Did Sweden get Covid wrong?
unherd.com
unherd.com
> We now know that the IFR for countries like the UK and Sweden is between 0.5% and 0.9% and that antibody testing has persistently revealed disappointingly small prevalence. Even now, after tens of millions of people have had Covid in the UK and a further 32 million have been vaccinated, antibodies are only estimated to be present in 55% of people.
Everyone is operating with only partial information in a live situation like this, and has to make guesses, predictions, and decisions based on the data they have AND how much they trust that science and its correctness, however well intentioned it might be. Those that had poor outcomes will be judged to have done too little and those with good outcomes will be judged to have gone too far, when the reality is that few will have acted truly unreasonably as they try to balance health, economy, social concerns, etc.
With respect to IFR, there has been a lot of variation over time and between locations. However the most recent meta study suggests a global IFR of 0.15% (compared to seasonal flu IFR of 0.1%): https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-study-puts-covid-infec...
Given that the official death toll in China is still <5k, these calculations are obviously cooked.
The paper is not reviewed and has no co authors, and the sole author has a history of playing down the pandemic, while failing to disclose conflicts of interest.
> the sole author has a history of playing down the pandemic
I’m curious why this matters. Do you also note that other people are “playing up” the pandemic? This feels like an ad hominem dismissal of good content rather than a convincing argument - at least for me. The author is a Professor at the Stanford school of medicine and also a professor of statistics. He has also worked extensively on meta research so it’s not surprising that his claims go against others’ claims at times. That doesn’t make him wrong - rather it makes him a specialist in conducting this exact meta study. We don’t have to rely on his authority solely, but to the extent you want to bring up the author, it seems like he is well suited for this study.
> while failing to disclose conflicts of interest
What conflict of interest are you alleging here? Without concrete details and evidence, this feels like an attempt at character assassination. Why not just discuss the underlying content directly and avoid the arguments based on the person?
Most people don't care. They selectively pick the academics that put out the most alarmist and pessimistic predictions (often predicated on the same assumption-packed models that generate results in line with those assumptions, then present the results as evidence of the original assumptions).
Ioaniddis is smeared with allegations about funding, etc. Meanwhile people like vaccine manufacturers, big pharma, etc. are never critically examined as potentially conflict-ridden organizations funding their own trials with scientists on their payroll. Same goes to the epidemiologists and others that stand to benefit from producing the most emotion-provoking results in order to secure their grants.
You see it with the censoring of the panels hosted by Gov. DeSantis. These aren't conspiracy theorists. They're credentialed academics and researchers with established careers.
The idea that those recordings of academics, discussing their subject matter, hosted on YouTube or wherever, are dangerous is patently absurd.
I mean, pretty fairly, to be honest. I <3 Ioaniddis until this pandemic, but I think he's been dead wrong on it, and should go back to giving out about the quality of published papers (where he's been very, very right).
Do you ever consider that he hasn't changed and you have during the pandemic?
I realize that could come off as accusatory, but I've seen this said a bunch. And it seems like it never occurs to people that maybe they're so invested in a certain viewpoint that they've given up the meta-cognition to consider something they've convinced themselves to be wrong.
What's more likely: Ioaniddis, as an academic with an extensive and well-respected career and publication history, has suddenly been corrupted, or there are large cultural and cognitive biases that have been activated by a natural disaster?
I don't believe he's invested in disproving the pandemic or something. It is clear to me that the reactions to him are disproportionate to things he's saying.
His suggestions don't threaten anyone - clearly policy makers and the political class largely haven't listened to him. That people are threatened by him enough to start offhandedly discrediting him, suggests to me there's something deeper going on.
I think society has invested so much into lockdown and all the related measure that any evidence that's critical causes cognitive dissonance. People would be unable to bear the thought that what we did was unfounded or misguided.
The tell for me is that people are unable to allow for the existence of opposing arguments. Not only is Ioannidis wrong, he's obviously evil or dangerous, and must be discredited.
What you've posited about 'society' is a mirror-image of what I've posited about Ionnaidis. It's very hard to back down from public commitments to a certain point of view. Ionnaidis has invested all his credibility at this point in the consensus view on the pandemic being wrong.
Honestly given that the consensus view is very much based in (almost boundless) fear, and in lots of ways a sense of moral superiority - and compounded with the inability for experts around the world to effectively combat the virus, I think he's closer to reality than people seem to believe.
And again, I'd put forward the notion that people react so much to Ioaniddis because he threatens the coherent, highly-personalized worldview they've built up over the past year.
He ignores the standard methods of collection and analysis of systematic reviews and meta-anlyses (some of which were authored by him) and uses ridiculous numbers like those in the OP of this thread to make it seem like Covid is less dangerous than it is.
Don't get me wrong, I've been estimating 0.5-1.5% IFR for this for well over a year now (all the CFR's last year were so misleading), and the general meta-scientific point that we didn't know enough to be locking down was entirely true.
But his sampling study was hot garbage, and he's gotten himself into a bunch of trouble for no good reason.
> Do you ever consider that he hasn't changed and you have during the pandemic?
Honestly, probably not. But that's an interesting suggestion, and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on this. Because maybe I have, and don't notice (to be fair, the birth of my first child has had a much greater impact on my life than the pandemic).
Basically it sounds like Ioannidis extrapolated from a lot of statistically non-representative seroprevalence samples to make his case.
I do think Gieseke is correct about cultural differences being a contributing factor to the similar outcomes in Sweden and the UK, despite the drastically different actions. Another important factor is public health. For example, as far as I can tell, obesity rates are vastly different between the two countries(~30% in England[0], ~15% in Sweden[1]). All this to say, I don't think the UK would have fared nearly as well as Sweden with the same relaxed approach.
0: https://data.worldobesity.org/country/england-240/
1:https://data.worldobesity.org/country/sweden-207/
Yes I know England != UK, but it's the largest country and the data for Scotland, Wales, and Norther Ireland is similar.