The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX
Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average.
The difference between them and their neighbors isn't small.
Counterfactuals are always hard, and there might be valid non-lockdown related excuses for why Sweden did so poorly, but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.
> Some birds of prey, such as hawks, are believed to have an acuity of around 20/2; in this respect, their vision is much better than human eyesight.
The scale of how good vision can be keeps going and going indefinitely (presumably until you get into physical limitations to resolution related to wavelengths). While 20/20 is considered normal and not in need of correction, it doesn't mean it's the best vision observed among human beings, or the best that's physically possible (for human beings or other animals).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#Powers,_abilities,_an...
> I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see.
No, of course not. Try looking at Saturn at night. Then try looking through a telescope. Odds are you'll see it better with the aid.
(20/20 means "person being tested sees as well at 20 feet as standard vision at 20 feet.")
This isn't obvious; consider that having 3,000/3,000 vision ("I can't read text all that well when it's half a mile away") says pretty much nothing about how clearly you can see things that are 20 feet away.
Nearsightedness and farsightedness are both characterized by "normal vision" at certain distances which becomes markedly worse at certain other distances.
3,000 feet is quite different (for one thing, atmospheric effects start becoming relevant).
That is how the saying is used, but oddly enough it's pretty much the opposite of what 20/20 vision means.
I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.
They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.
Makes sense....
I suppose one "solution" is one of those fake masks that looks real, but does nothing. Technically compliant with the letter of the law, but still striking a blow, with the bonus of hiding your face.
George Orwell, who actually died of an infectious disease ( Tuberculosis ), being recruited posthumously to the "lets spread disease without restraint" brigade is quite low.
Come to think of it when has contact tracing been done before?
What people would consider Orwellian is the app you can use to scan in at places. That's voluntary, but almost everyone uses it and you still have to sign in on paper if you don't.
Personally, I don't mind. We all carry around GPS tracking devices every day, and it's silly to think that governments can't already track those. Even with GPS off you can be tracked if hitting wifi or different cell towers.
We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.
So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.
It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.
[0] https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762
For outbound travel Australians are required to get a government exemption to leave the country. Australia also has far fewer inbound quarantine places per capita.
Also internally most states require entry/exit permits and frequently close thier borders to one another.
Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.
Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup plan.
But even the AZ rollout was a debacle with no one sure if they were eligible or how to get it. And the Prime Minster excusing it all by saying "it's not a race".
If Australia had the vaccination rate of the US or the UK (which was absolutely achievable) then Australia would still be the envy of the world.
New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.
Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).
Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/australia-to-get-pfiz...
[2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/vaccine-operations-centre-wee...
It boggles my mind that some people desire to live in a system like that.
I'm truly sorry you've had to go through that. My mom has a compromised immune system so she went through much of the same until she was able to get vaccinated. I still worry about what would happen to her with a breakthrough infection.
> I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk)
If that was a choice, I'd gladly take it. But Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam, etc. have shown that even the best lockdown implementations fail eventually. New Zealand may be the single outlier, but I'm not sure what their end game is as it requires completely sealing their country from the rest of the world, which is also unsustainable.
I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.
Pedantic “every country is a different country” aside; Norway and Finland are absolutely fine comparatives.
The population density (in the populated areas), culture and genetic make-up of these countries is so similar that they may as well be considered the same country socioeconomically.
Hell, they used to even _be_ the same country (the union of Kalmar).
I’ve lived in Finland and currently live in Sweden. As a British person I see more similarities than differences. (Language of Finland vs the Scandinavian languages not withstanding)
Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong.
I do suspect Sweden would have had less fatality had they implemented a lockdown. Would it then be comparable to Norway? I wouldn't bet may life on it. France has almost twice as many covid death as Germany even though they implemented a much stricter lockdown.
It seems some people hate Sweden for choosing their way to deal with the pandemics. Could have they done better otherwise? maybe, but overall, no cataclysm happened there, they did ok in terms of fatality compared to rest of Europe, and much better for the other metrics, as stated in the article.
It's very hard to correlate policies to outcomes.
Nobody has claimed that it is, and in fact in this very thread you've seen it correctly noted that Sweden's approach to old age homes was responsible for a significant part of the fatalities -- although here too there's a lot of debate about whether it's the percentage of % in age homes (a bit higher in Sweden), the Swedish tendency to have larger homes, or the Swedish COVID policy decision to treat people at the homes instead of hospitalizing them.
But, again, if you have alternative hypotheses or factors that you think differ greatly between the countries, let's hear them. Because as a native of the region, I'd struggle to find many, at least when it comes to factors a virus would care about (as opposed to, say, preferring sweeter jam with meatballs).
Maybe this explains the difference during the pandemic - Sweden had more old people.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
So first you claim we don't know. Then you claim they've "done quite well". Which is it? What was the purpose of the first sentence?
Countries geographically close to each other are more similar than countries far apart. Therefore you can more readily attribute the difference in death-rates to differences in policy.
And use Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates is most probably the correct one: lack of lockdown. It just makes (common) sense.
What is your explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates between Sweden and its closest neighbors? Do you have a simpler explanation than the lack of lockdown?
There are huge differences in demographics between the Scandinavian countries. Over 20% of the Swedish population have been born outside of the country, mostly in the Middle East or Africa. This group has been hit disproportionately by Covid. The risk of needing intensive care for Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden is 6 times higher than for people with Swedish ancestry, and the risk of dying is 2.8 higher [0].
There are also pretty big differences in how elderly care is organized and run.
I'm not saying we did a good job in Sweden, but I definitely think that there are more factors than lockdown in play.
[0] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...
In hindsight, would they still make the same decision, if (and when) a new equally deadly pandemic rises again?
"Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at which the average citizen lives. It is calculated by taking weighted average of the density of all parcels of land that make up a city, with each parcel weighted by its population" [0]
By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741. [1] Concluding that Denmark did amazingly well given the cards they were dealt and Sweden is at the average of Europe due to very a urbanised population compared to the size of the country.
[0]: https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-luisa-udp-pwd-ref2...
[1]: https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/LUISA/Secon...
I'm quite happy to accept that 'population density' is inadequate - I mention it only in passing in my comment, the point I'm making is that Sweden is not a country you would expect to perform at the european average, and given that, the most natural thing to do is to compare a country with its neighbors. Neighboring countries usually share many factors, and on top of that, they have a direct transmission effect too.
Sweden did much worse than its neighbors. The explanation for that is either in the ways that Sweden is different from its neighbors, or in the difference in public policy.
I certainly don't know which to blame, but I don't want to hear any more lionization of the Swedish approach that doesn't solidly get to grips with that question.
So maybe it's not geography we should be talking about, but instead the number of older vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
Because the effective Swedish population density is very low? The effective density is affected by household size, and about 40% of Swedes live alone without children[0]. Sweden had the biggest Corona infection vector neutered and still did horribly.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/526013/sweden-number-of-...
I thought your comment was going to be about the fact that urban density didn't end up being that useful a predictor of spread, except to the extent that it correlates with household size. In general, people were catching Covid from being inside with others, not from incidental contact with subway poles or passing people on the sidewalk.
Germany at 2651 did much better than Sweden. France is around 4800. Italy is just over 4000. Sweden is closer to Denmark than to either of those two.
It used to be - many years ago - a stodgy and conservative yet reputable newspaper (they fired Boris Johnson for lying, now he moonlights as a columnist). As with other newspapers (e.g. WSJ) it went off the deep end a long time ago.
I'm curious, how does it work in reality? A boardroom meetings where landlord's representative decide what to publish in the next issue to get people into commercial property? A weekly reviews of editors where they have their KPI tied to how well they lure people into buildings? Phone calls from commercial union leaders to publishing houses asking for specific results? Do we have some good articles which would describe mechanics of that or is it all successful clandestine operations?
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explains how this work with a very large number of examples.
1. https://youtu.be/9RPKH6BVcoM
2. https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...
Internet commenters love to think their enemy's minions are stupid.
In reality they're just as smart as you are and don't need to be specifically told what the people in charge do and don't want published and/or what tone they should take.
In the olden days the only way to get an education was through privately tutoring.
So establishments where everyone was educated together were “public” - even though you paid to attend.
Nowadays “public meaning paid” implies one of these original public schools (Harrow, Eton and the like).
I went to a paid school, founded in 1513, but it wouldn’t be called “public” because it’s not one of those original schools and therefore not high enough in the class system. It would be called “private”.
“Public as in free to attend” schools are known as state schools.
Mine wasn’t a boarding school though which probably counts for something.
For a journalism job at the Telegraph you're going to need to have a resume where you've written the right kinds of articles with the right kind of tone. Have a bunch of articles that you've written sympathetic to Corbyn and those around him and you ain't getting the job.
They won't even need to police you that hard once you've gotten the job, because you've spent 20+ years being brought up a certain way and you're probably not going to massively deviate from your past all of a sudden, particularly not if you're clearly getting paid well based on your current trajectory. Once you get vetted in the interview process they know what they're getting based on the way you present yourself, the way you talk, your background, where you grew up, the schools you went to, etc. And when you've been there long enough you'll vet other candidates the same way.
And its largely the same kind of interpersonal mechanics that govern the formation of cliques in high school, enforced by interviews and performance reviews, with large incentives where if you conform you climb the ladder and gain more wealth and power. Nobody needs to write it all down just like there's no written rules that he art nerds tend to hang out with the art nerds (and I'm sure there's examples of people who you think you can point to who broke the molds there, but they're notable precisely because they broke the molds).
the same way gravity works, you don't start floating through the room even if you don't actively believe in it. The financiers of these papers know the editors and managers they hire, they set the tone, they dine in the same circles, their kids go to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, for ideology to proliferate there are no 'mechanics' required.
They have gone off the deep end though. Some good coverage of The Telegraph's fall in standards is Peter Oborne's resignation letter: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...
For example, I read the guardian pretty much everyday, and various other papers, even though although culturally I am a proper grauniad-reader type, politically I am not - but by virtue of actually reading the articles text you can actually (believe it or not?) determine both the facts and the flavour separately.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-...
It shocks me that people believe manufacturer denials on this particular issue but still claim to be immune to commercial propaganda.
It's unlikely there will ever be undeniable proof available to the general public one way or the other on this. But the story was well sourced, was definitely technical credible and the parts that could be checked all checked out. Literally the only thing against it was manufacturer statements saying "nah".
But follow up articles have expanded that, and are starting to name people who say they have seen evidence now: https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/12/supermicro_bloomberg_...
In particular, check out page 71 of [1], where a former US Marine testifies under oath in a federal case about a similar things happening with Lenovo laptops in 2008 in Iraq. Quote:
A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the US military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China.
[1] https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/r9dKMMM0...
If it's real, it really shouldn't be that hard to prove conclusively - find the chip, scan it, dump what's in it. The technical parts are possible but not that plausible - not just the manufacturer but large internet companies with the right expertise were sceptical, and most of the people who thought it was genuine seemed to be non-technical. E.g. "had a chip encrypted on the motherboard" does not inspire confidence that this is someone who knows what they're talking about.
In a paper published last week in science journal Nature, Dr Bhatt, together with the UK's former government advisor Neil Ferguson and other researchers, estimated that if the UK had adopted Sweden’s policies, its death rate would have been between two and four times higher.
"What Sweden did was a pandemic response that involved large numbers of interventions, a considerable amount of reliance on population behaviour and population adherence, and a reliance on the intricacies of what makes Swedish culture Swedish culture,” Dr Bhatt said.
"If the UK had adopted what Sweden did, I have no doubt in my mind that it would have had an absolute disaster."
¯\(°_o)/¯
Notably, the Telegraph is not calling for people int he UK to be more like Swedes.
They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding.
If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x.
And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in Norway and 10 people died in Sweden, I don't think we'd be debating much. Even in Sweden, they did not have as many deaths as most other countries, and a lot of them were very early on.
If the data in the graph shared by kybernetikos is correct, the claim that 'it's all because of elder deaths in early 2020' seems to be misguided, given the 2021-01 peak, and the steady first-place position throughout the last ~18 months.
Realistically, most of the people live in a few cities and the density is similar to Ireland, Croatia, Bulgaria, or even Greece.
Sweden after its first wave doesn't look much different than any of those countries.
Is it because a lot of the susceptible people already died? Maybe. But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.
Okay then. Most of Australia is uninhabited, so let's compare those two (deaths per million).
> But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.
You can try, and that's what this story (and similar) tries to do, factoring in variables as best they can.
FWIW the fixation on morbidity, at the exclusion of long term health effects, including the mental and physical health of a society's medical professionals by either being overwhelmed or burned out, is similarly bewildering to me as comparing two countries with similar geographies, climate, and effective population density is to you.
What really scares the willies out of me is that someone will eventually BigData this pandemic, and spit out a number that reflects how many people a nation state should sacrifice per month to maximise the wealth acquisition of the elites. This number will inform how governments will operate during the next pandemic.
This petrifies me because I'm living in Australia, where we've adopted an elimination strategy (well, up until a few weeks ago), and it's worked really well for me, given I have no wish to involuntarily sacrifice myself in the name of a poorly architected and grossly corrupted economic system.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.
As they learned more about the virus and adapted their death rate per capita dropped to be on par with Europe..while still maintaining looser restrictions.
I think it still begs the question that those patients could have been saved, but it is not trying to say that old people don't count. More, that the full lockdowns didn't really protect them, by themselves. As seen in NYC, where it is fairly heavily believed that any good the lockdown did was more than offset by sending patients back into nursing homes.
The idea is that since the first wave and them changing their stance slightly - Sweden is not performing an order of magnitude worse than Norway and Finland, and it's pretty average compared to the rest of Europe - and definitely doing better than Russia.
They get stick from Tories who call them elitist Londoners (this is deeply ironic, but that's for another comment) and even more stick from proper lefties who don't believe they are on their side enough.
https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/john-pilger-says-guardian-col...
I know it's incredibly taboo to say something like this; but people are completely overvaluing the impact of the few absolute numbers of deaths, vs. the much harder to quantify widespread misery caused by these overreactions to the situation.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
and a follow-up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writi...
>It takes people ~50 months of strict lockdown to save one month of someone's healthy life.
Or another way to look at it, it takes 50 people locking down for a month to save each one month of life expectancy for one person. 600 people locking down to save a single person's life expectancy by one year. 6000 people for 10 years of life expectancy for a single person.
Whether that's worth the misery is up to the reader. I have my own opinion here, but it's undeniably subjective. It's a trade-off.
Every year my confidence and trust in politicians and any expert with a role in setting policies gets lower.
> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I'm consciously aware of how many (or how few) years I have left, and I would never have agreed to losing two of them by not being able to see my family (including 2 babies born) in that time).
I don't really have a problem with social distancing/masks/quarantine/etc, but locking people in their homes (and locking people out of their countries) was entirely too much. "Living" shouldn't have been treated as just a transmission vector for COVID.
- significant loss in productivity due to varying levels of incapacitation from Covid19
- additional loss in productivity due to cautious people isolating anyway
- new strains due to more mutations of the virus
Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. And I won't be suprised if we have an epidemic of early-onset Alzheimers in ten years time.
How much does one country having slightly more transmission affect the global mutation rate?
>>Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more.
Do you have a source on this? In England, the data indicates otherwise:
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from...
>>Nonetheless, the data showed that there have been 117 deaths among people in England who had the delta variant with the majority being in the over-50 age group.
>>There have been eight fatalities among the under-50s with six of them in unvaccinated individuals and the other two in people who had received one dose.
""" Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal. """"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...
Norway was down to 0-5 infections a day last summer even when the society was open.
Then we opened the door for foreign workers (and not a bad thing about them) and the industry who had promised to take care of quarantines etc failed so hard that all of a sudden wehad another wave.
I'm moderately conservative but disappointed with both conservative politicians and rhe industry for this.
Sounds aggressive, I know. But it’s a solid way to illustrate that there are real people behind statistics.
If 10x more people die, “everyone” is not going to have 2 years of a non-miserable life. The people who lose their spouses, parents, friends, children, etc will be horrifically miserable. It’s easy to trade lives when you assume you won’t be one of those people (or worse, one of the prematurely deceased).
Your argument is the precise fallacy I'm arguing against — risks and benefits should be quantified and weighed. The fact that it takes 50 man-months of quarantine to avoid a single one-month earlier than expected death, to me, is absolutely not worth it.
Perhaps you think locking up 50 innocent people to give someone an extra month is worth it. I don't. But I do understand that it's a subjective assessment.
https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...
Still not worth it to me.
But doesn’t it place a reasonable scale upon what a trade might look like.
If the virus was as deadly as people pretended it was we wouldn't NEED lockdowns or any government measures at all. People would stay at home by themselves. Instead I see people going shopping 3 times a week.
People are simply unwilling to admit they were wrong and bought into an unwarranted hysteria. The sooner they admit this the sooner this farce can end. The flu is more dangerous to most people in here, so let's react proportionally to what we did for the flu every year
"Hitlers Volksstaat", Aly, Götz
1. I think you underestimate how much of that misery comes from the pandemic itself and not from the reaction to the pandemic. I live in a country that went back and forth between relatively strict lockdowns and almost complete opening up. Yet even during the opening up phase people were afraid it would inevitably cause another wave, many would not go to pubs or clubs, businesses were not thriving...
2. I think you might overestimate the misery, which depends on personality, details of the restrictions in a given country etc. I am sure many suffered under the restrictions and I do not want to diminish that. However, I live in a country where I could go out running or cycling and nobody would prohibit me from visiting my family or going for a walk with a friend even during the strictest lockdowns (I am actually surprised by some experiences mentioned here, like not being able to see new babies born in the family - I make a resolution to examine more carefully what people mean when they talk about "lockdowns"). And I could work from home, which greatly improved my quality of life. And I am not alone in this - we are saying with my introverted colleagues that the pandemic would be great if it was not for the illness.
For me, basically all the stress comes from the fear that my parents of my grandmother could catch it or that I will catch it and have the bad luck of some long term problems. Virtually none of the stress comes from the restrictions. Again, I don't doubt that many do suffer, I just wanted to balance your view by a counter-view.
Cafes and restaurants were emptying in my area before the official lockdowns started. Even now with our (UK) lockdown over and high vaccination rates many people are still wary. Use of public transport is still way down.
I think there is a cut-off at some point, but 10x more deaths is way above my threshold.
I'll wait…
Your numbers are beyond absurd. But let me quickly disprove it: this study[1] shows the infection fatality rate among patients 70 and older in Stockholm was 4.3%. So, even if every single person over 60 was infected and was actually 70+, then you'd still not have 10% of the people you know over 60 die.
But obviously, 60 year olds are not all 70+, so their rate is lower, and not everyone gets infected (in Sweden so far, only about 10% of the country got infected) — so in your ridiculous example, it's over 50% likely that not a single one of the 100 people you listed dies in this contrived scenario.
But please, show me the data that shows otherwise.
[1]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...
Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times.
The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart).
It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat?
I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms.
In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.
It's called the 'dry tinder' hypothesis, and it isn't born out when researchers look at the data, e.g.
As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same.
Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.
Plus, it just makes common-sense that if people cannot meet other people, that prevents the spread of the disease. No?
That makes common sense, and then we see 10x difference in deaths. The Occam's razor explanation for the reason of 10x bigger death rate then is .. lack of lockdown!
Anybody arguing otherwise seems suspect of political calculus, in my view.
I sat in the UK for weeks looking at what was happening in Italy and wondering why we weren’t doing anything at all.
I also thought it was interesting that the delta wave seemed to disappear in the UK without the benefit of lockdowns. The same in India. The same in India. I've been wondering if these waves of infections come and go without much regard for typical lockdown measures (outside of full-on communist China and New Zealand lockdowns, which may not be practical in most other places).
"U.S. (Civid-19) deaths in the week ending Monday totaled 7,225. By comparison, about 5,400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks combined. "
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/delta-driven-surge-in-us-e...
We don't limit comparison of Italy to Mediterranean countries, or England to British Isle countries.
Sweden is a European country.
On a European scale Sweden was right in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita.
In reality this argument is a form of motivated reasoning. It boils down to, if you ignore all the countries that disprove the hypothesis behind lockdowns and take a tiny number that did better than Sweden, then search backwards for some justification as to why this cherry picking is legitimate, you get a 'neighbours hypothesis' that unfortunately has to ignore some of the neighbours.
It's just rationalizing by people who cannot accept that lockdowns failed, because if they accepted that they'd have to accept that academic expertise in general has failed. And not only failed. Failed in ways that were destructive and damaging.
People compare other countries to Australia and New Zealand and Singapore all the time to justify covid lockdowns and restrictions.
But in the case of Sweden a country that outright disproves effectiveness of covid restrictions you require the frame of reference to only be the specific neighboring countries to cherry pick to fit your narrative.
It's either monstrously nightmarishly disingenuous or completely boneheaded and clueless.
But when it comes to Sweden the one country that disproves their narrative it has to be just a neighboring countries.
It seems so disingenuous to me.
It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this.
I see two main failures:
1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up.
2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is where most deaths happened. Norway in particular handled this so much better.
And of course we should compare ourselves to e.g. Denmark/Norway/Finland.
I think the root cause of all this is that Sweden has not been involved in a war in a very long time, unlike our neighbors. We're pretty good when things are stable, but apparently awful when things are dynamic/shit is going down.
Of course I have very specific opinions on what "actually" went wrong and why, but that would be too detailed to be useful here and also way too partisan.
For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?
1. A significant number of Swedes were in Lombardy (northern Italy) at the time the European outbreak started there. Furthermore Sweden has at least two major companies with presence around Wuhan. So by the time government noticed the issue it was too late.
2. Elderly care employees in Sweden are basically gig workers, resulting in a huge rotation in care givers and further spreading of the virus. The Social Democrats (and the Left party V) have often been opposed to this.
Two more things to consider:
1. This difference between Sweden and its neighbours is also clearly visible in the flu pattern over the year. It is simply due to different living and travelling conditions.
2. The municipalities are somewhat independent of the central government. Some with the highest death numbers among the elders where controlled by the opposition (e.g. Stockholm).
So while the government could have done a MUCH better job, your comment is already fairly partisan by cherry picking or ignoring facts.
2. Huge employee rotation may be exactly why govt should step in?
* Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years.
* If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost.
If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct.
If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.
I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.
If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!”
It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.
Consider the following questions:
* Would you accept 70 million people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?
* Would you accept 500 people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?
* Would you accept 5,000 people staying inside for a year to extend 10 peoples life by 10 years?
* Would you stay inside for an hour to save another persons life by a year?
* Would you stay inside for a year to save another person life by 1 year?
These are the real questions that we have to answer, and they will absolutely (and unfortunately) need people to face into the question of the value of life.
My personal answer to these questions is (in sequence) No, No, No, Yes, No. A reasonable person could answer completely different - there is no absolute right answer in any of these!
We can pretend that the answer to these questions is impossible - but these are the real decisions that policy makers need to make. How much is someone's freedom worth compared to the life of a stranger?
I didn't assign zero value - I assigned it as 90% value compared to a year with no restrictions.
It's nice you used the time to improve your relationship with your wife, but I'm single and wasn't able to see my friends or family for 6 months. I like that you managed to make the most of it - but my life was put on hold.
> The idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching Netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids.
This post assumes that me being inside for a year stops someone else being suffocated - but actually it's probably more like 100-500 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated (although they will still die of another cause instead, on average a few years later but sometimes many years later). Besides, it's the idea that my freedom (and that of hundreds of others per life saved) should be traded for someone else's health is my issue. Selfish? Sure, but we all are. Everyone on this forum could donate all their earnings this year to save tens of strangers lives in less developed countries but very few do in reality.
> Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic?
See the trolley dilemma - this is a different ethical decision (based on positive action, i.e. doing vs allowing harm).
People in their 30s and 40s are dying and losing decades of life. Kids Even. Slowing down the spread and then vaccination has saved so many millions from rolling that die.
For myself and my wife for example my wife would virtually certainly be dead if she had contracted it and I wouldn't have great odds either. My lungs don't work that well now without benefit of covid
Then there is the damage done by the disease how do you properly value ravaged lungs and damaged bodies that decrease quality of life for the remainder of a life and end it prematurely? Better than half of asymptomatic survivors have lung damage even!
Then every case as a trillion chances at a better covid. How do you value THAT in your equation? Do you try to assign probability to various future death rates and multiply by probability of being realized?
> but actually it's probably more like 100 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated.
Plus 12 from being hospitalized and having substantial damage done to their bodies that decreases their lifespan by 5 years. Plus 20 more who didn't feel serious symptoms but still sustained substantial lung or cardiovascular damage and lost a year.
Even playing the same game I think you are behind the 8 ball.
We are all selfish. It's true but it's a vice not a justification. We ought to strive for better. The life you save may be your own.
People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
(If I may summarize what you've said) Saying that a large number of coincident deaths causes a collective grief that wouldn't have happened otherwise is rather subjective. I have felt nothing of the sort. I don't think it's enough of a concern to justify such an overreach of government power.
Quantifying the value of life as a number is icky but necessary if you're making decisions of this scale.
1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death.
> People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns.
These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing?
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
And on the side of not having lockdowns you'll find things that are much worse than some assumed percentage loss of happiness: people dying in total isolation despite not being sick, people dying of medical care that was withheld because they were too afraid to go to the hospital, a generation whose growth was stunted by lack of education and simple lack of human contact (according to one study, babies during the pandemic had a 22% lower IQ than babies from other years [1]), etc. We have done incredible damage to ourselves.
At the beginning of the pandemic this was justified, since we didn't know if this was going to be a mild case of the sniffles or some kind of air-transmissible ebola. Once we knew it was much closer to the first than to the second, however, we should have adjusted our policies, and we never did. I'm terrified that in the coming months we might see a return to lockdowns, as cases will inevitably rise again, and our politicians know only one answer.
I know an elderly couple that literally hasn't left their house, nor received any visitors other than for things like grocery deliveries, since the beginning of the pandemic. Considering how terrified they now are of the outside world, they will live out their lives in a self-chosen prison cell. They are both fully vaccinated (doctor came to their house for it), but refuse to step outside. Is that life?
As another poster here put it so eloquently: life shouldn't be treated as nothing other than a transmission vector for the virus.
How would you feel about a government policy where people are killed two years before their estimated 'normal' date of death, in order to spare society the massive medical cost of the last few years of living? Evil, right?
How do you feel about a policy where those two years are also taken by the government, but in the middle of your life? Sure, we weren't actually killed; we were allowed to keep producing. The only thing that was taken from us were all the things that made life worth living...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...
You can do it - although you can't calculate happiness completely, you can make models and reason about it in a mathematical/economic way. How much you believe the theory maps onto the real world is a valid criticism, however there are entire sections of the social sciences that attempt to do this to help inform policy and decisions (see: Happiness Economics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics).
In fact, the concept of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a very common healthcare economics concept which is used in the UK (NICE) to decide how to allocate drug funding and direct policy.
It's not an article about the cost of covid though, its about the benefits of not fighting it as hard as other countries. It's very light on that, not much of an attempt to quantify and compare to the cost, but still props to it for even acknowledging that those benefits exist and count for something.
The best write up I've seen so far on the topic is this [0] which concludes:
> So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.
> Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh.
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
End result ? 30000+ dead.
Well, at least it looks like the ammount of people who got infected was quite massive as with only 50% vaccination rate right now things are not going back to hell so far, with hardly any precautions still in place.
1) +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area. (https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... )
2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image)
3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures.
As many have said, one of the major factor was how the elderly in home facilities had been protected and the state of the medical infrastructure (rate of intense care beds per capita to handle the peaks for exemple).
In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).
Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?
By that comparison Sweden has done very badly compared to its peers. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
As this very article says:
However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.
The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.
Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway:
> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper.
It may be that Sweden had more older people than Norway at the beginning of the pandemic, i.e. a more vulnerable population. Also they admitted to doing a poor job early on in nursing homes.
I think you are simplifying this too much, insisting that it is valid to come to a conclusion on lockdowns based on a comparison of Sweden to two nearby countries. That doesn't exactly explain why a bunch of countries like the U.K., France, Spain, and Portugal that did lockdown had more per-capita deaths than Sweden. It ends up looking like you cherry picked your data, ignoring contradictory data, and not really explaining anything.
About Dr. Bhatt, from the same article you quoted:
> Samir Bhatt, professor of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy.
It's too bad nobody asked him why the the U.K. with lockdowns had more deaths that Sweden without lockdowns.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
The excess mortality graph only goes back 19 months, because that's when COVID start. It uses excess mortality, so those numbers are based on numbers in the previous years.
It's like looking at a chart showing inflation over the past year and saying "this says nothing about the prices two years ago!" They're used to compute the numbers on the chart, not be shown on the chart.
The article I linked to explains the significance, which I tried to sum up in my comment:
> In other words, excess mortality from COVID-19 may be less conspicuous than previously perceived in Sweden, while mortality displacement may be used to explain at least part of the observed findings.
> More specifically, mortality displacement implies temporarily increased mortality (i.e., excess mortality) in a certain population as a result of external events, which likely arises because individuals in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise – primarily due to the timing or severity of the unusual external event. The excess mortality is, thus, predated or followed by time periods of lower than expected mortality.
In other words, Sweden was better than Norway at keeping older people alive before the pandemic. Therefore during the pandemic there were more older people in Sweden. Older people are notably more vulnerable. This may be the explanation why more people died of covid in Sweden. It alludes to there being more factors involved than just the nearness of two countries and lockdown protocols.
Another way of saying this, exaggerated for clarity: More people will die of covid in a country of 80 year olds than in a country of 20 year olds.
Remember that only 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old [1]. This is consistent with the above information.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
Given that pandemic spread has almost entirely played out indoor, a much more likely risk factor is multi-member (and especially multi-generational) households. As mentioned in the article, Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia have a small household size and especially high proportion of single-person households.
The OP compares Sweden to its closest neighbours
> +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area
As do +83% +85% and +88% of the three closest neighbours OP compared Sweden.
In what way does that comparison not make sense?
Wrong!
It's like using Canadian population density with the whole country when almost the entire population lives within a hundred miles of the US border.
You've never been to Stockholm metro area. It's very sparsely populated compared to many big metro areas.
Stockholm is a small city (800k people or so) surrounded by villages (another 1.5 million people) spread over 6,519.3 km2. Density is 360/km2
And that's the biggest city in the country.
In comparison, Paris (as we were talking about France): 13 mln people over 18,940.7 km2 with a density of 690/km2. That's for metro area. Urban area alone is 10 mln people with density of 21,000/km2
Which is why Tegnell had the gall to blame immigrants for the spread of Covid-19. Immigrants live in more densely populated areas.
And all this still doesn't explane a significantly larger mortality rate than immediate neighbors that have similar populations.
2. Sweden's population density is 200th on this list of 250 countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthcare-access-and-qua...
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/countries/country-details/...
> In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).
Do you really think the economy only "contracted somewhat"?
Can we trust any statistics from people that depend on them to be good?
Also "just fine" is still not pre-pandemic levels so we'll have to see in a year or two.
When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.
That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies, and the best test for those policies is to compare like with like (e.g. other Nordic countries).
When people compare US numbers to other countries, I feel that's from more of a "what did the US do wrong" angle, and those comparisons could surface differences that could be learned from.
Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without left/right tinted glasses.
I would point out though that the truth does not always fit between the 'left' and 'right' views. The migration of the Overton window, capture of major media, and increased acceptance of social media censorship sailed away from truth some time ago.
Am I the only one whos just thinking none of this matters?
The reality is Sweden is doing an amazing job if there’s no lockdowns. Those lockdowns led to a massive increase in suicides[1], economic damage[2], inflation[3], massive increase in drug abuse[4], lost years in education[5].
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this virus would cause more harm. Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths (almost exclusively from people near end of life). What’s the damage in years of education lost, the drug abuse, homelessness, inflation pricing out homes for those who can work...
long-term I expect Sweden will see lower deaths than any of the countries that locked down.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm
[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/
[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi
[4] https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID...
[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-repor...
> Among adolescents aged 12–17 years, the number of weekly ED visits for suspected suicide attempts DECREASED DURING SPRING 2020 compared with that during 2019 [...] mean weekly number of ED visits for suspected suicide attempts were 22.3% HIGHER DURING SUMMER 2020 and 39.1% HIGHER DURING WINTER 2021 than during the corresponding periods in 2019
(Emphasis mine). So, during three phases of the COVID-19 epidemic, suicide attempts decreased during one, increased during two. The US was in nationwide lockdown during only one of these phases, which happens to be exactly the one where suicide attempts DECREASED.
Source [2] talks about (indisputable) damage to the US economy, which you attribute to the (half assed) US lockdowns. But this is begging the question whether it was the lockdown rather than the epidemic which did the damage, and in fact, Sweden had a WORSE economic outcome than its neighbors.
> Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths
The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil...
And even athletes in top physical condition can suffer debilitating consequences for indeterminate periods of time: https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31936050/lewis-hamilton-s...
Anecdotes should not be the basis for unprecedented forced quarantine policies that target not the sick, but the healthy majority. To demonstrate the unreliability of anecdotal evidence, see how a large study on heart inflammation in young athletes caused by covid have debunked earlier anecdotal evidence on the issue:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-...
However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.
The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. This also fails to acknowledge that there might be a worthwhile set of cost:benefit ratios to compare your single data point against.
> but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.
People accuse the COVID situation of being political and dividing people. I think one of the major lines of division is in the expectations that one has about their daily life in a given society, and how few some people have about their own.
Each to their own, but the failure to acknowledge the validity of the opposing point of view, even in a polite tone, is a troubling development.
I don't know about the US or Spain but the lockdown measures in the UK were halfhearted. Somehow we managed to have the worst of both worlds, the biggest economic hit in the OECD and the worst health outcomes.
Even though we have relatively few immigrants, at times, more than 50% of all the covid-infected belonged to these groups. https://www.p4.no/nyheter/over-halvparten-av-innlagte-er-inn...
I have not yet seen anyone try correlate socio-eoconomic status and/or overcrowding to infection in a nice way?
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...
Mostly in swedish.
A lockdown is no small thing. It's forcing millions of people into forced isolation, which has hard to forsee consequences for mental health and social development, means destroying innumerable small businesses, and with it, people's livelihoods, closing schools, with devastating effects to education [1], etc.
Also worth noting that the initial projections for covid deaths in Sweden vastly over-estimated the pandemic's eventual lethality:
https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-actual-covid-19-results-co...
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
In the UK the praise for the "Sweden model" comes particularly from the conservative-aligned pro-business anti-lockdown lobby; who are producing PR for their proposition that "lockdowns do more (economic) harm than they do (public health) good". Right or wrong, it's certainly not impartial reporting on a foreign country, it's selling the idea that this should be policy at home.
If you're reading such an article from a UK publication and you're not in the UK, then you are not the target of this marketing exercise. You are informational Bycatch.
There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK (Labour is mired in one scandal after another and can't elect a proper leader), whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.
When it comes to UK newspapers of course it does.
> There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK
That's certainly an opinion, but one that is not relevant to talking about newspapers.
> whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.
UK lockdowns were consistently too late, because the Conservative government did not want too admit the necessity. That's why the lockdowns had to be so long and repeated. Pressure like this article exits because the UK Government is know to be susceptible to it. Because they don't have their own serious plans for COVID, or actually for anything else either.
It may come as a surprise but not every smart, well meaning person supports the lockdowns. You can look at all the publicly available data and come to the conclusion that they were a colossal public health blunder.
I would argue the pro lockdown crowd have a huge bias toward ignoring any bit of data that demonstrates lockdowns are a bad idea.
It's not a good news source anymore, if you want a rational right-wing paper in the UK these days, read The Times.
Used to be the other way around.
Another part of the problem is the degree to which our understanding of facts has evolved. Take, for instance, the body of evidence for and against PPE of all types and compare it to what was being said in March of 2020.
The major failing of public policy was, in my opinion, the inability to articulate the difference between what we knew and what we thought. This was enhanced and exacerbated by the public wanting answers now, and refusing to countenance "we don't know".
When historians looks back at this period of history, they are going to marvel at the degree to which we lionized people who "stuck to their guns" and the degree to which we denigrate people who change their opinion when the facts change.
The argument may be more 'be aware of the biases of the news media you consume'.
Contrast:
> Sweden has recorded more COVID-19 cases per capita than most countries so far: Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.
[…]
> Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%. (None of these economies shrank by more than 4% over the course of 2020, though.)
> Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average.
* https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...
Compared to the UK (where the Telegraph is based) Sweden did pretty well—but that may not be a valid apples-apples comparison for a variety of reasons. Compared to the other Nordics—which may have more similarities (economy, demographic, geography)—Sweden did not do as well AFAICT.
Exactly this. That's why I said "it is not an impartial source".
This might lead you to stop consuming certain very low quality sources, or in most cases, read them with awareness.
CO2 doesn’t try to stymie your mitigation plans; a virus has selective pressure but it’s stochastic rather than directed by an intelligent adversary. In contrast, the stock market has a huge number of people with massive resources who can make enormous profits when they find a way to exploit some aspect of the system.
https://twitter.com/Andreas_Hopf/status/1429523341510123528
So they traded more deaths for a WORSE economy (though, as far as I know, the part about self reported mental health is true).
The overall sentiment in Sweden is that they should have done more. Even their chief epidemiologist publicly regretted their policy and wished they had followed their neighboring countries.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientist-behind-swedens-no-loc...
> The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
> And Dr Bhatt does not think another, non-Nordic country such as Britain could have copied Sweden’s policies and got the same results.
> With about 23 people per square kilometre, Sweden has about a tenth of the population density of the UK, while about half of Swedish households comprise just one person - a major factor in local transmission.
* "But that death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and well below those of France, Spain, Italy and the UK"
* Dr Bhatt concedes "it worked for Sweden"
* Dr Bhatt is "one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy"
That last detail is important. Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK. If he said anything else, that would become the story. What's remarkable is that someone in his position is conceding as much as he has.
> Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK.
I'm guessing he didn't say it because he didn't think it was true.
In Stockholm there are ~400 people per square km.
In Milan there are 2000, in Madrid there are 5400, in London there are 5700, and in Paris there are 20,000. This detail alone -- ignoring other cultural and demographic differences between northern and southern Europe -- could be enough on its own to soften the blow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_urban_area
I find ~4200 on Wikipedia but your point stands.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm
And not to be too scold-y, but 400 people per sq km is the population density of small middle-American towns. I know Stockholm isn’t the biggest city by any means, but it’s still a national capital and a cosmopolitan old-world city; a moment of reflection tells you it’s gotta be denser than, like, Little Falls, Minnesota.
That said, most of the population doesn’t live in Stockholm, so that probably was not the right idea to start to begin with.
As another commenter pointed out, Sweden did worse than its neighbors who have a similar population distribution, and I think that's the more interesting take.
I mean one reason why you might want to compare Sweden to other Nordic countries is because you might assume that Nordic countries are more similar to each other than they are to Italy etc.
It is no Hong Kong for sure, but not quite as sparse as it is often made out to be.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-84092-1
A dozen other papers in reputable journals have come to the same conclusion.
I assume this is done with the full knowledge that the final paragraphs are the least read in any article.
Evidently, there must have been some other factors at play besides the boolean of lockdown true/false. Better healthcare, maybe?
Probably it’s down to developed countries having a well-defined response protocol AND its citizen sticking to it.
August 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under...
June 2021 https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/31380...
January 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lo...
Right now it seems quite the opposite. Their vaccines are not very effective against the Delta variant, and they're having several outbreaks. They recently shut down a huge port. They never learned how to do partial lockdowns and just dealing with low levels of infection, so if they don't manage to eliminate the virus, they're screwed. What are they going to do with the Delta variant? Import foreign vaccines? Wait for better domestic vaccines? What if a new more infectious variant comes along that's even less affected by their vaccines?
I think China may be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. We know their approach has killed people, and the huge amount of resources spent on these lockdowns and massive amount of testing may have been better spent saving lives elsewhere. But we'll never know because they don't publish reliable data on excess mortality.
There is basically no real way to prove that lockdowns did a single thing. The fact so many countries were so willing to jump onto a completely unproven non pharmaceutical intervention that has massive negative side effects is pretty scary.
The fact so many people get hot and bothered by this and just assume that lockdowns worked at all… it’s quite disturbing.
Didn’t vote you down.
In my opinion anything that does not allow people to exercise conditional probability at the last mile is bound to have negative expected value.
Things that I do think make a difference: better airflow, more outdoor time, less obesity, better testing, a public equipped with better tools to diagnose and treat conditions at home, vaccines, better data infra and publishing of medical data, etc. Dumb blanket mandates that are applied across a population are stupid.
I think the most important difference is that ~50% of the population here thought the government was being incompetent/paralyzed and then performed a voluntary lockdown, much harsher than the government-mandated restrictions.
Since lots of those people who disagreed with the government (in)actions work as "knowledge workers", it was also relatively easy to make the switch to work from home, and they did, along with pretty much everone who was able to do WFH.
Possibly related: the current social democrat prime minister Stefan Löfven made a surprise announcement today that he'll be stepping down in November, a mere ten months before the next election.
I think it's natural that it would play out differently in Brazil - so many differences in the structure of the work force, access to information, English language skills, personal economic reserves, etc etc.
Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control.
If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it. We had as little control over covid as we have control over other natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.
Tell that to New Zealand, who have had less than 3,000 cases in a population of 5 million. They did this with strict border controls (people on inbound flights must isolate for 2 weeks) and quick response to community transmission (several lockdowns totalling 40 days).
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/17/asia/new-zealand-lockdown-one...
At best, its a fragile, brittle, costly "solution" that may work in an isolated country like NZ until vaccines are available.
It's been 8 months since vaccines have been available, and they're still in the low 20s in terms of people getting the vaccine.
Yes we locked down over one case. The next day we had a few more, and then more and more and more (21 in each of the last two days). Delta is amazingly spreadable.
Because we are locked down straight away, every case is easily contact traced, and people that did catch COVID are already isolated in their bubble, so cannot re-transmit easily behind that. As people are diagnosed they are taken to isolate in a hotel.
So there will be an end, even though we were unluckily enough to have had a number of very large spreader events (conferences, churches, schools etc.).
The oft-touted alternative from activists outside NZ is to vaccinate and open up. We are vaccinia go quickly, but that plan does not work. (NZ had no right/need to get vaccines early - we did not need them. We are now ramping up quickly, all to the plan.)
But vaccines do not prevent transmission.
Vaccines do not provide population immunity with Delta until a very large percentage (90%?) of all people, kids included, are vaccinated.
Vaccines do not eliminate illness (including long COVID) and death. They do reduce it a lot, but many people will die, especially the vaccine hesitant. Meanwhile anti-vaxers spread disinformation, much as the similar or overlapping anti-lockdown crowd do. (Think about that)
Vaccines are not available to kids, and some very vulnerable.
It has been really amazing living essentially a normal live while most the rest of the world “lives with COVID”. We want that back.
This is not a serious response. The correlation is far too definite to be mere chance; and the mechanisms that cause it not hard to understand. Or in plain English: it's not random.
Pandemic response is not coded into us, it’s something we have to consciously do- and it’s draining to fight an invisible enemy.
I have issues with authority, so I understand the desire to fight against being told what to do.
But you’re denying science, this is not helpful.
Science has nothing to do with these NPIs because science doesn’t tell society what do to.
Here, I’ll do you better: https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/
> One of these neighboring Southeastern states had a statewide mask mandate. The other two did not.
> [Shown: COVID-19 Deaths, per million, 7-day average]
But mask mandates do not claim to prevent COVID-19 deaths, rather transmission. A state with relatively low transmission but poor healthcare infra will see similarly unintuitive/surprising trends.
There is almost no way that lockdowns did nothing. It may have been overkill, there may have been a single aspect of lockdowns that far outperformed everything else, and we could have just practiced that. But this fatalistic view is lazy, unscientific and reductive, and in a societally harmful way.
After we've witnessed the experience of northern Italy in February / March 2020, most informed/reasonable people concluded that the situation is more serious than previously indicated, so it's obvious that people's habits would change. People are somewhat rational, after all.
But arguably self-imposed/-chosen changes in human behaviour can both better account for individual differences (in health, exposure, and risk aversion) as well as respond much faster to short-term, local changes of the situation, compared to government policy.
Again? He got kicked out and reelected two months ago. This government is a damn yo-yo.
This latest announcement is that he will be stepping down as the leader of the Social Democrats. There's a new election in Sep 2022, and to me (a Swede) it looks as if no-one is interested in an extra snap election right now (the regular election will be held in Sep 2022 as planned anyway).
Confirmed cases:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Confirmed deaths:
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
I can't remember the exact date, but I think in march or april 2020 there were restrictions put in place by government to limit the number of people that could attend a public event. Organizers and event-goers would commit a crime if they attended an event with more than 50 people.
Sure infected people did not get literally locked into their own homes, but "lockdown" is clearly more of a scale where some governments effectively locked the doors to everyones homes and some told everyone to stay home.
They are getting far fewer cases and deaths than many other areas now, and have been for many weeks.
Couple that with the not-lost social interactions and economy etc, and the fact that this was always (more or less) every country’s pandemic plan before we changed our mind for covid, and it becomes a troubling indicator that our entire response may have been irrational.
Even if the decision proves beneficial, it was an error, in the knowledge context of March 2020.
What if China had taken the most conservative policy in response to the appearance of covid-19? Maybe we would have been spared the turmoil and disruption of this pandemic. You're way too confident declaring this as "provably false".
Hopefully our knowledge is greater and our preparedness will be better such that we don't have to always take such an aggressive policy position when faced with a novel virus.
Focussing so myopically on the above has had unmeasurable consequences on a huge variety of fronts. My prime fury is reserved for closing schools. Extraordinary damage done, gulfs in opportunity and experience widened. Nobody cares much. Death stats are, after all, the only thing that matters to the media at large
As we acquire more information, policy should evolve with it. Limits on individual freedoms are blunt policy tools that should be used only when necessary, because they aren't zero cost.
I don't think we should have forever lockdowns at all. I'm in the camp of "get vaccinated and move on with your life" and that we should be more upfront about how covid-19 isn't going to be eradicated anytime soon.
If you don't know how it's transmitted, then try various things and see if they help. We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it, if it didn't change the situation we would have tried other things instead.
It is not that lockdown is bad or wrong. It is that I do not agree with all the things which were hit. I acknowledge there is a price to keeping education open but I believe it would have been worthwhile.
Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.
Actually I believe that’s table stakes for good governance. Trading known deaths for possible impact to development of children isn’t even in the realm of equal, which is why most places didn’t do it.
What about the children who infected their parents and now they're orphans?
No, we tried lockdowns, they did not work well, then extended them, then again. In my country some school children did not go to school for a whole year because people with anxiety disorder thought opening schools would kill children, parents and grand parents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY
They had a clear plan, unlike other governments like Germany, who still do not have a plan how to get out of this mess.
That's subjective: It depends on how much risk you're willing to take on. People here were pretty supportive of the policy, so presumably willing to take on more risk than you. Like you, I wasn't but that's just how it goes.
When faced with a cataclysmic, albeit low probability, event, the only course of action is the cautious one.
> When faced with a cataclysmic, albeit low probability, event, the only course of action is the cautious one.
This is nothing but extreme risk aversion. Some people, most, do not share it with you.
https://healthfeedback.org/what-has-been-the-effect-of-the-p...
And lockdowns were a jump into an economic unknown, which also had very unpredictable effects. There's no way you can say it was an error given the evidence available at the time. We'll see how it works out in the end.
Please make no mistake, lockdowns will go down in history as the biggest mistake of the modern human history. The only reason why we're still arguing in here is because it's damn near impossible to admit one made the biggest mistake in modern human history.
Also, the idea that the playbook has always been low-distance intervention for pathogens of similar impact is wrong.
Other people would point out that Sweden experienced economic effects and other indicia of behavioral changes roughly equivalent to places that notionally, at least, had lockdowns.
We moved to Denmark start 2021 and has been back and forth between the two countries monthly and there’s still a big difference in behavior.
The intention has always been to mitigate the worst health effects of covid, which means temporary measures.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
Better than most, not as good as some. Certainly not the catastrophe predicted by some.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/455935/urbanization-in-s...
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190821-why-so-many-yo...
There may be extenuating circumstances in some instances, but in case of Sweden, I'm not sure what they would be. As far as I can see, policy makers rolled the dice and lost (assuming preservation of life is the metric of choice) - though that failure becomes less significant as time goes on and the fraction representing initial excess mortality starts shrinking...
If you're comparing with literally any of their neighbors, then they did really really badly. Their excess mortality was around 1000 per million (i.e. around 10,000 more people dead than expected), while Denmark, Finland and Norway were much much less.
Sweden _is_ one of those countries when compared to its neighbours though.
Denmark, Finland and Norway have nowhere near the same levels of international travel, immigration and urban population.
This article does address that.
There's two components to this. The first is indeed that both countries are relatively isolated islands. Yes, South Korea is technically a peninsula, but the part that connects it to the mainland is separated by the best guarded border in the world, so...
But the second component is how the situation was (and still is) handled: instead of waiting for exponential growth of the rate of new infections, both countries went into full emergency mode immediately. South Korea in particular applied lessons learned during the SARS crisis about a decade earlier and invested heavily in automated testing equipment, etc.
In Europe, one of the critical failures was the inability to quickly and cost-effectively ramp up testing due to the lack of automated lab equipment.
Other critical aspects of disease control included traceability, which worked exceptionally well in South Korea due to the excellent cell coverage and prevalence of smartphone app usage (plus permissive and practical data protection laws) and willing participation and support of the population.
New Zealand is quick to order measures even if a single case is being reported. This prevents exponential spreading and keeps measures such as lock-downs short and reduces the overall negative impact.
So it's really not just the location, but a number of measures that most other countries simply failed to take.
The geography helps a lot, though, no question.
I even googled it and found this: https://si.se/en/annual-report-of-the-image-of-sweden-abroad... Is there a cultural infatuation between the US/UK and Sweden? Is Sweden activally investing resources to improve their perceived image?
Yes. Look at the About page on that site you found:
https://si.se/en/about-si/our-mission/
The Swedish Institute is a public agency that promotes interest and trust in Sweden around the world.
"The highest number of confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in the Nordic countries as of August 18, 2021, had occurred in Sweden at 14,664. Denmark followed with 2,562 deaths, Finland with 1,008, and Norway with 811."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up. 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...
How the hell is saying shit like this allowed on this website?!?! Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead!?? Are you serious?
Submitters: please post the original source so people know the site the article is coming from, and for the sake of the archives here.
If there's a paywall workaround, it's fine to post it in the thread.
The Telegraph's title glosses over other factors, so hey: This one ^ does too!
I am relieved by my region's luck and the collective will to move the goalpost of success to be 'limiting the number of people dying of COVID'. It has been basically normal life domestically besides scattered lockdowns for 5 million people, without losing parents, grandparents; 1 death per M here compared to Sweden's 1425, USA's 1895.
National vaccination rate is lagging, on track to be sufficient in October, when the national modelling (Doherty) shows we will be sweet to test, trace, isolate, quarantine our way to control/suppression without need for further lockdown ad infinium. Just one precarious month in the way...
The article acknowledges that what worked for Sweden would not have worked for other countries with higher population densities like UK.
All these extra Swedes died for sheer ineptitude of their government. There's hardly any difference in economic impact either.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Lots of folks have post fact information these days, based on FB articles and other sources, but how did you end up with yours as a long time user here?
https://www.scb.se/en/About-us/news-and-press-releases/exces...
It may come as a surprise that, in the area covered by this source, excess mortality for children age 0-14 was actually negative in 2020.
One thing to note in the near time is how the infection rate is low at the moment [1] (the data for spring 2020 is inaccurate due to lack of testing). This is not because of some government initiative or similar, in fact it was very low last summer as well before it got really high during winter. This shows the enormous difference it makes when people are spending less time indoor, and pretty much everyone has a month off work. The infection rate is currently rising, mainly among young people that has chose not to get vaccinated. My attitude about it is that in about a months time everyone will have had the chance to have had two vaccine shots, so if people want to put themselves at risk we should let them, and not force the rest of us to protect them by limiting ourselves. At least as long as the hospitals can manage.
[0] https://www.telia.se/privat/aktuellt/hemma-i-folknatet/covid...
[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...
You have to pay for doctor's visits between $30-60 and often have to wait 4-8 weeks even with the fee. Almost everything requires a prescription compared to other countries, so the delays are problematic as there is no opportunity for self-medication at all.
But there's definitely something to be said for the overall health of the population like obesity rates, smoking rates, etc.
- Economy suffered the same as neighbors, and the government was quick to help big companies like Volvo (which immediately paid dividends to shareholders), but small businesses couldn't get their voices heard (even not-so-small businesses like airports)
Alternative history re-writers already hail this as the greatest achievement ever.
“It’s not subtle by any stretch,” said Deoni. “You don’t typically see things like that, outside of major cognitive disorders.”
I think we vastly underestimate the severe long-term effects of lockdowns.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...
Also, how accurate are IQ tests on 1 year old and younger babies?
I'm not sure why IQs would be lower (if indeed this is the case) - parents are still around. In fact parents have been more often around during the pandemic given the increase in work from home policies.
Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover?
> However, since all study visits take place in a clinical setting, parents less concerned about the pandemic, and those with strong social support networks, may have been more likely to participate than those with greater concerns.
This seems pretty impactful to me. If you consider that people more worried about the pandemic were avoiding doctor visits, and the study showed parent's education reduced the effect they saw...
They kind of glossed over the fact that children born just before the pandemic didn't have lower scores. I'm curious about that since the first few weeks/months for newborns they are not leaving the house much, so a pandemic shouldn't have changed a whole lot there. Why were they immune if the stages were they would've expected to start leaving the house (4+ months) were taken away, just like babies born during the pandemic?
"Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover?"
It may sound like a silly comparison, but puppies need to be challenged and introduced to experiences in the first weeks as there is a limited window of opportunity to stimulate neural development which results in brain development. During the first eight weeks of age, skills not acquired may be lost forever.
Maybe similar to how children can easily pick up a (new) language, but learning a language at a later age is a real struggle.
It did better than western Europe, but that's not because of the policy, it is because Sweden is Sweden and not Italy or Spain or France.
First is population density, much lower, and the countries are less connected.
And there is the population. The Swedish government and their people have a more trusting relationship than in many other countries, so, more recommendations than obligations. Scandinavian countries also have the highest level of content in the world (they are the "happiest" countries), which is likely to have a positive effect on mental health in the face of hardships. They are also not people who are know for hanging our in large groups and hugging strangers.
Scandinavia has advantages over the rest of Europe when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, and it shows. But out of all these countries, the one that did worst is Sweden, the country of no lockdowns.
Pro lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns dont work
Anti lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns works.
There is no point keep talking about it, unless you want to loose your time arguing with someone who will never agree with you.
There was a post on HN a few days ago "Why it is so hard to be rational ?" [1], it perfectly describes the current situation.
Even if they do work it's barely relevant to the argument that lockdowns should be avoided. Lockdowns would have to work and be less harmful overall than cutting off or reducing access to everything else people depend on in society, like schooling, mental health services, cancer diagnostics and treatment, and so on and so forth. That's a tall order.
Anti-lockdown people who claim lockdowns don't work are surely employing motivated reasoning.