are made to even consider that they don't have all the information needed for a scientific response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077233
"I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden."
Look at this paragraph. It jumped right out at me, why is nobody else commenting on this?
The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming in to the hospital was covid. Practically everyone who was tested had covid, regardless of what the presenting symtom was. People came in with a nose bleed and they had covid. They came in with stomach pain and they had covid.
What sort of disease has no specific symptoms at all? I thought COVID patients were presenting with an unusual form of dry pneumonia?
If you look at the history of epidemiology and virology, it is unfortunately filled with stories of misinterpreted data leading to incorrect belief that a virus was the underlying cause. For a long time diseases caused by vitamin deficiencies were blamed on viruses although none actually existed.
When you read that some doctors experience of COVID was "people turned up as normal but suddenly they were all testing positive", you do have to wonder what is going on. I thought COVID patients in hospitals were clearly COVID patients by symptoms, but the list of associated symptoms seems to keep widening. That's confusing and worrying indeed.
https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-08-04_SE_Mobil...
In an ideal world, the government would listen to the experts, they would reach some reality-based and science-based consensus, and then the people would follow those conclusions because it's the right thing to do.
But that's an ideal world.
And sure, one of them is likely right and one wrong, but we won't know which one until we get more data.
Now, as for the current pandemic, data is plenty already.
NYC is at 2716 cases per 100k and 281 deaths per 100k: https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases
States with aggressive reopening policies like Florida/Louisana/Arizona etc had spikes recently but are also coming back down. They are sitting at around 2-3k cases per 100k (deaths will lag).
Even if the reason why those states "peaked" is because of herd immunity, it seems like it still requires at least 3k cases per 100k. That would translate to 300k cases for a population of 10 million but Sweden is only at 80k right now.
I highly doubt they have herd immunity.
The same is true of Sweden as well, of course. Social interaction has collapsed to very close to nil, and any article that claims that things are "normal" is lying to push an agenda.
No fans. Playing in two bubble cities in Canada.
"NBA is just getting started"
No fans. Playing in one bubble city.
And I was talking about NYC. Zero NBA or NHL games are taking place in NYC.
In an average month in NYC, pre-COVID, there are dozens of enormous sports events. Hundreds of concerts. Tens of thousands of significant parties. If social interaction were on a scale from 0 to 100, and 100 was the before, right now NYC is at a less than 1. So when someone looks at NYCs current infection rate and presumes that means there is some herd immunity or the like, I don't think they're fully taking into account the reality on the ground.
Both are equally important pieces of the puzzle. They work together to get R below 1.
Which leaves most of the population vulnerable, and re-introduction a possibility.
You have to get R significantly below 1 and the whole ecosystem (for the US: the whole world) to do it.
Or, you need herd immunity compatible with the R that you can maintain indefinitely - which la likely >2 so immunity needs to be >60%.
Any other way leaves you with the possibility of reintroduction as far as I understand.
Anyways, I don't think measuring recovery in the number of events and parties is a very good metric. Though I agree without that there probably isn't going to be true herd immunity for this and I wish people would stop throwing around the term.
b) Further, it was about New York City!
Extremely few sports are taking place in NYC, and even if we discount that, from the overarching context those sports having a tiny, tiny fraction of the communicability potential.
25% percent of NYC was seropositive in May. So that works out to about 25k per 100k people.
The reported cases have always been just the tip of the iceberg. And we never knew how big the underwater part was. We still down't.
Take the current situation, is the disease penetration larger than that in March/April? Most likely not, not even close, yet the reported new cases are about 5x larger.
As long at the confirmed cases is within some constant fraction of true number, it will be a decent proxy. This makes sense to me since some x% of the people who get infect will need hospitalization so they will get counted towards the statistics.
You should care. The disease propagation is all about the "unseen" part.
Otherwise the numbers are not comparable at all. Back then we caught 10% of cases, today perhaps 50%
Thus you can't extrapolate from old numbers into the new.
if anything you'd need to triple the numbers or more
Even when directly appealing to people the participation rate is likely higher among people who suspect they may have had it.
We know that testing was very limited early in the outbreak, when NYC was hit, and that it caught only a fraction of the people infected. But all metrics are that there is still a huge victim base in the area.
The drop is more likely entirely behavioral.
Even at 14% seropositivity the true number of people that had the virus is likely larger. There are reports that some (many?) people that recover do so without needed antibodies.
Working backwards, taking the fairly accepted value of 0.6% fatality rate, the 30K deaths in NYC would indicate around 5 million infections. Now the the NYC fatality rate is likely higher due to Cuomo's mind boggling order regarding nursing homes.
Regardless I think it is fair to estimate that the true number of cases in NYC is likely to fall between the reported 400k and the upper limit of 5 million. At 25% seropositivity would be around 2 million, to me sounds believable.
Hope those 5000+ unnecessary deaths were worth 3.3%.
"Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway."
Wow.
Both countries have it under control now. But it's clear Finland's shutdown saved lives.
The shutdown will be looked back on in 10 years as one of the worst mistakes the world has ever made.
For myself, I definitely sense that we (collectively, or nation by nation) could have followed various pathways (and to some extent, we did). The "right" answer was (and is) not known, and we had a choice between erring on the side of caution over the damage caused by the disease versus that caused by economic disruption.
For now, I'm still in favor of erring in the direction of caution over the disease impact, but will concede that history may judge things quite differently.
That’s just a piece of the all cause mortality due to the COVID response.
And then after accepting all that direct cost, then you can start evaluating the economic damage on top (which to some extent is unavoidable regardless of lockdown policy).
I'd love to believe that you're right (and 3 months ago, I felt the same way). But I just don't.
Sweden didn’t make this bet. Finland, Norway, and New Zealand did.
Sustained lockdown and lack of travel will be very costly if it has to be maintained for two years; and the fatigue from maintaining it will undo all of the supposed success.
This is not decidable at this point in time, and likely not within the next 5 years.
Of course you could say that math is horrible and inhumane, and any equation involving dollars and human lives will feel that way. But the point is that health care spending is already rationed by something like that standard, and every dollar of GDP that disappears is a dollar that's unavailable to spend in other ways (including medical treatments that are cost-effective by that standard).
To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost-effective to me by that standard. Their response otherwise seems reasonable to me, not obviously better than stricter approaches but not obviously worse.
https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...
This is the medical literature version of the xkcd green M&M comic:
Average age of the covid-19 dead in Sweden is 82, average life expectancy is 83. The majority of the deaths also occurred at elder care homes where the expected survival time is less than two years. And, just like everywhere else, the covid-19 dead are much more likely to belong to certain risk groups associated with earlier deaths as well.
10 QALY lost per death sounds way, way too high to me.
> To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost-effective to me by that standard.
The reasoning behind this, which is the same in the rest of the Nordics and the Netherlands, is that a general mask mandate is counter-productive. No-one is arguing that medical grade face masks properly handled, worn, and disposed of help prevent the spread. The problem, and this should be obvious if you live in a place where masks are mandated, is that people don't have proper masks and don't wear them properly. So masks can create a sense of false security, and make people slack off on their distancing, which means a mask mandate can result in a net negative result.
Right or wrong, I don't know, and I don't know if we'll ever know, but that's at least the reasoning behind it. And it definitely sounds plausible to me.
I'm in Hawaii which has had a mask mandate for months now, and the way regular people are actually handling their masks in the real world is very, very far from the way trained medical professionals handle their masks.
That's life expectancy at BIRTH. It would seem to me that the relevant statistic in the case of an 80 year old dying is the average life expectancy they had at 80, which is considerably more than 3 years.
The biggest disingeniousness of the people talking about the covid-19 specific death toll is that the assumption is that if not for covid-19, everyone would have lived forever and ever, and that's simply not true. Looking at the demographics of the dead, for many, covid-19 is what happened to push them over. If not for covid-19, something else would have done it in a similar timeframe, especially since the flu seasons of 2018/19 and 2019/20 were so mild.
Yes, there are people who died significantly before their time, but they're a small minority of the dead. So 10 QALY lost per dead is way too much. 1 QALY lost per dead is too little, I agree. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
As to masks, I also agree correct use is a problem. Here (SF Bay Area) the East Asian population seems to use them competently and consistently, but everyone else is hit or miss. I would have liked to see more public education, rather than just the unexplained mandate; but the probability that masks primarily explain East Asia's success in containing the virus seems high enough, and the cost seems low enough, that they seem like a favorable bet to me. I do also think it's quite possible that other factors (e.g., different degrees of pre-existing T cell immunity from other coronaviruses) will turn out to explain that big difference though.
As did Peru. Despite following WHO globalist advice to the letter.
Why is your cherry pick right and mine wrong?
so yes, temporarily Sweden stats may look worse because people who would die this or next year died in short time window in these few months, but those people will be missing in stats down the road
it's already happening in UK, for 6 consecutive weeks they have lower than 5yr average death toll and excess deaths are shrinking because oft his
https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032
so while you may pat yourself on shoulders how good you done without spike in the end you both reach pretty much same result spike or not
Contrary to the author’s claims, no one in their right mind went into lockdown trying to decrease the total number of deaths, not directly at least. Lockdowns were/are there to smoothen the spike of cases and prevent medical system from the overload.
As to diminishing cases, could it be that people got the habits of social distancing and hand washing? In a small country without large cities it would not take much to take R_t to the values that are close enough to 1.0.
For one, his per-capita-death-rates are wayyy off. (1 out of 200 dying? try around 8% in Spain and Italy...)
For 2, yes, it's precisely about slowing the spread 1) giving a chance for emergency services to handle the influx instead of being slammed in one go 2) attempting to quash a given outbreak
So many sweeping generalizations here and so little counter-point to the facts the general public have become well-acquainted with, I'm afraid our Good Doctor seems a bit eccentric and witless writing such a trivializing dismissive blog post.
Let's call him "an outlier" even for Sweden, as travel is not making his strange claims that "covid is over for Sweden" look even sillier.
Covid is not finished for "the world" at large, and it's an interconnected world, and suspicion of "t-cells bearing COVID immunity rather than antibodies" as if the PCR were just a cheap placebo test and no antibodies were detected in prior COVID sufferers (it does detect them.)... this is all making light of what deserves serious engagement.
Fire this man or get a committee investigating his various claims as flippant blogs are not the appropriate realm for such incendiary topics.
And the "T-cell immunity" is factually correct. Even the NYTimes wrote an article on how people who have never been exposed to Covid, do indeed, appear to have some level of immunity due to T-cell and likely prior infection by a related virus.[1]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/health/coronavirus-immune...
You have conflated the CFR and IFR, and are thereby spreading gross misinformation. From the article:
> And remember, the risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually do get infected.
They're talking about the risk of dying "if you actually do get infected" (i.e., IFR), not the risk of dying if you get infected and test positive (i.e., CFR). Most people infected suffer mild enough symptoms that they don't seek a test, so the CFR is much higher than the IFR. This is especially true during severe outbreaks, where people with mild symptoms are explicitly encouraged to just stay home until they get better (or worse) to avoid further stressing the medical system.
A recent meta-analysis estimates the IFR around 0.7%[1], a little higher than the Swedish doctor's numbers but pretty close. The exact number will vary dramatically with the age structure of the population, since the IFR is >100x for old people vs. young.
1. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...
Eg. They don't have to keep working or risk not having healthcare.
The US needs the big government sponsored lockdown because otherwise US companies will force people to go to work when it's not safe
Here’s a chart showing the effective transmission rate (R value) as a function of “social connectivity” and “herd immunity”;
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1291860668342079490?s=21
I think what you can find in many examples across the globe is that without an innate geographical advantage or well-established cultural protocols, you cannot reduce “social connectivity” enough with an immunity of 0% to keep R below 1.
For most peoples and places, it’s only through a combination of reducing social connectivity and increased immunity that R will ultimately fall below 1.
Interestingly, both factors do not necessarily only move in one direction along the axis over time, and neither factor can be entirely controlled, even given an effective and widely produced vaccine.
I can only pray that at least immunity is quite durable, lest we find ourselves in a repeating cycle of R cresting well above 1.
At least until an effective vaccine is available, there is a massive cost to pay to push R downward, regardless of which axis you choose to push on.
And the next time someone laments why did we lockdown if only to end up with so many cases, I think for most countries the only answer to get to R below 1 is actually that “you need both”.
Everyone, as far as I'm concerned, has a right to proper healthcare. The medical professionals realized early on that based on how easily the virus spreads and how it is plenty more lethal than a common cold, they knew letting everyone catch it at the same time would've overwhelmed the healthcare system. There is no chance most people would've gotten proper care, thus more people would've died than had to.
I'm still not fully convinced of what the doctor had to say. Let's give it a full-year where we've gone through all the seasons to see if he really is right about the fact that Sweden did it the right way.
EDIT: Also, during those first months medical professionals learned more about how to handle it. They took those learnings and applied them to the next group of patients. That knowledge would've never been put to use (in theory) if everyone had the virus at the same time.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20096909v...
https://covid19-projections.com/denmark vs https://covid19-projections.com/sweden
Its also possible Sweden just got lucky with the prevalent strain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.233866v1....
I would love it if Sweden was right and tackled this in a way that does look like a seasonal flu, but I think the science is still out on that. It does seem the science points mildly towards it being quite as deadly as initially thought, but I would not the Swedish death rate a total win.
<snark> Forget all that Sweden is the best approach, we should copy it in America especially the very solid social health care system :) </snark>
I guess my counter would be:
* It was solved at a greater expense of human life, its easy to say "those people would have died" but that is harder to prove ethically. Could the excess deaths have lived on _longer than a flu season_?
* Is there a good argument that it is in fact over in Sweden?
* Are there other variables that might have made Covid-19 not so bad in Sweden?
If I was to take more direct counters to the article:
> I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway.
Maybe, but that could also be a case of thinking that the death rate is a fairly simple linear model, which would fly in the face of the various epidemiological models that we use (not just for covid but since the 1920s)
> No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated.
Is Covid-19 completely new? By this reasoning it would as stated be more infectious due to a lack of known immunity. With this line of reasoning why wouldn't a _different_ cornovirus also give a more uniform immunity? Why would a novel Cornovirus strain have a greater impact over a novel Influenza strain?
I could go one but I feel like I am sniping.
Personally I dont think the world wide response has been great, I do think we have overreacted but I also would argue that its not just another influenza and should be ignored as such.
Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients – An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...
“Interpretation
Study findings revealed possible disruption to micro-structural and functional brain integrity in the recovery stages of COVID-19, suggesting the long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...
“Manifest brain damage in 55% COVID-19 patients
..higher bilateral gray matter volumes (GMV) in olfactory cortices, hippocampi, insulas, left Rolandic operculum..
No significant difference between severe and non-severe COVID”
Anyway it may not be a perfect extrapolation or comparison but if you take his numbers, 6000 dead in a country of 100 million people and you adjust that to the US population don't you come out with 330 million people and 198000 dead?
We are not far from that now and if the trend continues we will blow past that in a month or so. That's one race I didn't want to be winning.
His name tag says "Underläkare", which is a title meaning "assistant physician". The term is defined in this Swedish Wikipedia article:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underl%C3%A4kare
Google translates it as follows:
"Assistant physician in Sweden is a title for all the doctors on duty who do not have specialist competence..."
Underneath that it says "VO kirurgi och urologi" which translates as "Acting supervisor[1] - surgery and urology".
The red tag says "Läkare", which is just "Doctor".
[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO (literally "officer on duty")
In fact, in rereading my own comment I notice that I fat-fingered a number in the comparison I was trying to make. Where I show their Dead vs Population size as 6000 / 100 million that should've been 6000 / 10 million. I had one too many zeroes on their population figure.
Not my finest hour and a real drag for me personally since I have spent so much of my career QC'ing other people's work and pointing out their defects. I need to pay closer attention to my own output since I obviously am not perfect either.
Claims are made that SARS-CoV-2 must be widely spread through the community now (because cases requiring hospitalisation are dropping) but what then are the numbers for neuro, renal, respiratory etc complications caused by this virus?
Personally, the stats make me reasonably confident I would survive an infection, but the fact that significant quality-of-life effects in the mid to long term seem to be a random distribution scares the willies out of me.
The ideological clarity of the covid regime is sublime. All sorts of debated matters are decided, by "science", and that is that. Whether by accident or design, the covid regime, the "new normal" that MSM has been educating us about from the very beginning, is a blueprint for a global authoritarian technocracy with its own internal logic, ethics, and mores.
Please note I stress that I am commenting on the virus "regime".
Is the virus real? I think we should assume it is real, regardless of the facts. Let's say it is real.
Should we concern ourselves with whether it is (a) natural phenomena, or (b) man-made;
and whether regardless of its provenance, the spread of the virus was due to (a) chance events, or (b) intentional release?
Again, I say, to seriously answer any of these questions is an unreasonable burden. So, let's call it an "act of god".
Now, we are at the point to discuss sensible response, rational response, reasonable response, to a collective health issue: a virus that has reached pandemic stage and posses certain risk probabilies across various demographics.
Does the above scenario mandate that governmental norms be bent if not broken? For example, is it acceptable that from now on society will be governed by executive decrees and not legislative bodies?
How long should we tolerate such encroachments on what we know to be the basis of free societies?
Should not a health care matter of such grave import and impact on our lives be subject to the input of a wide range of experts in related subject matters?
What "authority" has designated certain institutions, such as the Imperial College as an example, as fonts of indisputable claims regarding the gravity of the situation and required remedies?
Why are dissenting experts and workers in the "frontlines" subject to media blackout, de-platforming, and loss of income?
I could go on and practically write a little book here. But that should suffice as to "why" some of us are rather concerned, to say the least.
These are legitimate questions that definitively need to be asked and answered in context of a complete workover of our societies, instead of being dishonestly dismissed.
edit: also state backed TRT https://twitter.com/RachaelRuble/status/1291957654697455621
It's important information that I don't think should be censored, but it goes contrary to WHO.
The name is very unusual for a Swedish person, I can only find three people with that last name in Sweden, and none of them has the first name Sebastian.
The image of him in a gas mask is vague enough that you can't identify the person based on that.
The blog is a hosted wordpress that only has a couple of articles going back a few days.
The English is very good, I didn't see a single Swedishism, which makes it less likely the writer is actually Swedish.
The article talks about other kinds of deaths that are also bad, and mentions opioid deaths. That is a cause of death that is extremely rare in Sweden, but which would be familiar to an American audience. Using that as an example while talking about Swedish deaths is very odd.
So all in all this piece smells off.
I found him on LinkedIn as well, so, ok, it's a real person.
I have now tried to contact him by Facebook Messenger, where he has had an account for many years. I asked if he wrote those texts on Wordpress.
> Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available.
Wouldn’t shutting down completely for a month or two effectively end covid ?
You'd have to be completely sure that during your lockdown, the virus burned itself out inside each household. You'd have to have a really strict lockdown (e.g. troops on the streets, imprisonment for violation) to do that; I think maybe only Italy & China did anything close to that. And of course it would only take a handful of exceptions to re-ignite the virus (see Australia).
They had the distinct advantages of being a remote island with very few cases to begin with and relatively little international traffic compared to most of the rest of the world which was easily shutdown. They had a really good chance to beat it, they took it and they succeeded -- but I think it was a pretty unique situation.
I know the UK was going for herd immunity at first and then switched
Spain did lockdown drastically once things got pretty bad
My next question would be on Sweden’s case: is herd immunity real? Or as the virus spreads it reinfects ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_lockdown_in_...
However, since they opened back up, they've seen a fairly large resurgence in cases:
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
Lots of evidence now that aerosol covid is a major risk with prolonged exposure.
Scientist have found the virus in ventilation systems of hospitals supporting this.
This means the ‘aura’ of effect for an individual is quite large, especially in buildings with shared ventilation systems. This still requires much greater exposure time due to virion density decreases over distance from source, but that time would be available in a quarantine. Therefore, a steady trickle of infection is likely because not everyone lives in a house, and because there will never be enough N95 masks (we had to start prepping for this 10 years ago to make enough masks).
That, and the fact that people move between borders means it will not go away on a meaningful month time scale because there is no way to coordinate an entire world response. As you can see, the easiest geography to protect is islands...
I've been hearing people say "just wear a mask," but considering aerosol risk, they probably aren't effective enough for anything prolonged and indoors.
Bathrooms appear to be a large risk of aerosol due to flushing induced formation.
All it would take is 1 out of 1M people to break the rules and you're dealing with another outbreak.
Obviously none of these are practically possible.
we will know only later what was the impact of this virus, but everything leads to completely unproportiante response with pretty much no excess deaths, if you look at yearly stats even in failed countries like UK or US
in UK is already in 6 consecutive weeks total death toll from all causes lower than 5 year average implying people who would die through the year just died within short time window and now the stats are catching up and number of excess deaths is falling
https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032
I can imagine it's gonna be pretty much same in US despite anti-Trump hysteria amd scaremongering, but of course you won't have huge headlines about lower than average death toll per week, that's not very attractive for media
I wish people would be so enthusiastic about other deaths too, half million people in US die every single year from smoking, but I don't see anyone banning smoking as much as we wasted tons of money on this minor virus killing pretty much nobody
We forgot about the whole "flatten the curve" thing awfully quick. Overwhelmed medical system of Italy was the main cause for their grim consequences. Good for Sweden their healthcare has so much backup capacity.
It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more.
The first thing to note is that in the UK, with a supposed lockdown imposed (now lifted), the number of deaths from Covid-19 so far is 46,596 [1]. That's in a country of almost 70 million [2]. The article above reports about 6,000 deaths in Sweden so far. We can look at different ratios and statistics, like per capita death rate (for the entire country) or case fatality ratio, etc, and we must of course accept that "death from Covid-19" sometimes means "death with Covid-19" and sometimes "death by Covid-19". Finally, we can note that the majority of the people who died were of a certain age and had underlying issues so they may have been dying already anyway.
The fact remains that more than 45,000 people is a big number of people to die within a couple of months. It's a much larger number of deaths than 7,000 and it's not a number that justifies sitting around doing nothing. Not for policy makers, not for doctors, not for the general population.
Of course the article makes the point that the situation in Sweden is now much better than in other places, because Sweden did not impose a lockdown like those other countries. So, in theory, without a lockdown the UK would have many fewer infections thanks to heard immunity. But, what would be the cost of acquiring this herd immunity? If more than 45,000 people died under lockdown, how many would have died without it? Of course this is a difficult question to answer- but it stands to reason that we would see more deaths, perhaps many more [4]. How many peoples' lives saved justify a lockdown? 50,000? 100,000? 10,000?
To be honest, I can't get my head around this dreadful arithmetic. Epidemiologists and perhaps some doctors also are used to thinking of case fatality rates and population-level statistics, but the fact still remains that even a thousand people dead from a single, possibly preventable cause, is something that the majority of the population of any country would accept as intolerable. See for instance the recent explosion in Beirut which killed "only" 135 people (last I looked). And yet, this seems to be considered by everyone as a great tragedy (certainly by the press, always obsessed with body counts, but by everone else also). If we accept that everything should be done to avoid losing 135 people in an explosion, shouldn't everything be done to avoid losing more than 45,000 people in a disease outbreak?
_______________
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom reports a 2020 estimate of 67,886,004.
[3] This all is before looking at excess deaths in the UK in the months of the lockdown, which I won't do because I find the way these are measured and reported a bit confusing (e.g. I've found excess mortality plots for the last five years - but that's a short time and there may be much more variation over 10 years, say, or 35, so I'm not sure we learn much by looking at those plots).
[4] Again I'm not going to try to quantify "how many more would have died without lockdown" because we simply don't have the data for accurate estimates. Some estimates have been derived, notably the estimates from the Imperial Colledge modelling team, but there's no way to rely on them with any certainty.
That is (luckily imo) only a tiny minority of Germans. I would be very interested: are the current restrictions really that bad? You need to wear a mask in supermarkets, do you think that's actually that big of a deal?
I suppose the Swedish response would be that these deaths weren't prevented, just delayed, as there'll be a second wave, third wave... and lockdowns can't continue forever.
If I told you to list 3 things you're grateful for each day, and hounded and sanctioned you for not doing it, if I talked about all these Nazis I know who incidentally also are not doing it, and meaningfully nodded your way every time, and made fun of you in filter bubbles... wouldn't you just do this minor thing that may actually be beneficial and is unlikely to do harm?
This is the problem, and to use a pandemic to normalize that just makes it worse, morally speaking.
The difference being that there is a strong scientific consensus that wearing a mask will save many peoples lives. I don't want to be patronizing and me pointing out that op was in a minority merely wanted to correct the "fellow germans" statement. But sometimes it's difficult not to be patronizing if you are following the strong scientific consensus on a topic. Because wearing masks shouldn't be a political issue if you can't develop a reasonable counterargument.
> Because wearing masks shouldn't be a political issue if you can't develop a reasonable counterargument.
You are the one making it about the masks and only the masks, even the protests aren't, and I for one said IMO the pushiness is the problem, not what is being pushed.
It is not. Masks are meant to protect everybody, they are not meant to protect yourself. I'm not in favor of preventing consenting mentally stable adults from doing basically anything to themselves and – to answer your question – I would obviously object to other people forcing me into adopting any unreasonable habit. But this is about protecting society and risk groups.
> IMO the pushiness is the problem, not what is being pushed.
By "the pushiness" do you mean the laws that are in place to force people to do things? Because those are pretty common in all sorts of situations.
Or do you mean the general attitude by commentators (in the media/on twitter etc.) towards people not abiding by those laws?
> I would obviously object to other people forcing me into adopting any unreasonable habit.
There is nothing "unreasonable" about naming 3 things you are grateful for each day. If you did it each day, you could probably get it down to taking a few seconds.
> Or do you mean the general attitude by commentators (in the media/on twitter etc.) towards people not abiding by those laws?
I do mean the attitude, but not about not abiding to laws per se. It's just a wholesale dismissal. Like, what does "mentally stable" have to do with anything, why did you weave that in there? Because instable people are complaining about masks or think G5 causes Corona? What do, for example, arguments put forward in the OP article have to do with that?
"A large crowd of far-right groups gathered for a "sit-in" at Berlin's iconic Brandenburg Gate on Saturday to protest against the German government's coronavirus restrictions."
It just seemed like an incredibly dismissive headline. "No worries, just crazy far-right doing their crazy stuff. We can safely ignore what they have to say."
Shame be upon such short-sighted folks who think that their "freedom" to not wear a mask is greater than others right to merely live.
I'll say it again: can you imagine what the survivors of World War 2 lived through? 10 years of being nervous everytime you try to go to the toilet... and these modern crybabies and their anti-vaccine lies want you to take them seriously?
It's not right.
Other commenters are expressing views that are (presumably) similar to yours in ways that stay within the guidelines. If you would please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and be like them, we'd be grateful.
It's such a pity that you have Trumpelstiltskins over there too. I had thought you smarter...
Just curious - what do you thing will happen in the long run if the whole world chooses to live according to some mythology, as you propose?
it turns out that in Germany, as in the USA, there is a significant overlap between the Covidioten and right-wing/nationalist political groups, including even fringe groups that don't believe that the Third Reich actually ended. This gives rise to some good jokes within Germany.
1) I'm glad I don't have this guy as a doctor. 2)If it's not a big deal, why is he wearing a mask in the picture? Catch covid-19, rub some dirt on it, and move on. If you die, you were going to anyway.
Of course you get to the article's slant when it claims that Sweden is "normal" right now, which is an outrageous lie.
Virtually all events are cancelled. Social engagements are non-existent. Streets are empty. Huge percentages of people work from home. Bars and restaurants were closed for a period of time in hot areas, and regardless have operated under a significantly reduced capacity. Sweden's summer school break began at the PEAK of their outbreak, and we'll see what happens when they return in a little over a week.
Sweden's societal reaction to COVID-19 is basically optimal as a general society, and some parts of the US that are "locked down" have much higher social engagement. Either we've redefined normal to be "completely and absolutely unlike the before times", or this guy is just twisting reality pretty generously because he likes the views, particularly among a certain conspiratorial segment of the US population (a Swedish MD whose blog is in English).
[1] An MD who has extraordinarily little expertise in virology or immunology. Yet he discounts immunity tests. This is like a JavaScript developer telling you why Metal is better than Vulkan.
If so, they've only stabilized because they adopted the recommended measures finally.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/i58jjj/helgtr%C3%A5...
There you go -- read about Swedes talking about their COVID-19 experience. It is a universe removed from normal, or what Florida-man-using-Sweden-as-their-no-biggie-example claims.
Here you go - https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/nastan-alla-fick-coro...
Someone had an ill considered party. Despite the amazing herd immunity nonsense this guy is arguing (again, contrary to the entire expert community), most of the partiers got COVID. Ooops!
And although non-essential businesses aren't closed, Swedes aren't going to those stores?
And masks aren't mandated, but most people are wearing them?
Swedish schools closed for the summer break just as COVID was peaking. They return in just over a week. Businesses are sparse because few people are shopping. Restaurants and bars were closed, and other than that have strict reduced occupancy.
But Florida man is sure that Everything Is Normal. It's hilarity. That "look they didn't close their schools"...when they were closed regardless. Hurr.
"And masks aren't mandated, but most people are wearing them?"
Masks are necessary when you're in close proximity to other people. Swedes aren't getting in close proximity to other people. Are you getting this?
The Cult of Idiocy that has overtaken the US isn't there in Sweden. Florida in their highest level of lockdown has dramatically more social interaction than Sweden minus it.
My understanding (based on what I've heard) is that that was indeed the situation at least during the peak; not sure if that's still the case.
"Now, increasing numbers of workers are also coming forward to criticise regional healthcare authorities for protocols which they say discourage care home workers from sending residents into hospital, and prevent care home and nursing staff from administering oxygen without a doctor's approval, either as part of acute or palliative (end-of-life) services.
"'We were told not to send them in' "They told us that we shouldn't send anyone to the hospital, even if they may be 65 and have many years to live. We were told not to send them in," says Latifa Löfvenberg, a nurse who worked in several care homes around Gävle, north of Stockholm, at the beginning of the pandemic.
""Some can have a lot of years left to live with loved ones, but they don't have the chance... because they never make it to the hospital," she says. "They suffocate to death. And it's a lot of panic and it's very hard to just stand by and watch."" (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52704836)
My understanding is that Sweden avoided overcrowded hospitals by only offering palliative care (which doesn't include oxygen) to the elderly.
Trump doesn't want to reopen too fast because it won't be clear by the election (October, when mail-in voting happens) that this was a good strategy.
Democrats don't want to reopen too fast because keeping the economy shut down is bad for Trump's reelection chances.
Too cynical? Perhaps. But I do think that perspectives like the author's are dismissed too quickly because neither 'side' sees a way in which following this advice will help them in the upcoming election.
Regardless, it is a real shame that COVID has been so politicized, given the tremendous medical and economic repercussions that we are seeing.
>Democrats don't want to reopen too fast because keeping the economy shut down is bad for Trump's reelection chances.
That's basically a conspiracy theory because the Democrats would need to coordinate this political stand and also conspire with medical health advisors. Unless you claim that every democrat has come to this conclusion by themselves.
I don't know that Dems would all have to reach this result on their own — it's pretty clear that the Democratic party line right now (and since the beginning) has been "lock it down". Once that was established, it would have taken quite a bit of courage of convictions for a Democrat to have come out in favor of opening.
Hasn't Trump been the one flippantly saying "it's not a big deal" and "we'll be back to normal quickly" and "we'll get the kids back to school shortly"?
How could anyone view his behavior as "not wanting to reopen too fast"? It seems the exact opposite to me.
If so, it's not like their laissez-faire attitude (the previous months) is the success he's making it out to be. They only have stabilized because they adopted the recommended measures finally, if that's true.
There haven’t been any cases of reinfection afaik but we’ll see in due time.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v...
Proving herd immunity impossible is a rather bold claim and the threshold for that has simply not been met.
We do have a rather large confidence that this virus isn’t going anywhere and will be endemic. It will join the 200+ Cold viruses that hit us every year.