Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.
Sweden's strategy would have worked fine everywhere. Most deaths are in care homes, that general lockdowns don't protect, and anyway, remember that they were never advertised as reducing deaths? The virus just comes back when lockdowns are over, even if you assume they work.
Sweden is the winner of COVID, by far. It is indeed vindicated.
What's your metric? Because in terms of deaths per capita, they are supposedly worse off than France - as well as the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Norway, and Greece. So far, Sweden is not doing as good or better than most of western Europe...
It’s cherry-picking to take two countries that did better, simply because you prefer that narrative.
Ranking items and then choosing the most favorable is exactly where the phrase came from. "Clear and consistent" is not sufficient. Any lie can be clear and consistent. There also has to be a reason beyond self-interest for limiting the sample to a particular subset.
Observing where an item lies in a ranked list is no more or less biased than picking a median.
Belgium
Spain
United Kingdom
Italy
Sweden
France
Netherlands
Ireland
Switzerland
Portugal
Germany
Denmark
Austria
Finland
Norway
Greece
Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are indeed worse off than Sweden, and it isn’t selective to point it out. That’s all I’m saying here.
Belgium
Spain
United Kingdom
Italy
Sweden
France
Netherlands
Portugal
Germany
Greece
Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.
If you want to go that way, it's better to look at integrated metrics instead of discarding data points (I only did so because I was lazy and didn't want to look up the data for all the countries with less than a city's woth of inhabitants).
So let's do that:
Sweden's death rate per 1k population is 0.58, whereas the average rate (averaged over population) for western Europe[1] is 0.42. Sweden just isn't doing as good or better than most of western Europe.
For reference, spread among countries is 0.025 (Monaco) to 1.24 (San Marino) with a median of 0.20 for the full list, and 0.028 (Greece) to 0.86 (Belgium) with a median of 0.30 for my restricted one. The median of your list is 0.52.
[1] Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
I’m not saying Sweden is better or worse, but an in depth analysis won’t be available for a while and especially while everything is still in chaos including our health care system which we were trying to save on the first place.
Portugal has 1800ish COVID deaths, 5800 excess deaths.
Yes, Sweden fucked up and Portugal is amazing! OR maybe, just maybe, either COVID deaths are counted differently OR the lockdowns caused people that wouldn't have died of COVID to die for other causes due to lack of treatment and support.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
And yet we keep hearing the same argument. You just wait and enough people will die in all those places to make up the difference.
Today we had 680+ cases. Our ICU patients are increasing, but for 3+ months I heard how we were doing so much better than Sweden, how they were idiots, etc. But Since the beginning we had researches from the UK, our medical professionals, saying that we had too much excess deaths not being counted as COVID (statistically very improbably increase not being related) and we still kept acting like Swedish were idiots.
Now they have like 100 cases per day or so, with a test rate almost double that we have, when we are on average on 400, and climbing every week (was 200 daily average, then 250, 300 and now we are around 400).
They also has a 8% GDP drop vs 16% for PT, and we got into much more debt than they did to 'pay' for all the stopped economy, which they didn't (as much)
There are so many different variables between countries, even neighbour ones, that it makes no sense.
Sweden old people homes are (from what I read) basically glorified death waiting rooms. People don't stay in them long (months vs years in other places). Also people movements during the high 'season' of covid spread is different (Students do different things in spring break between countries). etc etc etc etc.
Not saying Norway or whatnot is not doing better, just we don't really know. (Same as saying Portugal is doing great because look at it's neighbour spain kind of deal)
But we do, excess deaths have all causes integrated. Comparing to the Nordic neighbors makes sense because they have more similarities than comparing to Portugal but feel free to compare to all the countries in that website. Sweden is worse than most.
They mentioned euromomo but also have countries not in it, so I assume they use various sources?
Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true.
If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.
Huh? The virus has not "gone," except perhaps in places that implemented actual lockdowns (not just stay at home orders) and maintain strict travel restrictions, like China.
For comparison: China's population is 136 times that of Sweden [1] and it has had fewer COVID deaths in absolute terms than Sweden (4,634 vs 5,846) [2]. Even assuming the true figure in China is 10x what the official number is, that's still far fewer deaths per capita. If China has had an equivalent per capita dealths, it would have had 800,000 dead from COVID [3].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+population vs https://www.google.com/search?q=china+population
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deaths vs https://www.google.com/search?q=china+covid+deaths
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=(5846+%2F+10.23+million)+*+1...
If you count excess mortality instead of registered deaths then Neatherlands is also worse than Sweden. And if you also consider that the countries that are above Sweden are on average larger than the countries below then there are about as many who lives in countries with worse results than Sweden as there are people living in countries with better results. So it is fair to say that they have pretty average resullts for Europe. If you also add USA and Canada and talk about the west then there is no contest since you add 340 million people living in a country with worse results.
It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance.
We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't but there's no political will to implement since most politicians care more about being reelected rather than making short term unpopular decisions that could save lives long term since most of their Average Joe voters care more about their freedom to go on vacation and not having to wear masks everywhere than stopping the virus.
> It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEOs performance.
Yes, it's like that if it was in the middle of a worldwide recession with incomplete numbers and all companies were dealing with similar issues. Sweden has done some things differently, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up when we eventually know enough to judge it.
> We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't
Do we? To me it seems like we have both successful and non-successful countries taking wildly different strategies and the long term effects on society are not known. Either you know something the rest of us don't or you're wrong.
The health institute in Sweden isn’t by running an experiment anymore than the "experiments" running in say NY & CA. Every thing I’ve read indicates broad national Swedish support, of course there’s dissenters but news sources would indicate they’re in the minority. Compare that to the contention in say CA, or Germany over the lockdown/shutdowns of normal life.
In the grand scheme I believe most people will realize a total of 5,000 deaths in a country that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year isn’t extreme. Unfortunate, but not much different from most years (it’s possible Sweden will overall lose less people than the average on previous years). Just this cause has a lot of scary news behind it.
To be clear: I said no such thing. I think it's far to early to evaluate that. Currently things in sweden look pretty good IMO, but "currently" and "pretty good" can shift radically and fast.
> that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year
Seems like the normal deaths per year are around 95000.
My point is mostly that I think it will take at least a year for us to get stats that are comparable between countries since different countries track it differently and have different efficiency/centralization of tracking. What will be even harder will be to track secondary and societal effects of both the virus itself and the measures taken to prevent spread, which will probably have a ongoing effect for many years.
Also good to know the average numbers. I think even at about a hundred thousand yearly my point holds. It’s high enough that many wouldn’t agree too.
How is indefinite house detention, destroying small business and lower levels of the economy, and ripping asunder the fabric of normal society any less "treating your country like a guinea pig"?
> It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance.
Ok let me try doing you: "I'm going to hold you hostage indefinitely...it's for your own safety!"
Sweden can't "throw in the towel" and go back to before 2020 -- the people who have died have already died (and notably, more than half of the COVID-19 deaths so far in Sweden happened before May 1, and about 90% before mid June). Implementing lockdown measures now won't bring those people back to life, and since the number of cases is low and continuing to decrease now, also would have very little benefit otherwise.
Unless you're referring to stopping lockdown measures as "throwing in the towel and admitting you fucked up", in which case the answer is "definitely not before there's some plausible story you can tell about why it's fine to do that now but wasn't before". And any country that hasn't had widespread community spread like Sweden is likely to see the same sort of spread Sweden saw early on if they implement the same measures Sweden did.
Edit: No, better is correct, missed the switch from 11th in europe to the 10th in the world.
Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
Germany still has spikes they need to deal with, but is also doing really well, when in fact people in Germany are not bunkering down in their homes forever. Germany is currently way more open than the U.S. is and is doing way better at control of the disease.
Precisely becuase their response is not limited to "masks and hand-washing". "Masks and hand-washing" and "bunkering down" in fact describes the USA response better than it describes the German response. And Germany is doing a lot better than the USA.
The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position. Neither is actually an effective response; neither actually characterizes the response of countries like Germany who have been very effective in controlling the pandemic.
It is insanity, and we've been stuck in it for six months, I keep wondering when Americans will realize those aren't the only choices; apparently never? Maybe because some people still think there is going to be some magic bullet "when the vaccine" and we can just wait it out until then; that's not how it's going to work, we're going to be dealing with this for years, and need to be finding sustainable solutions, not arguing about whether we should do something insufficient and unsustainable OR do nothing at all.
What Germany's response has involved is massive testing, a quality healthcare system with universal access, supporting people in quarantine, supporting people financially so nobody has to go to work sick or in non-safe situations in order to stay secure financially, and it goes on from there. All of this is somehow unimaginable in the USA, where people can only conceive of "masks, hand-washing, and staying home", or "pretty much ignore it".
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. All the while measures have been relaxed way more here than in the US. “Lockdowns” were also never really harsh in Germany and only lasted a very short time.
Three factors are suspected to be at play there:
* very early testing that detected community spread with unknown origins very early on (using the influenza sentinel system for detection)
* luckily being late in importing the virus, which lead to …
* … politicians being able to “look into the future” by looking at Italy (a place that unluckily imported the virus quite a bit earlier)
As a result Germany relatively quickly (though Germany could have acted a bit faster and have been even more effective) implemented quite mild measures for a relatively short amount of time. Some of those measures are still in place, most were, however, lifted in the meantime.
This lead to a still enduring drop to very low numbers, extremely low numbers if you look at deaths. Even though measures at this point often are much milder than in the US.
Your defensive “numbers aren’t comparable” retort is bullshit. Mostly because, sure, the numbers aren’t comparable. Sure, that’s true. But we aren’t talking about orders of magnitude here.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. No matter what you measure, whether it’s infections, deaths, excess deaths, economic impact. You name it.
And yet Germany is not currently "locked down". The argument that Germany is among the best of all countries at handling this is not an argument for "if everyone just wears a mask and doesn't leave their home forever" -- that is not what happened in Germany. At all.
What does that mean? How did it lead to a bad outcome?
> The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position.
In practice, what does this look like? You have Fox reporting on Nancy Pelosi's haircut everyday on the week. You have 1 op-ed from CNN. Both sides think the each other are bad actors. Funding that needs to go out to the people are held up for election purposes.
Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic. It leads to people, who might otherwise be rational people, doubling down to support their side. Whether or not they agree with it. Because both sides are polar opposites, there is no compromise for a middle ground solution.
The only way it would have been not "politicized" was if the initial response had been even halfway competent.
Both sides include poison pills that they know that the other side won't pass. Why is a new $2B FBI headquarter or SALT reform even in a COVID bill? They both agree to at least $300B directly to the people, just pass that. Now is the time to have unanimous agreement on things that will help, not include provisions to help your constituents.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/30/upshot/corona...
Included by the White House, according to the article you posted. Which also mismanaged the initial response, so hardly surprising.
> SALT reform
According to the article, it was a temporary elimination on the SALT cap, not wholesale reform. Temporary tax relief during a recession should hardly be considered a poison pill.
Sure, I shouldn't have said reform. But are you seriously going to pretend that it isn't a political move by the Democrats when they were so vocal in 2018 in their opposition? [1]
Money quote:
""" Cuomo said New York will challenge a provision of the law that limits how much Americans can deduct from their federal taxes for payments made to state and local governments. Many of the people most affected by that provision live in states run by Democrats, which tend to have higher state and local tax rates. """
The irony in all of this is that I'm not a US person. I can't vote and am not on the path to residency. I have no dog in this fight. This is a literal replay of the silly argument that I got into recently that started this thread.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/01/03/cuomo...
If you live and work in the US, you probably pay US taxes, so you do have a dog in this fight whether you like it or not.
1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-d...
2. https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/new-employer-tax-credits
3. https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/coronavirus-tax-relief-for-b...
On the flip side, one would think one’s opinion on how government handles things would have a rather large impact on one’s political affiliation, and the more significant those things are the stronger a factor it would be.
Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1])
This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game.
No. It isn't just 2 years off some elderly people who were going to die soon anyway (not that that isn't an extremely callous position to hold):
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/study-finds-that-people-w...
It’s not true that there weren’t any measures in Sweden – there were quite a few – and it’s also not true that countries like Germany are still in lockdown. They are not.
Only the US with its absurd mishandling of the virus is in this self-inflicted state of permanent-panic.
So, let's break it down. He said "...unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave".
And you're reading it as "without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths".
So, let's compare them. He presented it as a hypothetical about the future, and you presented it as fact about the future. So, the same sentiment, except you don't have the grounds for it. On top of that, you read it, and claimed he said the the opposite of what he did.
I'm left wondering if you didn't understand what he said, or perhaps have a different idea of what "obtuse" means. I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really need an answer, as I'm sure we are done here.
Many countries do not have that experience.
Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway.
(For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)
How many cabinet ministers have you seen in masks?
However, that doesn't invalidate the overall comparisons. Countries like Sweden have a lowering death rate despite no broad mask wearing (https://fortune.com/2020/07/29/no-point-in-wearing-mask-swed...). You can see an example graph here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
They don't have lockdown
You will find that Sweden will still be near the top of the charts for lifespan 2020. 3.5% of GDP is 30-50% of the entire healthcare budget, you can buy a lot of extra lifespan for the population for that. Arguing that one way to increase lifespan (corona) is better than all other ways to increase lifespan without any proof is nonsense. As of now it looks like you would save more lives by mostly ignoring Corona and using that money to expand the healthcare sector or improving the diet of poor people or creating exercise programs etc.
Citation needed.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
https://www.thelocal.se/20200713/new-stats-reveal-growing-un...
It is better to get back to life as usual than to deal with Australia's, Britain's, and other countries' response that drastically reduced quality of life for people en masse in the name of saving a life or two.
Somehow, brutal lockdowns effect on people's lives is incomprehensible to people who spend most of their time in one room on a computer--what a surprise!
"Oh, suck it up, wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart, stay in your home, buy online, don't leave the country, and wait for a vaccine that will come, eventually."
It is absolutely worth continuously assessing whether the measures are necessary and what is and is not working, but that requires not throwing a huge number of people under the bus
People keep parroting this out of fear.
Go ahead and take your best guess about the percentage of people that this will happen to. Are you ok with lockdowns to save .001% of the population from this? I've asked questions like this before but never received a response. Any type of real debate is simple ignored and downvoted. All emotions, never any debate.
Fear brings more upvotes than facts. A scary story will get 100+ upvotes but this story only got 7:
Lungs damaged by coronavirus can repair themselves in three months (telegraph.co.uk)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/06/lungs-damaged-co...
The online fear factory is similar to the old school media fear factor but the online one is self perpetuating.
No. But that's a full 4 orders of magnitude off our best estimates of mortality which are around 1%. Do I support the limited lockdowns we've had, lasting only a few weeks, to allow breaking the exponential growth and not doubling our yearly mortality? Definitely yes.
Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino).
It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two microstates.
Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with 11th best in the world.
They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.