A New World Health Organization Report Once Again Proves Sweden Right
ianmsc.substack.com
ianmsc.substack.com
> Although the determination of pro-mandate fanatics to exclusively compare Sweden to other Scandinavian countries is nonsensical, the 2021 excess mortality rates show Sweden with lower numbers than both Finland and Denmark.
Well, when a bigger proportion of your vulnerable population died in 2020, it's not surprising that in the subsequent year you see a decrease.
The author also seems confused about the causes for the lockdowns in all the other countries. Unlike Sweden, most of them reached a threshold where further spread of the disease would mean hospitals exceed capacity. It's simply incorrect to use the number of deaths as the single measure of effectiveness of lockdowns, as the true counterfactual would be countries that did no lockdowns and also had their healthcare system collapse.
I disagree. If you imagine almost any variable - wealth, education, weather, socialization patterns -, Sweden is vastly more different from Italy than from Finland. Any sensible analysis has to take into account what a valid comparison really is.
This is an interesting question, and it really depends on what question you are trying to answer with with the comparison.
If you are trying to ask if Sweden could have done more, then I think your suggestion is correct.
If you are trying to ask if Sweden did enough then the comparison may be different. For example, if the goal was to not have a huge spike in excess deaths, it seems like their approach worked well.
"Unlike Sweden, most of them reached a threshold where further spread of the disease would mean hospitals exceed capacity"
No they didn't. Epidemiologists and their models claimed such thresholds would be reached but those models were wrong about everything. It never actually happened. Look at Switzerland for an obvious counter example. Lockdowns happened, then they didn't, but hospitals never went above 80% utilization no matter what. Or at the UK. Freedom day came and the experts said it was an unethical experiment on the entire world because cases would surely soar. They dropped dramatically and immediately.
"It's simply incorrect to use the number of deaths as the single measure of effectiveness of lockdowns"
Reducing that one number was the entire justification for lockdowns! Now it's "simply incorrect" to observe that there is no link between them. Absurd.
Sweden's GDP per capita is more than double of Portugal and 40% bigger than Italy, two countries prominently noted in his analysis. There are two huge factors here other than wealth that are vastly different between Scandinavian countries and the rest of Europe: socialization patterns and weather, with both tending to make the virus way less likely to spread in the North.
> Epidemiologists and their models claimed such thresholds would be reached but those models were wrong about everything. It never actually happened.
Italy's healthcare system was overwhelmed early on in the epidemic, causing a ton of deaths, and hospitals all over the world approached 100% ICU capacity at several points in the last two years. I don't know where you pulled your numbers from, but they are wrong, and so is your conclusion.
>> "It's simply incorrect to use the number of deaths as the single measure of effectiveness of lockdowns"
> Reducing that one number was the entire justification for lockdowns! Now it's "simply incorrect" to observe that there is no link between them. Absurd.
It's basic logic: if we had to use lockdowns in the most extreme cases where hospitals were reaching capacity, then these countries would have experienced a higher death rate regardless of what they did. The question is whether the lockdowns had any effect on easing the burdens in the hospitals or not, but you cannot compare Portugal with Sweden and say "oh hey, more people died in Portugal and they did a lockdown, therefore lockdowns are bad/useless".
You're still scrabbling about to try and hide this with cherry picking. There's no scientifically valid reason to only compare Sweden with Norway, or Portugal, or Italy. That's why the blog post shows it relative to all European countries (and they could have included the USA, Canada etc too).
Moreover you have no scientific or biological basis to claim that GDP is the reason lockdowns weren't necessary in Sweden. No epidemiologist ever claimed some GDP dependence existed when justifying the policy nor have they done since.
"Italy's healthcare system was overwhelmed early on in the epidemic"
No, it wasn't. I kept waiting for news reports to switch from "hospitals are nearly full" to "hospitals are full and people are queuing outside" but it never happened actually (except maybe for one or two very small local hospitals? even then it's unclear). Certainly the whole of Italy was never overwhelmed. That was the impression the press wanted to give but if you watched carefully it wasn't the case.
"hospitals all over the world approached 100% ICU capacity at several points in the last two years"
Hospitals are always approaching 100% utilization because ICU capacity is flexible (it's partly a designation related to staffing levels), and having unused capacity is wasteful. Again, this is a talking point that was spun to try and justify the catastrophic policies, but they aren't valid. Hospitals weren't actually overloaded and especially not in Sweden which didn't bother with most of the mitigations.
"It's basic logic: if we had to use lockdowns in the most extreme cases where hospitals were reaching capacity, then these countries would have experienced a higher death rate regardless of what they did."
Huh? There's nothing logical about what you just wrote. The whole point is that we did not have to use lockdowns because they don't do anything, and comparing places that used them vs places that didn't (not just Portugal) shows this clearly.
It's logical that lockdowns don't work. SARS-CoV-2 spreads like a gas and can hang in the air for hours. Lockdowns didn't stop people interacting nor did it stop airflows. SARS-1 could spread through drainage pipes in apartment buildings, it literally didn't matter if nobody left their room, they'd still be exposed. And of course even in lockdowns people still had to pass through places recently vacated by the sick, like shops, apartment building lobbies etc. The justification for lockdown was the droplet model of spread, which is wrong.
I'm sorry but this is my main point, and it is crystal clear. I'm not sure why it's eluding you. No, you cannot compare highly disparate countries like that. Are you willing to compare China and Vietnam with Sweden too? Or maybe we should say that Norway, which did impose a lockdown, was the model to be followed in Europe? Cherry-picking is taking data you know is not appropriate and using it, I'm arguing for the opposite here. There is of course subjectivity involved, but you absolutely cannot claim that an imagined "default" (ie, all European countries) is unbiased or automatically valid. The best comparison for Sweden for most metrics, not only COVID, is among Scandinavian countries.
> Hospitals are always approaching 100% utilization because ICU capacity is flexible (it's partly a designation related to staffing levels), and having unused capacity is wasteful. Again, this is a talking point that was spun to try and justify the catastrophic policies, but they aren't valid. Hospitals weren't actually overloaded and especially not in Sweden which didn't bother with most of the mitigations.
You are absolutely wrong in your claims about hospitals. A non-exhaustive list of countries where the healthcare system neared collapse at rates much different than baseline: [1][2][3][4]. Your point about Sweden is literally what I wrote before, which is that Sweden did not face this problem, and therefore never had the same issues as other countries that issued lockdowns.
The jury is still out about the effects of the lockdowns. In order to find out, we have to be intellectually honest, which in my opinion is the opposite of what the author of this piece is doing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/world/europe/12italy-coro... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/world/europe/portugal-cor... [3] https://www.thelocal.es/20200329/where-in-spain-hospitals-ar... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/world/americas/virus-braz...
No? You seem to like citing the New York Times, but they were previously absolutely sure you could compare them. I can no longer view this story but know what it said at the time: it said Sweden was a "cautionary tale for the world".
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...
Back then there was no Nordic exception, because Sweden wasn't proving lockdown theory wrong. The idea that there is something special about it only emerged after their results became much better than elsewhere, revealing that public health had no clue what it was doing anywhere else.
By the way, please don't use the New York Times as a source for anything. It's both paywalled and notoriously biased.
"Are you willing to compare China and Vietnam with Sweden too?"
I already said this above: "Sweden's peers are rich western countries".
"The jury is still out about the effects of the lockdowns"
The jury went home a year ago dude, you just can't accept what they found. There is no correlation between severity of countermeasures and outcomes (when looking at countries with reliable data). This has been examined six ways from Sunday and the results are always the same - no correlation. You can tell people they should ignore almost all of the data to try and create doubt here, but those of us who actually are intellectually honest will ignore you, because that's not how science is done. Lockdowns were a catastrophe of stupidity, incompetence and malice by the public health community. They must never be allowed to happen again.
I could give you a number of other credible sources to verify that hospitals were in fact exceptionally strained at several points last year, a verifiable and true statement that you do not believe in. You are welcome to provide a source for your claims, I'm sure it would come from a very good, unbiased source.
> The jury went home a year ago dude, you just can't accept what they found. There is no correlation between severity of countermeasures and outcomes (when looking at countries with reliable data). This has been examined six ways from Sunday and the results are always the same - no correlation
You are wrong again. To just focus on one example, here is a paper published in Science last year, suggesting various distancing measures produced significant reductions in transmission of COVID [1]. I would advise you to follow your own advice and have a look at the evidence, because in this short discussion you were proven factually wrong twice already.
I've not disagreed with that. Are you conflating "strained" with "collapsed"?
Here's the definitions I'm using - very busy isn't collapse or near collapse. It's just busy. You want hospitals to be busy otherwise it means you over-built capacity.
The UK healthcare system is currently in a state of collapse. People are dying in ambulances because they're sitting in queues outside hospitals. They're dying on waiting lists because by the time the hospitals can put them into surgery it's already too late. Hospital managers themselves are naming precise dates for when their entire region will "collapse" and they're using that word specifically. The cause is a combination of the general backlog caused by lockdowns, bed-blocking caused by staff fleeing care homes (forced vaccinations etc), a new WFH culture in primary care doctors, and a refusal to abandon useless anti-COVID measures inside hospitals that reduces throughput. But that's a very rare situation, rather specific to the UK, and is also quite recent.
"here is a paper published in Science last year, suggesting various distancing measures produced significant reductions in transmission of COVID [1]"
It wasn't published last year. It is dated 15 Dec 2020 and uses data only from the first wave. If you're going to cite scientific papers at least describe them correctly!
Look, there are tons of junk science papers on this topic because academics are desperate to believe that their advice worked. This particular paper is of a genre popular just after the first wave, in which they take as axiomatic that any reduction in transmission was caused by their suggested policies and then build a model on that assumption. The model then calculates how much of the reduction came from each intervention.
These papers are all invalid because the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 acted like every other respiratory virus in the world, and comes in waves that naturally peter out, was ignored entirely. It's unscientific. Later on more waves came and this idea was destroyed by the evidence, but the sort of paper you're citing wouldn't have taken that into account.
It would be also be interesting to see excess mortality as a percent of baseline mortality. This would go a long way to address demographic differences between countries.
Looking at Sweden alone, it appears that the baseline mortality rate is 901/100k. Based on this, 50 excess deaths would be about a 5.5% spike.
I mean, if you believe the analysis, then what you must conclude is that lock-down, isolation and masks cause more COVID mortality? Since this seems hard to believe, then the conclusion is that Sweden performance must be unrelated, surely?
All you have to believe is:
1) Countries and situations have different levels of risk from covid, and
2) Lockdowns, isolation, and masks are not necessary to achieve low mortality in every single situation.
or
3) The approach of informing individuals and letting them make personal choices was effective at lowering mortality in Sweden.
Switzerland was another country that took a more individual based approach and is also at the bottom of the list.
That said it looks pretty clear from the data that Sweden did fine with its personal discretion policy.
That doesn't mean the policy would have translated well to poorer or more dense than countries either though.
"If you think that lockdowns, travel bans, and mask mandates were the right approach, then you probably see Sweden as failure. Unlike almost every other wealthy nation, it held off doing those things. And the result was a much higher death rate than its neighbors Norway and Denmark. Approximately 13,000 Swedes have died since the beginning of the pandemic — half of them in nursing homes. In comparison, only about 700 Norwegians have died of COVID-19."
IOW, pick your facts, pick your facts! You can have any opinion if you pick your facts.
[1] https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-br...
IF you are asking me to pick my fact between an analysis of verifiable deaths per capita by the WHO or a crappy KCRW article, I go with the WHO.
KCRW is trying to compare countries without even thinking about the population difference. It also ignores that countries differ in when they report covid as a leading cause of death.
I found it helpful because otherwise I would not have seen the WHO data.