The most interesting stat to me though that I only see mentioned briefly in this post is the fact that over 90% of the deaths was over 60 years old. I think that gives us very clear signs of how to focus the prevention of further deaths.
It also still had people social distancing, wearing masks and disinfecting, a very low population density, a robust healthcare system which at no point in time got overwhelmed unlike let's say northern Italy.
Covid just never really blew up there but at the same time one can't exactly argue that the lack of certain policies contributed to that.
This fact is brought up a lot. Isn't nation-wide population density a bad measurement? If a country, like Sweden, has huge areas where nobody lives, it says nothing about the density relevant for a virus spreading. While Stockholm's underground transport is nothing like Tokyo's, it's not different to other medium cities in the world.
not true at least in Stockholm
No, actually it isn't. It's not a binary thing, where it's either prevent you from seeing people or going out of the house, or zero restrictions. Sweden's choice was to go with purely voluntary restrictions. The alternative is some restrictions. Where I live, we've had a mask requirement for quite a while and basically nothing other than that, and that is indeed an alternative Sweden could have chosen.
In addition, "being prevented from seeing friends and family, and not being allowed to go to work" was to a large extent dictated by the circumstances. When some areas got to the point that they no longer had hospital capacity, they had no choice. A simple look at the correlation between restrictions and health outcomes is a textbook example of bad reasoning for an intro statistics course.
That's false. Areas in Australia had extremely strict lockdown requirements, including disallowing any movement (to the point that newborns actually died as a result of movement restrictions) meanwhile ICU utilization in those areas was hovering around 1% of capacity. ONE PERCENT. Outside of ICU, hospital utilization was way down.
I'm a Victorian, and I've heard this claim before. I assume it's referring to the newborns in Adelaide that died after not receiving critical heart surgery.
The article that I read[1] (from The Daily Mail, no less) had claimed that under normal circumstances, these cases would be airlifted to Melbourne which has the facilities necessary to treat them, but the Victorian lockdown prevented them from doing so.
This is misinformation. Emergency care was an exception to the rules throughout the entire lockdown. Dan Andrews was asked to clarify this on the following day the article was published, and said exactly as above - there is no reason that they could not have been airlifted.
It was down to individual clinical decisions at the hospital in question, and had nothing to do with the lockdown restrictions.
I realise that I'm critiquing a single claim in what was a torrent of falsehoods, but this one was particularly offensive. Using the death of babies as political fodder is notably egregious in what was an unending campaign against one of the few political leaders that listened to science, and successfully suppressed a second wave.
1: https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/why-victorias-lockd...
For whatever reason, the sheer disorganisation and lack of communication resulted in death.
You erroneously stated that I claimed they died as a result of being denied entry to the state, a claim I never made. Would they have died with zero travel restrictions? Very likely not.
Functionally, being denied entry to the state and one side not bothering to even try to enter them into the state is a distinction without a difference (either way, they die).
The government is certainly taking away your civil liberties by severely restricting your ability to meet your friends or even go outside.
Perhaps instead of acting like a fool on the internet you research the nonsense you spout. Spreading lies just makes the world more divisive.
Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/06/pandemic...
You are free to argue why the stance my country Sweden has taken is misinformed or unwise but let’s keep to data and first principle arguments rather than snark and sarcasm.
It of course also sets a precedent. If the rulers can whip the masses into thinking a curfew to stop a virus is necessary, they surely can do it for other reasons again and again. Bye, bye right of assembly.
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6...
Still, I believe that the massive restrictions on civil liberties in the form of lockdowns are completely unacceptable. I’d explain my arguments, but they’ve been repeated over and over by “conservative think tanks”.
I promise that I’m arguing in good faith, and having spoken with countrymen of yours I am certain they too do. I’m glad my country never enforced anything COVID19-related, although I disagree strongly with my socialist rulers.
A good exercise to do with a friend, or on pen and paper if it’s socially uncomfortable, is to try to make your opponents argument as convincingly as you can. If your current understanding is true, you’ll learn to argue for it from another perspective, else you will have learned something. Kind regards
There's been tons of articles and research supporting this if you care to look. And honestly, while citations are always good, this claim is so common-sensical that the knee-jerk "Citation needed.", as though OP were suggesting that there was a teapot floating in space halfway between here and Mars, comes off as unnecessarily disrespectful.
http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=51861
https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4352.full?ijkey=NDYZgh6...
Lots of caution needed about the data, and these are early data and the situation may change so we do need to pay attention to prevention, but:
> Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic.
You are just bringing that up to argue.
"In this survey study that included 1441 respondents from during the COVID-19 pandemic and 5065 respondents from before the pandemic, depression symptom prevalence was more than 3-fold higher during the COVID-19 pandemic than before."
And not to antagonize you, but just a post earlier you were talking about protecting people in your community. Caring about their wellbeing is one of the ways of doing that.
> Nevertheless, a reasonably consistent picture is beginning to emerge from high income countries. Reports suggest either no rise in suicide rates (Massachusetts, USA11; Victoria, Australia13; England14) or a fall (Japan,9 Norway15) in the early months of the pandemic.
But to me it's not even the relevant comparison. Being partisan of Sweden's approach doesn't mean believing Covid doesn't exist. Even a bad flu season will have an impact on year-end mortality stats. The question is rather how much worse did Sweden do vs countries that enforced severe restriction of civil liberties. And not only Sweden didn't do particularly bad, but it's done better than many major European countries like France, Italy, Spain or the UK.