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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
"Hitlers Volksstaat", Aly, Götz
""" 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...
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.