Average age of the covid-19 dead in Sweden is 82, average life expectancy is 83. The majority of the deaths also occurred at elder care homes where the expected survival time is less than two years. And, just like everywhere else, the covid-19 dead are much more likely to belong to certain risk groups associated with earlier deaths as well.
10 QALY lost per death sounds way, way too high to me.
> To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost-effective to me by that standard.
The reasoning behind this, which is the same in the rest of the Nordics and the Netherlands, is that a general mask mandate is counter-productive. No-one is arguing that medical grade face masks properly handled, worn, and disposed of help prevent the spread. The problem, and this should be obvious if you live in a place where masks are mandated, is that people don't have proper masks and don't wear them properly. So masks can create a sense of false security, and make people slack off on their distancing, which means a mask mandate can result in a net negative result.
Right or wrong, I don't know, and I don't know if we'll ever know, but that's at least the reasoning behind it. And it definitely sounds plausible to me.
I'm in Hawaii which has had a mask mandate for months now, and the way regular people are actually handling their masks in the real world is very, very far from the way trained medical professionals handle their masks.
That's life expectancy at BIRTH. It would seem to me that the relevant statistic in the case of an 80 year old dying is the average life expectancy they had at 80, which is considerably more than 3 years.
The biggest disingeniousness of the people talking about the covid-19 specific death toll is that the assumption is that if not for covid-19, everyone would have lived forever and ever, and that's simply not true. Looking at the demographics of the dead, for many, covid-19 is what happened to push them over. If not for covid-19, something else would have done it in a similar timeframe, especially since the flu seasons of 2018/19 and 2019/20 were so mild.
Yes, there are people who died significantly before their time, but they're a small minority of the dead. So 10 QALY lost per dead is way too much. 1 QALY lost per dead is too little, I agree. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
As to masks, I also agree correct use is a problem. Here (SF Bay Area) the East Asian population seems to use them competently and consistently, but everyone else is hit or miss. I would have liked to see more public education, rather than just the unexplained mandate; but the probability that masks primarily explain East Asia's success in containing the virus seems high enough, and the cost seems low enough, that they seem like a favorable bet to me. I do also think it's quite possible that other factors (e.g., different degrees of pre-existing T cell immunity from other coronaviruses) will turn out to explain that big difference though.
https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...
This is the medical literature version of the xkcd green M&M comic:
Of course you could say that math is horrible and inhumane, and any equation involving dollars and human lives will feel that way. But the point is that health care spending is already rationed by something like that standard, and every dollar of GDP that disappears is a dollar that's unavailable to spend in other ways (including medical treatments that are cost-effective by that standard).
To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost-effective to me by that standard. Their response otherwise seems reasonable to me, not obviously better than stricter approaches but not obviously worse.