Why does no one ever talk about Sweden anymore?
ianmsc.substack.com
ianmsc.substack.com
Even though the author does have a point, they overlook the fact that it's been much harder to get COVID tests in Sweden than the countries it is compared to in the blog post. Are these numbers normalised with respect to the number of tests performed? What about the number of tests on symptomatic vs. asymptomatic people?
Sweden's lack of action against the pandemic was not limited to just the lack of closure and mask mandates and so on. As far as I know, they never set up a proper test and trace system (please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not sure about this) as they did in Israel or the UK. Of course their case numbers will be smaller.
Another one: Israel population is 20x more dense than Sweden, which naturally would lead to more spread https://versus.com/en/israel-vs-sweden
What might/probably matter(s) is the degree of urbanisation.
Population density is a measure of urbanization. I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make?
Population density is not a measure of urbanization.
A country with a single city of 1M and outside it a desert of 1M sq km has a population density of around 1 person per square kilometer.
A country with a single city of 1M and outside it a desert of 10M sq/km has a density of around 0.1 person per square km.
A 1sq km city state with 1M people have 1M people per sq km!
All 3 these countries are 100% urbanized (no one lives in the countryside) and have the same population yet population density varies by four orders of magnitude.
Sweden has a high level of urbanization and a low population density. Or put another way: most people live in few places BUT the areas where people don’t live are large.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
Tel Aviv is one of the most dense cities in the world.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/07/11/the-50-...
But in both those cases, it doesn't matter how much unpopulated land there is outside the cities! That is - the population density of a whole country is a completely useless and irrelevant measure when it comes to the pandemic. Urbanization is also a blunt measurement, but at least it's better than density.
In the end, it's all about human contact and movement patterns. Here you can compare a city like Stockholm which has a very large service economy with people working from home during the pandemic (good) with a city of the same size and density in a poorer country with a larger part of the economy depending on manufacturing or services direct human interaction. It's going to fare worse than Stockholm.
The problem with Stockholm was put very simply that there is a large chunk of the population that lives in cramped working conditions, doesn't have private cars and that's immigrants in a few suburbs. They drive taxis, buses or work in other areas with human contacts. They also have disproportionately more comorbidites. Sadly, they are also overrepresented in elderly care work, so the grooup most severely affected also works closely with the most at-risk group. Finally, to add insult to injury the elderly care system has been progressively dismantled, leading to staff shortages and poor working conditions.
So the picture of the early stage of the pandemic in stockholm is basically this: An elderly care worker lives with a large extended family in cramped conditions. He or she has to take public transport to several different care homes, sometimes within a single day to work, despite the fact that there are active Covid outbreaks in some of the care homes and not in others. When there are outbreaks in the care homes, there is no possibility to isolate the sick from the other residents.
I don't know if it's true, mind you.
What matters is the interaction cross section.
Population densities of both Jerusalem and Stockholm are high enough for covid to spread fast, and forrests and deserts are empty enough to make it hard for covid to spread. Averageas are meaningless here, because even statisticians can drown in a river with average depth of 0.5m.
Regarding contact tracing - I'm not aware of anything, but Telia does check aggregate people movement across different regions, and report findings to the health authorities, see https://business.teliacompany.com/crowd-insights
Why does it matter if tests are readily available or not when you compare death rates? At the end of the day, if the policy is to say "assume that everybody is sick and just be careful/sensible" I don't see how more tests would change anything.
Or from more testing... Peace of mind for the testee, social liability coverage for self or employer, knowing if infections are increasing or not, vaccines blocking transmission or not, death rate lags by a few weeks for anyone hoping to see a quick change from a new/killed policy.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
On the other hand there is also different level of trust between citizens and the government. But there are probably more variables.
We might have a slightly higher prevalence of some random genetic feature in Czechia that makes our death rate higher.
Overall on the map of Europe, it seems that death rates varied wildly and not according to usual patterns. For example, you would expect higher death rate in less developed southern Italy than in Lombardy.
A good reminder that people need to be patient and stop prematurely declaring victory or defeat.
Here’s the things I noticed that were clearly different between the two countries:
1. The rules were clear from the start and didn’t change much. FHM said from the beginning that the virus is here to stay and set the rules so that they are sustainable (most importantly: schools were never closed). There was no screw-unscrew-screw-… loop
2. Many more people worked from home here than in CZ. I don’t know what to attribute this to, it can be because Swedes are generally better acquainted with technology or that there are more jobs that can be done from home in Sweden.
3. People actually follow the rules (for the most part..there still were student parties and such). This can be an effect of people trusting their politicians and the government agencies but maybe just a different mentality. I still remember that during my visit to Prague people at the Billa supermarket at the Prague train station were absolutely not keeping distance and were touching bagels (rohlíky :-)) without any gloves. Masks and lockdowns won’t save you then…
4. People are generally much fitter here. You won’t see the typical Czech beer belly, in general everyone keeps themselves in shape and eats quite well.
Contrary to what many might think the level of healthcare is about the same in my experience.
I’m really no Tegnell fanboy, many things about him irk me a lot (his constant picking on other countries the most) and I wish the Swedish government took a more active role sooner rather than let FHM steer everything for about 9 months, but in general I think the Swedish strategy was good.
Also, given how many deaths are of extremely vulnerable elderly (many of which would have died from any cold, or within a year regardless), “total deaths” are perhaps not the best measure of success. It will show how well the disease was kept out of living facilities for the very old, mostly (which in Sweden was “not very well”). The difference in how elderly care is operated in Sweden and Norway is pretty big, and that I think is a policy failure that should be looked at.
All the other scandinavian countries had policies and outcomes like norway.
- Sweden: ~1450 deaths per million
Population: ~10.2 million
Density: ~25 people/km^2
Urbanization: 88%
Rates compared: 10x Norway, 8x Finland, 3x Denmark
- Denmark: ~450 deaths per million
Population: ~5.8 million
Density: ~137 people/km^2
Urbanization: 88%
Rates compared: 3x Norway, 2.5x Finland
- Finland: ~190 deaths per million
Population: ~5.5 million
Density: ~18 people/km^2
Urbanization: 86%
Rates compared: 1.2x Norway
- Norway: ~150 deaths per million
Population: ~5.3 million
Density: ~15 people/km^2
Urbanization: 83%I though we had really gotten over this?
Then again, I thought we had gotten over the idea of Sweden’s tenfold death rate being good in any sense, as well…
They have the same numbers...
Fun fact: Norway was one of the only country in Europe to have strict closed border. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/stricter-border-contro...
Both Denmark and Norway later issued rules that allowed Swedes to cross between the nations if they lived in low infection rate parts of Sweden. It was mostly people from Stockholm that could not pass.
How is 19 million dead soldiers from Allied forces counted as success and win in WW2 is also beyond me.
For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up during the pandemic. They are tied over the last four years.
More people may have died of covid in Sweden because there were more old vulnerable people in Sweden.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
Why compare those against each other? Because these four nations are close to each other geographically[0] and when it comes to the climate[1], rather similar culturally[2], and economically similar too in that the populations are by and large comparatively "well off".
All other things equal (or rather similar at least), the differences in COVID deaths are likely in a larger part due to differences in public policy regarding the direct COVID response in particular and/or health care more generally.
This is just guess work (a lot of people did), of course, but I've yet to read any other plausible explanations for these major differences.
[0] Neighboring each other, with Norway (~150 deaths/million) west, Finland (~190) east and Denmark (~450) south of Sweden (~1450). Schleswig-Holstein, the German Federal State bordering Denmark to the South with a sizable Danish minority living there also has a similar rate (~580) to Denmark. (German rate is ~1110).
[1] Weather and temperature have been identified as correlating strongly with COVID spread, not just because of how well the virus can survive in different temperatures, but also because of how humans will behave in different weather conditions (stay inside or go out).
[2] These nations historically developed close to each other, and occupied each other a lot of times. E.g. Norway only became fully independent from Sweden in 1905. These nations have a lot of shared cultural heritage which still informs a lot of the culture today.
This is why anyone should be extremely wary of comparing "deaths per million" statistics across nations, since the statistic is 1) not standardized and 2) not always trustworthy.
Counting excess mortality isn't as good, but at least it's normalized across the board, so you can make some kind of meaningful comparison.
It may be remarkable that Sweden is only the 40th in case-fatality rate, but this statistic has not one, but two "moving targets": first, the number of cases (which is probably why Peru has such a high rate - underreporting of cases) and second, the number of deaths (which every country handles differently - dying of Covid vs. dying with Covid etc.).
I tend to agree that we could talk about Sweden more but most likely for a very different reason: they managed to turn the corner despite the lax rules and not because of them. The outcome, I think, can be attributed to the fact that Sweden is a developed country with a strong health and well-fare system and economic ability (and socially pre-existing tendency!) for distancing without going bankrupt in the process (think: remote work instead of work that requires physical presence in e.g. a workshop - I doubt that such an outcome would have been possible in a country with widespread day-labour and people living hand-to-mouth). People were eventually able to react correctly all by themselves but it took a while and that costed a lot of lives. That does not mean that they could not have saved a lot of people with a different approach, like Norway or Finland managed to. Those did not really fare much worse economically in the process and that without incurring the huge cost of lives like Sweden did in the beginning. If you translate the swedish snippet at the top of the post, you might be able to guess who I blame for that.
If it did, you would expect some archeological discovery supporting it. You can't throw old people into a hole for centuries without a cache of bones developing at the bottom.
There is, for example, ample physical evidence of Aztec human sacrifice.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2014-01-23-ancient-carthaginians-r...
I mean Florida and Texas went to extreme ‘do nothing at all’ positions, and the results were not good.
Texas (23rd overall; 211/100k) and Florida (10th overall; 237/100k) are both mid-pack amongst US states for Covid mortality rate, even before adjusting by age (if you adjust by age, Florida, in particular, looks better, because of the number of elderly people who move there to retire):
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...
Among those states doing substantially worse:
For Florida: New Jersey (306/100k), New York (281/100k), Massachusetts (267/100k)
For Texas: all of the above, plus Connecticut (237/100k), Pennsylvania (235/100k), and maybe Illinois (212/100k)
All of these are states whose governors imposed stringent restrictions on daily life. Florida and Texas have certainly been intensely covered by the press, but the reality of the situation is not accurately reflected by the intensity of the news coverage.
--
EDIT: Others are quick to point out that the distribution of mortality over time is different for these states, which is true. But you also cannot leap to the conclusion that the most recent differences in mortality are due to policy decisions made months ago. Florida saw >60% of its Covid-related deaths prior to March 2021 (the advent of mass vaccination), but it lifted most Covid restrictions starting in October 2020:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/florida-lifts-covid-19-restric...
Any claim that New York (for example) did far better during the pre-vaccination period has to contend with the fact that 87% of its mortality happened prior to vaccination, despite substantially greater restrictions on daily life:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/
One could argue that NY is a special case, since most of its mortality happened in spring 2020. But that isn't true for, say, Illinois, which had the vast majority of its deaths in the winter of 2020, and still saw 85% of its total mortality prior to March 1:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/illinois/
There is no simple narrative here. Seasonality, climate and chance (i.e. who gets hit first) all play a large role in how states do. People are far too quick to attribute success or failure to a single factor.
Ultimately, however, the top-line facts are opposed to the narrative that TX and FL did substantially worse because of their choices. They did not.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/florida/
By this source, ~32k of Florida's deaths happened prior to March 1, and now they're at ~51k. So 32k/51k = 63% of Florida's deaths happened prior to mass vaccination. For NY the equivalent percentage is 48k / 55k = 87%:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/new-york/
So yes, Florida has had 19k deaths (vs New York's 7k deaths) since vaccines became available, but they also did substantially better than New York throughout 2020 and early 2021, despite far fewer restrictions for nearly all of that time.
It isn't a simple narrative.
From June 1 2020 to the end of 2020 they had an additional 40.
In the first 6 months of 2021 they added 80.
Since then they have added 7.
Florida was still around 10 by June 1 2020.
From June 1 to the end of 2020 they added 90.
In the first 6 months of 2021, Florida added 75.
Since then they have added 63.
Comparing, Florida did substantially better than New York for the first 10% of the time since the pandemic started. For the second half of 2020 New York had less than half the death rate of Florida. In the first half of 2021 they were close. Then, in the era of widespread vaccine availability New York has dropped an order of magnitude from where they were in the first half of 2021 whereas Florida has merely dropped about 20%.
That's unique to New York, which had a particularly skewed distribution. Compare to Illinois (which also had severe restrictions), where most of the mortality was in winter 2020:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/illinois/
Or to California (same pattern), which has a higher age-adjusted mortality rate than FL, despite some of the most ridiculously over-the-top restrictions in the country:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/california/
Or to Pennsylvania, which is similar overall:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/pennsylvania/
You really have to cherry-pick the data to make the argument that this is because of policy decisions around NPIs. The patterns being described here have as much to do with seasonality as anything else, and if you don't control for that fact, then any argument is simply pointless. That's all I'm saying.
These simple narratives that "Florida didn't do $my_preferred_intervention, and look how that turned out!" are far more heat than light. If $preferred_intervention were really as effective as claimed, then it would be simply unambiguous that they're doing worse. Instead, they're about mid-pack for overall mortality. In the big natural experiment of Covid responses, there's no clear signal that anything works, other than vaccination.
> Then, in the era of widespread vaccine availability New York has dropped an order of magnitude from where they were in the first half of 2021 whereas Florida has merely dropped about 20%.
OK. I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make with this. Is it that Florida isn't vaccinating people, and that's why the mortality rate is higher in summer 2021? Florida is at 66% partial vaccination, vs. New York's 69.9%:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/coronavirus-covid-19/vaccine-trac...
Again, seasonality plays a huge role here, and the media narrative is hyperbolic. I expect that the northeastern states will see a mortality increase in the fall, because they always do, even before SARS-CoV2. Meanwhile, Florida's wave will probably fall.
If you look at the overall global picture - location, climate, size, population, demographics, education, GDP, mask mandates, ... - there is no clear conclusion, it's a causal mess.
It's safe to say that at this moment nobody can predict where a covid wave will hit and how big it will be, outside a very general sense - that it might be bad in the winter in unvaccinated places.
Mask quality is definitely a factor, but can't be the major factor, unless people wear masks 100% of the time and never take them off outside of the house, which we know it's not true. There is also the "eye protection" factor, which seems to exist.
As just one example, they make the point that Sweden's recently mortality rate is pretty close to Finland and Norway, and show a graph of rate of excess deaths per 100k people, showing Sweden at 0.06 and Finland and Norway at 0.04.
That's 2000 additional excess deaths in Sweden per 100k people than their neighbours. This equates to an additional 208k+ people that would die if the full country was infected, based on the presented mortality rate data.
If we want to be scientific about this point, we'd have to ask several questions to actually understand whether those numbers are meaningful in the way the author suggests:
- Is it typical for Sweden's all-cause mortality rate to be 50% higher than its neighbours? - If not, what is the typical difference? - Could there be other unaccounted-for confounding factors?
That these questions and answers were omitted I think demonstrates pretty clearly the author hasn't fully considered the point they are attempting to make, or suggests that these questions were not answered because by answering them it may undermine the point they set out to make.
Because it was the only example of a developed nation whose health officials came out and said "given our circumstances, we think our country will be ok without anti-covid measures."
People who wanted (for a variety of reasons) to denounce anti-covid measures took those statements, stripped out the "given our circumstances" and said "see, Sweden thinks everyone will be ok without anti-covid measures."
The anti-covid groups, recognizing that nuance is doomed, did not respond by saying "Sweden might be ok, but we won't" and instead said "Sweden is wrong."
So why did people stop talking about it? Because the policy decisions have already been made. The political tool that is "Sweden says otherwise" isn't useful anymore.
Now obviously the academics and public policy experts have not stopped talking about Sweden (and the verdict is not even close to rendered), but since they are doing so out of the public eye it doesn't so much count.
So why should we have more public discussion about Sweden? It looks to me like this author believes it is evidence for the assertion "if the experts are struggling, the amateurs must be right." It is not. This kind of reasoning is virtually always the kind of justification someone comes up with when they need an explanation for why someone should trust a fringe conspiratorial theory of events over a mainstream expert-endorsed one.
Swedes are normal Europeans who live in normal cities in a normal western country, and the virus is tiny. To the extent Sweden is "different" to its neighbours it's only in things like the proportion of non-Swedes who live there, which it seems inherently raises their numbers relative to their more anti-immigration neighbours (given that COVID seems to hurt African immigrants more in all regions of the world including the USA).
"obviously the academics and public policy experts have not stopped talking about Sweden (and the verdict is not even close to rendered), but since they are doing so out of the public eye it doesn't so much count."
The academics and policy experts are refusing to talk about Sweden, because it reveals that they aren't really experts at all - just playing at being experts. It is easy to see this. Here's one of the only recent academic pronouncements on Sweden, published in Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9
Except it's not really recent at all. Despite being published in August the first sentence of the article is a false claim about public statistics and it goes downhill from there. The reason is, to build its argument it has to simply ignore all data from after July 2020. If it didn't then it couldn't possibly make the arguments it's trying to make. Also, it cherry picks its countries and its calculations aren't even consistent with each other. It's not science. It's policy advocacy pretending to be science. These people deserve to be raked over the coals in public because their credibility is zero.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03003930.2021.1...
So if the goal is to compare "no restrictions" to "restrictions", only amateurs would think you could use "all" the data from Sweden.
Sweden was never at any point as tough as most other countries, and even if they had adopted e.g. UK style measures afterwards (which they didn't), it wouldn't matter: they should have still ended up worse than other countries due to their early stance.
What actually happened is that Sweden has significantly lower per-capita COVID mortality than the EU average.
Seeing how desperately people try to rationalize this is fundamentally very depressing. Lockdowns do not work. Masks do not work. They have never worked. Swedes are not biologically different to Brits or the French. You don't actually need Sweden to see this, there are many other examples from the USA, e.g. the differences between North and South Dakota (no outcome differences, very different policies). Or just look at graphs of case curves. You cannot figure out from looking at cases when policies were changed, even though being able to do so was the only goal of the changes. These policies directly failed on their own terms, and no studies or inter-country comparisons are even needed to prove that.
Sweden is also significantly higher than all its immediate neighbors who have 1/3rd to 1/10th the mortality.
>These policies directly failed on their own terms, and no studies or inter-country comparisons are even needed to prove that.
...So we don't need to talk about Sweden after all?
>e.g. the differences between North and South Dakota (no outcome differences, very different policies).
North Dakota (with late lockdowns) beat South Dakota (no lockdowns) by about the same margin that Sweden beat the EU average (10~15%). Why is the difference "significant" for Sweden, but "nonexistent" for the Dakotas?
The justifications here are based on working backwards from a desired conclusion, yet there's no rational way to do it. For instance, is this talking point "all its immediate neighbours", as you put it? Or just some of its neighbours? Because Sweden is also neighboured by some Baltic states, and if you include those, Sweden is no longer the worst in that little group. So the usual construct is "Scandinavian neighbours", not "all immediate". The incoherency of this claim is a good sign it's made up on the spot - data cherry picking, exactly what people aren't meant to do.
So. "Experts" said Sweden would suffer mass death from not locking down: 90,000 deaths predicted by the ICL model alone. There was no postulated Scandinavian Exception in any model or scenario. Nor has anyone presented any sort of mechanistic or biological explanation for how such an Exception should work. Instead, once their data disproved the underlying theory, people started desperately trying to retrofit the narrative to claim it actually a success rather than accept the truth that epidemiology is, as a field, so incompetent as to be fraudulent. Reality came nowhere near the predictions.
But, if you wish, just ignore Sweden (or Texas, or Florida, or the Dakotas) and present a methodology that reliably selects from case curve data alone the dates of policy changes. It cannot be done. But case data is ground truth: policy was justified on the grounds it would change the rate of infections. Because policy changed for everyone in a country on a single day, there should be very clear artificial changes in infection numbers a few days after that (it takes a few days for symptoms to develop and people to get tested). If you cannot reliably find such changes from the data, then the policies have failed by their own logic. Comparisons are irrelevant at that point because they weren't justified that way.
The very first graph don't show any country having lower death rate than Sweden, only those above it. Yet the crux of criticism of COVID response in Sweden is based upon the fact that its next door neighbours did better: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...
We are going back into offices in October. The pandemic is over here, and it never was even very serious.
About 1500 people under 50 died of covid, from 10.2 million. That's a survival rate of 99.9995%.
If you count the older people, it's "only" 99.995%.
Some pandemic. I know it was bad in the US but most likely because the population is in poor health due to the country thinking poor people should eat shitty foods and never have any time outside of work.
I think the covid response in different countries shows a lot about how they view humans.
I'm glad I can say with a good heart that my country took care of the old, including my own parents and grandparents. It's a real test of the country's values.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/#...
That is the life expectancy given 2020 years mortality. Neighboring old people died less of covid but died more of other causes. Note sure if you should see that as a win. And even if you do, maybe you should consider that many other factors in society are way more important than the covid response, it is a very minor factor as we can see here.
We put our elders in nursery home and visit them once a year if lucky. I think that is why the response is regarded as a success in Sweden. Older people dying is just a relief.
On a serious note, were Sweden's larger deaths early on in the pandemic when the government could be given a pass thinking COVID would be more easily controlled than it was? Or was it a long slow crawl? It's not like it would be easy to move thousands of elderly out of nursing homes to control things anyway. Nursing homes are not anywhere close to isolation wards so it might have been inevitable outcome.
We've been shocked at chinese social rating system, but it looks like 2020 threw all our philosophical consideration on how subtle and delicate democracy is to the trash.
This person claims to know better, yet provides no suggestions, just complaints, pointing fingers at imaginary figures like "The Media", "The Science", "The Expert".
People that just like to complain and point the finger aren't helpful. Being helpful takes a whole other kind of person, and this article isn't helpful.
Obviously, I'm don't consider myself an expert in the medical field but the mere draconian groupthink has left a bitter taste in me and has clouded my judgement.
Sort that channel in "top per day" mode and a real discussion is going on.
Namely people's preference for pseudoscientifically presented factoids of arbitrary provenance over more fruitful, curated discussions in more approachable, honest language.
Here are a couple of key concerns that I have with the data and the anti-covid measures : 1) There is no baseline. How many people die with a postive PCR-test for influenza or other coronaviruses each year? Did we ever test millions of sick people? 2) How did the morbidity actually change after the spread of Sars-CoV-2? If you want to measure this you need to compute some age-adjusted probability that people will die in a given year. Data from germany suggests that although ~100k people died, the probability to die didn't change much or at least changed around a typical baseline for the last 10 years. 3) If age-adjusted morbidity didn't change then PCR-tests measure natural morbidity to a large extend. 4) Nobody is talking about the negative impact of the lockdown. To name a few : less births in several countries in the EU, inflation, +60% cases of anorexia in german youth, +10% increased tabacco usage in germany, no proper schooling for 2 years, social cooling in general, ... I could go on endlessly. 5) The language changed. There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019. This is very worrysome in my opinion because it shows a radical change in ideology of the population that goes way beyond a pandemic and shows changes in mass psychology.
4: People are absolutely talking about the negative impact of the lockdowns. I'm not sure why you think otherwise - there have been robust debates about this, at least in the UK media. Perhaps what you mean is that you think it hasn't been taken into account in a way that you'd like?
5: This is a once-in-a-century event. Of course there's new language around it.
2-3: That's exactly what I mean but you should not measure excess mortality as absolute deaths / million people but you should adjust for demographics. Because if you have older population, you will have more expected deaths. And if you adjust for age the excess mortality vanishes for germany.
4: Yes, it is talked about but not to the extend that would be necessary. In reality most people experience the various negative consequences of the lockdown policies but very few the negative consequences of the virus.
5: This is certainly debatable. If you compare this to the HIV-pandemic (still ~1mio Deaths / yr), then Covid has a factor of 10^5 more public attention (but 2x the death toll). A similar number of people die of tuberculosis. Nobody knows how many people die of influenza or coronavirus each year. We suspect there are 100 Mio dengue virus infections each year. Nobody knows what a once-in-a-century pandemic is. It seems to be a matter of public attention and newness instead of careful data analysis.
It's not just about mortality rates. The other problem is hospitalizations. If you get in a bad car accident, get a bad infection, or have a pregnancy go bad you want an ICU bed not occupied by someone drowning from COVID. I expect most of these mortality rates are from places that didn't have their hospital systems collapse and have to ration care. I think US is heading there in some states, then mortality will get closer to that hospitalization rate.
Excess mortality has to somehow account for reduced commuting, reduced regular medical visits, more domestic violence, etc it's a mixed bag when you are dealing with pandemic behavioral changes do they have real models for all that?
On possibly reduced mortality by lockdown : OK, fair enough. I think you can see it in decreased car accidents in germany and also in seemingly low influenza associated deaths. But my theory is that influenza and sars2 are evolutionary competing for vulnerable individuals and sars2 seems to be winning right now. I saw a nice study showing this for several flu-like viruses a couple of years ago. But getting enough and clean data for problems like this is very hard.
I think the lockdown has almost nothing to do with the virus but is a strange reaction to increased pressure of globalization and digitalization on the societies as well as a global economic crisis. Maybe lockdown policies will stay for a long time. But not to protect us from a dangerous virus but to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy.
Everyone has had vastly different experiences with the virus which affects views of the lockdown and behaviors.
Within the first few months of it in the US lost 3 coworkers to it, 1 known personally all around the same time. No clear mortality rate at the time, lockdowns made sense to us, it was real, we stayed masked up and crazy isolated. By comparison to my father who knew no one affected at all for the first year or longer. So to everyone outside of NY and California or wherever it started it was a whole lot of nothing. Either anxiety of virus that wasn't nearby for the vulnerable or another media hype like Swine flu or Avian flu or MERS that never really hit.
I'm sure there are still plenty of people who haven't been directly affected by the actual virus just the restrictions, only know people who maybe had a positive test or a short fever with their kids. When people only get news loosely from posts on the internet I'm sure many ignore or miss the semi-regular pleas from doctors and nurses to take it seriously and keep the F out of the hospitals. Like one I recently saw from Florida.
I consider COVID a new killer in addition to flu, I assume flu vaccines actually work (imperfectly) to lessen symptoms and everyone's annual clichè claims that the vaccine makes them sick or does nothing is just repeating the same old shtick. To be fair I have no data to back that up that the influenza vaccine does anything but I think it just underscores the vague distrust of medicine floating about. I'm almost a scientist and optimistically drink the koolaid and get my flu shot annual and trust that government fda, cdc, whatever generally does want medicines to actually work to keep people working.
"to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy."
I don't usually go along with these things that sound like grand control conspiracies.
The anxiety about globalization and digitization is probably part of all the conspiracy thinking. Globalization is moving what used to be semi livable jobs out and replacing livable wage work with software engineering and advanced degree jobs or rent seeking almost exclusively. Everyone else is getting squeezed by big corps, franchise contracts vs minimum wage, high tech gear with no right to repair, etc. Grand control conspiracies in my mind are a weird commiserating hope that the world sucks on purpose because some elite levers of power are making it that way when really the world sucks because a bunch of simple systems chasing money or power are making a big complicated mess the crushed the unlucky under the cruel invisible hand of the market.
On the other hand hearing vaguely about Turing being part of a team successfully handling details from the cracked enigma machine to steer WWII without letting Nazis realize the code was broken seems to give credit to the idea that the knowledge collected by agencies like the NSA could be used by geniuses around the world to manipulate things. But if they exist they do a great job making governments look dumb...
Sorry this turned into word spaghetti.
I didn't say there is somebody controlling or forcing the population into technocracy. What I meant is that it is inevitable to some degree that tech will continue to shape our society in unexpected and unintended ways.
Even if I did. Nothing is wrong with good conspiracy theories. Sometimes they turn out to be true.
Even though it's downplayed in the article Sweden had significant excess mortality in the spring of 2020 and at the turn of 2020-2021 compared to other countries like Norway and Finland that are used as benchmarks in the article.
For example?
For example?
> Being helpful takes a whole other kind of person
^ this sounds like an ad-hom
Experts will provide thorough analysis of fatality rates and the effectiveness of healthcare measures, but it will take a while and I'd rather wait a few years until emotions have cooled down and this is no longer such a "political issue" (most of it is not, but some people chose to make it one). Personally, I'm quite happy with how my host country Portugal dealt with the crisis.
This the article doesn't succeed in doing. It's so focussed on the rhetorical aspects of rubbing the nose of MSM in the failure of their claims, which in and of itself is OK, that it doesn't invest enough to succeed in its attempts to argue for its claims beyond that. While I narrowly agree with many of the criticisms, I don't think the article justifies any wider conclusions beyond "be skeptical of media narratives". I'm not upvoting this story.
Also, to me at least there is very clear motivation for governments to keep people alive and profit motive for vaccine manufacturers to make vaccines that work.
Unfortunately these days we seem to live in a world where 100% effort is put into criticizing actions and 0% into searching for a better solution.
Covid infections are not evenly spread. The most vulnerable people are not evenly spread, as is high risk areas.
Sweden did shut down and restrict a lot of those things. The elder care was compared to prison, with people doing "prison breaks" through open windows. Sports, bath houses, concerts, and similar places were closed down. People were strongly discouraged from using mass transit. Infection were still located mostly in hot zones around the large cities, in general where the large concentration of elderly care is located, and those working there had the full setup with mask and face protection and gloves and so on.
To me it seems like the different strategy can be classified as either targeted or generalized. Sweden went with a mostly targeted approach, although not as effective as it could have been since it was initially a bit delayed.
One other major decision that the Swedish government did was to remove the so called "karensdag". Before the pandemic people who got sick had to go without pay for the first day of the sickness, a measure that was likely there to discourage people from falsely calling in sick. By removing it they made it very clear to people to stay at home if they feel sick, with only 20% reduction in pay if you call in sick.
Similarly, the fact that yet again in a thread on this topic, perfectly reasonable comments are being downvoted to oblivion, should give everyone serious cause for concern about the way things are going.
Because it’s expected in a highly vaccinated population.
As of Sep. 1, 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated. Sweden seems to be close to, if not already at, the coveted herd immunity by vaccination. In comparison, in Israel, 65% have had one shot and only 60% are fully vaccinated (a smidge over half of those 3x).
You should compare eligible to eligible, not 82% of eligible Swedes to 65% of all Israelis.
In Israel, "eligible" includes being over 12 years old (the vaccines aren't approved for younger children yet), and according to NPR, as of a month ago "78% of eligible Israelis over 12 years old are vaccinated."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...
Sweden: 61.9% of population fully vaccinated, Israel: 61.6% of population fully vaccinated. Those numbers are pretty much the same.
I think your error was to compare % of elegible Swedes and % of Israel population.
From Aug 20, "That means only 58% of Israel's total citizenry is fully vaccinated. [1]"
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...
Things are better due to vaccinations having been administered fairly successfully.
It would be unwise to accept the numbers presented in this article without any skepticism, in particular given that the author is very transparent about their agenda (discredit mask usage). The numbers are very cherry-picked to precisely fit their argument.
First off - herd immunity was never the strategy to combat COVID-19 in Sweden. We had some forms of restrictions, we mostly just strayed from the 'majority' of countries, if you will, by not mandating that some businesses shut down, and by not making mask usage mandatory. Notably, we also do not mandate quarantine for arriving travelers - we merely encourage it.
Sweden, their response to COVID-19 and the results of that response are most accurately discussed in the context of our close neighbours. It would be inaccurate to measure against other countries with wildly differing cultures and economic situations, it's making too much of an apples to oranges comparison. The death rate numbers in that context (which as you may note are conveniently left out by the author) speak for themselves - Swedens death rate per capita is around 3 times as high as the next neighbor, Denmark (1434/million vs 449/million), 7 times as high as Finland (190/million) and 9 times as high as Norway (157/million). These numbers should be expected to more or less converge now that we have vaccinated at fairly similar rates, and hence comparisons of recent numbers, as made in the article, is fairly useless.
Does it though?
Or is it "just asking questions" about the competence of experts and "the media"?
Have you looked at which countries were identified as high risk back in April 16 2020?
https://www.newsfirst.lk/2020/04/16/sri-lanka-ranked-16th-am...
Then compared it to actual deaths?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
in any case, rather than obsessing over irrelevant minutiae as the mediopolitical machine has done over the past 2 years to their own substantial benefit, what we should have done is simple: (1) quarantine the elderly with their caregivers (well-supported/-compensated, on a rotating basis), (2) be mindful only of long, close indoor exhaust-sharing (not incidental/public contact), and (3) quarantine when sick. but otherwise, get on with life absent economic ravagement, mass psychosocial injury, increased socioeconomic inequality, and depressed health and welfare. then when the vaccines came, (4) supply (not mandate) them to the vulnerable and the risk-averse.
this is basically what sweden did except for #1, which is where their mortality rates took a big hit. this approach is well supported by the available scientific evidence, unlike most of what we did, but it has no mediopolitical support, which is why it's so woefully under-considered and under-recommended.
Another interesting angle to examine internationally is natural immunity. For example India had a large delta spike when the variant first appeared, and since then they have had a very low number of cases, and are transitioning to treating the virus as endemic. A recent sero survey found that 90% of people in Mumbai have antibodies (https://www.reuters.com/world/india/almost-90-people-indias-...). Given the low infection fatality rate for those who are healthy and under 50, I wonder if that population should just go about their lives freely to develop natural immunity, which would then make it harder for everyone else to get infected.
For that reason, "excess deaths" is about the best we can do, being an aggregate number. We don't need to decide if they died "of COVID" or "with COVID." We have a distribution of the number of deaths, there's no issue of whether someone is dead or not, and it has a mean and SD.
It's also common sense that, whatever other variables you bring in, "persons per household" is a primary variable. Sustained contact with an infected person just has to be a prime cause of the spread of a communicable disease. "Population density" is probably a weaker proxy for that.
Israel reports 7465 COVID deaths and a population of 9.8M. That's about 80 per 100,000.
I really wish that the Swedish strategy was the answer; that would make future pandemics (and the rest of this one) a lot more pleasant. But alas.
The government have a state of emergency that gives them power above the law and a lot of public money has already been stolen.
With all the draconian measures the infection and death rate continues upward.
As of Sep. 1, 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated.
Sweden seems to be close to, if not already at, the coveted herd immunity by vaccination.
In comparison, in Israel, 65% have had one shot and only 60% are fully vaccinated (a smidge over half of those 3x).
And Sweden’s deaths per capita from the start of the pandemic are ~1434/1M compared to Israel’s ~824/1M.
Nobody talks about Sweden because its early response was an object lesson in what not to do. And the present situation confirms what we expect in a highly vaccinated population.
The Sweden > world nonsense is based on the oddest data cherry-picking.
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=tha&are...
What's hard to line up are the changes in policy, behavior, vaccination, and variant mix that obviously have a big effect on the dynamics of the epidemic. I suspect it'll be quite a while before that data is compiled in a form that allows really strong analysis.
The more likely goal is to continue spending money (or eyeball time / clicks ) on media.
Yes, for profit media screams stupid headlines... For profit. business insider' as important media? Really?
There is no reason to reasonably and rationally discuss an issue raised by an article which takes this position... And does not discuss timing of vaccines, Delta variant, population skew, or the goal of preventing hospital overload.
I love the graph where the author says 'sure, maybe fewer people died, but...' . Classic.
The entire substance of this article is taking a single graph from Twitter and establishing that masks do nothing to stem the spread of covid. That’s it. That’s the whole post.
Do the regular rank and file posters on this website believe that covid was a massive global conspiracy? Entertaining this sort of clearly biased propaganda (the name of the blog is literally “Unmasked” and all the articles seem to start from the same premise of “covid precautions are unnecessary and harmful”) certainly makes this site look as if that’s the case.
I understand that this forum is generally very pro-business. Considering that this piece of propaganda serves a specific purpose of advocating for a reduction of covid measures, are the people here genuinely so invested in making money that they’ll believe and advocate for doing nothing to stop the spread of a deadly virus?
It looks like you do. I’m not saying that I personally think that you, the reader, is happy to allow a pandemic to spread unchecked in order to maximize your portfolio returns but I AM saying that the very fact that this made it to the front page reflects on this community.
From an outsider’s perspective, either HN has such a strong individualism bent that the community is willing to gamify mass death for profit, OR that it’s incredibly easy to artificially boost harmful propaganda on a well-funded, fully staffed website made by tech people for tech people.
It’s embarrassing either way.
Judging from the current top comments, it seems the general sentiment is that this post is incorrect and ignores a number of points.
The fact that the public is still not widely informed about this is telling, since we have known since ~ July 2020 that this virus is aerosol stable for hours…
By far not going to work is a huge risk mitigation factor for most people (100% effective), which is why it is hard to decouple distancing from poorly worn cotton masks, which is mostly what happens here.
I guess no.
> either HN has such a strong individualism bent that the community is willing to gamify mass death for profit, OR that it’s incredibly easy to artificially boost harmful propaganda
There is a third option. A lot of topics are discussed. We discussed from the Higgs's boson to the Em-Drive (but for some reason, nobody likes to discuss Giant Magnetoresistance). It's also interesting to discuss what is the best strategy during a pandemic.
I think it's too soon, and to get the answer we must wait like 10 years until the dust is settle, the government of each country changed so much that they are not covering theirs asses or using the death as an electoral weapon, and also get better computer models.
It's interesting that in the heat of the moment each country tried a different strategy, from almost complete lockdown to almost no lockdown. I remember trying the simulator in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763873 The "full lockdown" is very tempting, but the money used there can be used to other thing, like giving food to poor people, in spite it's not an option in the simulator. It's a very though decision, and I'm relieved that I didn't have to take those hard decision in real life.
Not fake, but it should be obvious that the statistics of a small geographical area might not be comparable to that of a much larger one.
Just wait till you find out the death rate at a single nursing home vs the surrounding 100km^2!
Quite a few names involved in the industry of vaccines have been campainging for years to get inoculations worldwide, for unnamed diseases, but announcing that it was coming. Here we have a highly contagious flu disease that kills a ratio of the infected people, the perfect horse to ride.
Never in my life would I have believed that nearly all media, governments and then even people to become obsessed, hysterical and imposing their views on people's health.
Let's not forget what this virus is. A highly transmissible bug that has a 3 to 6% chance to be lethal, in an aging population, with significant rates of diabetes, obesity and cardio vascular issues.
Of course the media wants to forget about Sweeden. It went against their objective to increase health control on citizens.
I'd say it demonstrates really well the way the country is heading: more inequality, people not caring what happens to each other, just in general America v2 but with a different language.
1. Don't open doors per handle/with hands
2. wear masks in public transit
3. no handshakes just fist bumps
4. if (1) wasn't possible or after (3), always pulling out the small bottle of hand sanitizer
Before the pandemic, in a western, non-medical context, this was clearly considered odd and OCD.
The fear ignited at the onset of the pandemic turned many of us in to OCD patients. Into OCD-societies.
Remember those dead bodies piling up on Wuhan streets? Or the chaotic scenes from Italian hospitals? Those videos are all debunked for along time, so "Why Does No One Ever Talk About those Shock-Videos form China and Italy anymore?" is a question connected to the author's question:
"Why Does No One Ever Talk About Sweden Anymore?"
The answer: "unmitigated, renegade disaster of Sweden’s policy"
No one talks about Sweden (or those videos) anymore, because the lies have become too big to fail.
This pandemical policy desaster across so many "enlightened" countries documents a failure of societal cohesiveness that cannot be explained alone with the biased newsrooms. It stems from vast pockets of society (mostly the upper echelons) that have lost fundamental understanding of basic human rights of their neighbours.
In so far, not only seems Sweden's Covid response more successful. But the foundations of their society much more sound.