Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX
Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average.
The difference between them and their neighbors isn't small.
Counterfactuals are always hard, and there might be valid non-lockdown related excuses for why Sweden did so poorly, but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.
It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this.
I see two main failures:
1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up.
2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is where most deaths happened. Norway in particular handled this so much better.
And of course we should compare ourselves to e.g. Denmark/Norway/Finland.
I think the root cause of all this is that Sweden has not been involved in a war in a very long time, unlike our neighbors. We're pretty good when things are stable, but apparently awful when things are dynamic/shit is going down.
Of course I have very specific opinions on what "actually" went wrong and why, but that would be too detailed to be useful here and also way too partisan.
I think you are forgetting two important facts that counter your arguments:
1. A significant number of Swedes were in Lombardy (northern Italy) at the time the European outbreak started there. Furthermore Sweden has at least two major companies with presence around Wuhan. So by the time government noticed the issue it was too late.
2. Elderly care employees in Sweden are basically gig workers, resulting in a huge rotation in care givers and further spreading of the virus. The Social Democrats (and the Left party V) have often been opposed to this.
Two more things to consider:
1. This difference between Sweden and its neighbours is also clearly visible in the flu pattern over the year. It is simply due to different living and travelling conditions.
2. The municipalities are somewhat independent of the central government. Some with the highest death numbers among the elders where controlled by the opposition (e.g. Stockholm).
So while the government could have done a MUCH better job, your comment is already fairly partisan by cherry picking or ignoring facts.
There are counter arguments to your counter arguments:
1. If you are mentioning large amount of people over in outbreak territory, Taiwan had 700K white collars working in China and 150K passengers travel between China and Taiwan weekly. Taiwan took action fast enough to avoid any major outbreak. Flight screening started on the last day of 2019.
2. Huge employee rotation may be exactly why govt should step in?
Around February there's a whole week where schools are closed with the incentive to do sports - especially winter sports (given the time of the year). A lot of people go to ski resorts - the alps (or up north in Sweden - which got mountains but is far from the Alps).
I lived in a town of about 800 people during the onset and first year of the pandemic. More than a dozen people from my town alone were in Lombardy and a couple of the super early outbreak areas of Germany during 2020 sportlov (the break that stpe mentions in parent comment). I knew first-hand a lot of people who were really ill in March and April, though I don't know if it was covid for sure, since our testing was insufficient then. Anyway, yeah, lots of Swedes traveling to the wrong places at the wrong time right then.
The biggest problem with the discussions on most subject is that everyone cherrypicks their data or just don't have whole picture. And this picture is a realy big one.
For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?
2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image)
3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures.
As many have said, one of the major factor was how the elderly in home facilities had been protected and the state of the medical infrastructure (rate of intense care beds per capita to handle the peaks for exemple).
In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).
That's not an accurate figure for the density where a typical Swede lives. Most of the population lives in the southern part of the country, a quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area as well.
It's like using Canadian population density with the whole country when almost the entire population lives within a hundred miles of the US border.
> quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area
You've never been to Stockholm metro area. It's very sparsely populated compared to many big metro areas.
Stockholm is a small city (800k people or so) surrounded by villages (another 1.5 million people) spread over 6,519.3 km2. Density is 360/km2
And that's the biggest city in the country.
In comparison, Paris (as we were talking about France): 13 mln people over 18,940.7 km2 with a density of 690/km2. That's for metro area. Urban area alone is 10 mln people with density of 21,000/km2
But when you look at the average distance between two random people who live in the same town/city it would probably indicate that lack of contact doesn’t explain any success they’ve had with their numbers
Elsewhere people have already pointed this out: Swedes also have smaller families and a large proportion of people living alone, which (positively) contributed to numbers more than population density.
Which is why Tegnell had the gall to blame immigrants for the spread of Covid-19. Immigrants live in more densely populated areas.
And all this still doesn't explane a significantly larger mortality rate than immediate neighbors that have similar populations.
Determinants of pandemic performance has proven to be very multi-factorial, but from day one, urban density has not that been significant a factor, especially in richer countries. The initial wave just looked urban because the virus reached each _country_ via internationally-connected urban centers.
Given that pandemic spread has almost entirely played out indoor, a much more likely risk factor is multi-member (and especially multi-generational) households. As mentioned in the article, Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia have a small household size and especially high proportion of single-person households.
While I don't doubt you have Swedish family, I would like to see your data for the French economy being "killed". Certainly the economy contracted somewhat, but they seem to be doing just fine now.
Isn’t the interest rate close to 0%? If, like in 1918, they come back stronger than places which had more disruption due to deaths and prolonged closures that’s not anywhere near a crushing level of debt for a rich nation-state with a diverse economy.
> In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).
I’ve seen accusations in the US that people were being counted as Covid deaths that died “woth” Covid, and would have even without it - I have no idea if these accusations are true, just that probably-nonsense leads me to the question:
Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?
However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.
The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).
The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.
Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway:
> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper.
It may be that Sweden had more older people than Norway at the beginning of the pandemic, i.e. a more vulnerable population. Also they admitted to doing a poor job early on in nursing homes.
I think you are simplifying this too much, insisting that it is valid to come to a conclusion on lockdowns based on a comparison of Sweden to two nearby countries. That doesn't exactly explain why a bunch of countries like the U.K., France, Spain, and Portugal that did lockdown had more per-capita deaths than Sweden. It ends up looking like you cherry picked your data, ignoring contradictory data, and not really explaining anything.
About Dr. Bhatt, from the same article you quoted:
> Samir Bhatt, professor of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy.
It's too bad nobody asked him why the the U.K. with lockdowns had more deaths that Sweden without lockdowns.
> The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.
The excess mortality graph only goes back 19 months, because that's when COVID start. It uses excess mortality, so those numbers are based on numbers in the previous years.
It's like looking at a chart showing inflation over the past year and saying "this says nothing about the prices two years ago!" They're used to compute the numbers on the chart, not be shown on the chart.
I mentioned this because the comment I was responding to was factually incorrect when they states that Sweden mortality rate was worse than Norway over the past few years. It was not.
The article I linked to explains the significance, which I tried to sum up in my comment:
> In other words, excess mortality from COVID-19 may be less conspicuous than previously perceived in Sweden, while mortality displacement may be used to explain at least part of the observed findings.
> More specifically, mortality displacement implies temporarily increased mortality (i.e., excess mortality) in a certain population as a result of external events, which likely arises because individuals in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise – primarily due to the timing or severity of the unusual external event. The excess mortality is, thus, predated or followed by time periods of lower than expected mortality.
In other words, Sweden was better than Norway at keeping older people alive before the pandemic. Therefore during the pandemic there were more older people in Sweden. Older people are notably more vulnerable. This may be the explanation why more people died of covid in Sweden. It alludes to there being more factors involved than just the nearness of two countries and lockdown protocols.
Another way of saying this, exaggerated for clarity: More people will die of covid in a country of 80 year olds than in a country of 20 year olds.
Remember that only 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old [1]. This is consistent with the above information.
The Telegraph leans strongly conservative just as the Guardian leans strongly left. This seems like a very slanted article; it buries the mortality impact of CVOID until near the end. I seriously doubt that Norway would prefer to swap its ~10x lower death rate for Sweden's GDP numbers. Further:
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.
Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though?
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.
> Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes ...
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.
Considering the vast majority of Sweden is basically uninhabited - I'm not sure why everyone is so dead set on comparing Sweden only with Norway and Finland (I get it that they are similar in this way and many others).
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.
> Considering the vast majority of Sweden is basically uninhabited ..
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.
What??!! What I'm hearing when you say "If you factor out all those deaths" is "Old people don't count". Economically they may not have as much impact as younger people, but they provide richness to family and community life that can't be replaced.
So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.
No - the point is that at first Sweden had a no-policy, basically, which didn't work out for old people. So that changed that a little, and it seems to have worked much better.
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 the point is supposed to be that that figure can be traced to specific decisions regarding nursing homes. The supposed counter factual being that, if they had isolated sick patients from nursing homes, those deaths could have been greatly reduced.
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.
New York city had the same problems in nursing homes as Sweden.
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.
The guardian is left leaning culturally but actually fairly centrist economically.
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.
And the Guardian has been shifting inexorably to the neoliberal position as it has started to rely more and more on US and Australian readership. Their rampant bias against the only viable socialist, anti-imperialist party (Labour under Corbyn) was notable and they've followed this up with a disgusting lack of activism around the torture by imprisonment of Julian Assange. In short: the Guardian is anything but left-wing.
I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life.
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.
It’s incredibly easy to trade statistical deaths for statistical happiness. Ask yourself instead if you would be willing to kill yourself and your family if you knew it would make your neighbors happy.
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).
Actually, I do trade the statistical risk of killing myself for some statistically greater benefit pretty much every single day and every action I take, from driving a car, to traveling for work, to any number of recreational activities like surfing or skiing.
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.
Comparing a virus that has an average age of death at or even above life expectancy with a suicide shows how weak your point actually is.
Let's turn it around shall we? We can reduce the amount of deaths from car accidents by 1000 fold if we limit the speed of all vehicles to 10mph. Should we do it or not? Ask yourself if you would be willing to kill yourself and 999 close members of your family if you knew it would make your taxi driver be able to drive a little faster.
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
>> I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life.
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.
Your higher death rate comes with these exciting free add-ons!
- 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.
>>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.
At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat for saying it, I feel very much the same.
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.
The key takeaway I had from Scott's post was this stat:
>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.
Another way of looking at it: those telling us that we must lockdown seem to not even try to think about it from any perspective other than simply saving lives, regardless of consequences.
Every year my confidence and trust in politicians and any expert with a role in setting policies gets lower.
To be clear about this, you are saying that if you wrote down a list of 100 of your close relatives, friends and co-workers that are above 60 years of age, you would happily trade "2 years of having a non miserable life", for the high statistical chance that 10 randomly selected individuals from the list will die?
I think there is a cut-off at some point, but 10x more deaths is way above my threshold.
So, you're suggesting that 10% of all people over 60 years old died of Covid since this began? I would love to see you try to find me a source for this statistic.
Then you should maybe look at the context of what's being said — I was replying to a comment about Norway trading it's "10x lower" covid death rate with Sweden — where 0.014% of people died of Covid.
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.
My biggest problem with all this is the thought that have got rid of this entire virus by being a little more strict.
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.
I don't think that choice was available. If you let the virus spread unchecked then people would have been locking themselves down.
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.
Slatestar Codex did an interesting look at it. The entire thread is worth a read. It's taken a little out of context as he's just joking and playing around with numbers but still interesting to think about.
"""
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.
""""
Hey, you said it! I’ve been waiting for a comment like this. I always have to go back to Frederic Bastiat, the “seen and unseen”: Covid deaths are visible. Effects of lockdowns, not so much, especially as they play out over the ensuing years (observable effects on children can be particularly delayed).
Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? It is a completely irrelevant metric, lets include the Canadian arctic when calculating the density of Toronto and the effects of Covid, makes a whole lot of sense! A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density.
"Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at which the average citizen lives. It is calculated by taking weighted average of the density of all parcels of land that make up a city, with each parcel weighted by its population" [0]
By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741. [1] Concluding that Denmark did amazingly well given the cards they were dealt and Sweden is at the average of Europe due to very a urbanised population compared to the size of the country.
>Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021?
Because the effective Swedish population density is very low? The effective density is affected by household size, and about 40% of Swedes live alone without children[0]. Sweden had the biggest Corona infection vector neutered and still did horribly.
Sure, there're a lot of factors that can affect how disease spreads, like demographics, genetics, climate, health system, sociability, temperature, cafe culture, saunas, wfh incidence, international travel, travel links, tourism...
I'm quite happy to accept that 'population density' is inadequate - I mention it only in passing in my comment, the point I'm making is that Sweden is not a country you would expect to perform at the european average, and given that, the most natural thing to do is to compare a country with its neighbors. Neighboring countries usually share many factors, and on top of that, they have a direct transmission effect too.
Sweden did much worse than its neighbors. The explanation for that is either in the ways that Sweden is different from its neighbors, or in the difference in public policy.
I certainly don't know which to blame, but I don't want to hear any more lionization of the Swedish approach that doesn't solidly get to grips with that question.
Over the last four years the all cause mortality has been the same for Sweden and Norway [0]. So it would appear more people died in Norway before the pandemic, and more people in Sweden since, equalling out over the last four years.
So maybe it's not geography we should be talking about, but instead the number of older vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic.
> A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density.
I thought your comment was going to be about the fact that urban density didn't end up being that useful a predictor of spread, except to the extent that it correlates with household size. In general, people were catching Covid from being inside with others, not from incidental contact with subway poles or passing people on the sidewalk.
I suggest the measure density is a single value based on housing units and not the right measure to care about in itself. Instead look at public and private hygiene, isolation practices and incident response profiles, per hundred thousand or so.. not hectares per hundred thousand.
I’m looking at those numbers and the worst was Peru - 0.5% excess deaths.
Am I the only one whos just thinking none of this matters?
The reality is Sweden is doing an amazing job if there’s no lockdowns. Those lockdowns led to a massive increase in suicides[1], economic damage[2], inflation[3], massive increase in drug abuse[4], lost years in education[5].
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this virus would cause more harm. Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths (almost exclusively from people near end of life). What’s the damage in years of education lost, the drug abuse, homelessness, inflation pricing out homes for those who can work...
long-term I expect Sweden will see lower deaths than any of the countries that locked down.
Your reference [1] does not talk about suicide, but suicide attempts, and to the extent it correlates with "lockdowns", it seems to directly contradict your claim:
> Among adolescents aged 12–17 years, the number of weekly ED visits for suspected suicide attempts DECREASED DURING SPRING 2020 compared with that during 2019 [...] mean weekly number of ED visits for suspected suicide attempts were 22.3% HIGHER DURING SUMMER 2020 and 39.1% HIGHER DURING WINTER 2021 than during the corresponding periods in 2019
(Emphasis mine). So, during three phases of the COVID-19 epidemic, suicide attempts decreased during one, increased during two. The US was in nationwide lockdown during only one of these phases, which happens to be exactly the one where suicide attempts DECREASED.
Source [2] talks about (indisputable) damage to the US economy, which you attribute to the (half assed) US lockdowns. But this is begging the question whether it was the lockdown rather than the epidemic which did the damage, and in fact, Sweden had a WORSE economic outcome than its neighbors.
> Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths
The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil...
>>The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil...
Anecdotes should not be the basis for unprecedented forced quarantine policies that target not the sick, but the healthy majority. To demonstrate the unreliability of anecdotal evidence, see how a large study on heart inflammation in young athletes caused by covid have debunked earlier anecdotal evidence on the issue:
It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries.
When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.
> It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries.
That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies, and the best test for those policies is to compare like with like (e.g. other Nordic countries).
When people compare US numbers to other countries, I feel that's from more of a "what did the US do wrong" angle, and those comparisons could surface differences that could be learned from.
> Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies
Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling.
The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without left/right tinted glasses.
I would point out though that the truth does not always fit between the 'left' and 'right' views. The migration of the Overton window, capture of major media, and increased acceptance of social media censorship sailed away from truth some time ago.
In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that.
Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times.
The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart).
It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat?
I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms.
In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.
Thank you for pointing that out: 10x. An order of magnitude difference in deaths.
Plus, it just makes common-sense that if people cannot meet other people, that prevents the spread of the disease. No?
That makes common sense, and then we see 10x difference in deaths. The Occam's razor explanation for the reason of 10x bigger death rate then is .. lack of lockdown!
Anybody arguing otherwise seems suspect of political calculus, in my view.
That would make sense, except for the countries that did lock down and did worse. It would help a lot to have a satisfactory explanation for that, too. Geography by itself is not enough to eliminate the doubt sown by that contradiction.
Yeah, the lockdowns in the UK were interesting, particularly were they would announce them ahead of time, giving everyone time to travel and/or bar hop.
I also thought it was interesting that the delta wave seemed to disappear in the UK without the benefit of lockdowns. The same in India. The same in India. I've been wondering if these waves of infections come and go without much regard for typical lockdown measures (outside of full-on communist China and New Zealand lockdowns, which may not be practical in most other places).
"U.S. (Civid-19) deaths in the week ending Monday totaled 7,225. By comparison, about 5,400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks combined. "
I’m not sure that it is disappearing - in Scotland today we have the highest number of recorded cases since the pandemic began. Schools just returned last week too so that won’t help.
Limiting it to immediate neighbors leaves you with comparisons which have similar environment, socio-economic status, and culture/lifestyle. When doing statistical analysis you first try to control for as many potential confounding variables as possible. By limiting the comparisons to like vs like on many different variables you end up being able to make stronger claims about the consequences of active choices.
This analysis doesn't limit it to immediate neighbours. If it was doing that it'd need to include the Baltic states too and when you do that Sweden goes back to being average.
In reality this argument is a form of motivated reasoning. It boils down to, if you ignore all the countries that disprove the hypothesis behind lockdowns and take a tiny number that did better than Sweden, then search backwards for some justification as to why this cherry picking is legitimate, you get a 'neighbours hypothesis' that unfortunately has to ignore some of the neighbours.
It's just rationalizing by people who cannot accept that lockdowns failed, because if they accepted that they'd have to accept that academic expertise in general has failed. And not only failed. Failed in ways that were destructive and damaging.
If you think that Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania share the same socio-economic status, population distribution, and cultural/lifestyle factors as Sweden then I think you are the one who is engaging in motivated reasoning. The reason we keep looking at Sweden and comparing it to its neighbors is that they are a perfect example of the success of lockdowns in preventing high death rates at the start of Covid. Anyone who claims otherwise seems to be either delusional or deceptive.
He's calling out the fact that you compare all countries to each other except in the case of Sweden.
People compare other countries to Australia and New Zealand and Singapore all the time to justify covid lockdowns and restrictions.
But in the case of Sweden a country that outright disproves effectiveness of covid restrictions you require the frame of reference to only be the specific neighboring countries to cherry pick to fit your narrative.
It's either monstrously nightmarishly disingenuous or completely boneheaded and clueless.
The 1450 per million figure the article cites as the cost of covid to Sweden actually makes them look worse than your own data.
It's not an article about the cost of covid though, its about the benefits of not fighting it as hard as other countries. It's very light on that, not much of an attempt to quantify and compare to the cost, but still props to it for even acknowledging that those benefits exist and count for something.
The best write up I've seen so far on the topic is this [0] which concludes:
> So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.
> Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh.
Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below:
* Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years.
* If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost.
If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct.
If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.
That comparison of life hours isn't valid though. There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. And that's not to mention the potential overwhelming of the healthcare system, resulting in many other lives being lost or severely impacted.
People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
Imperfect comparison but still valid. All lives are eventually lost causing some grief.
(If I may summarize what you've said) Saying that a large number of coincident deaths causes a collective grief that wouldn't have happened otherwise is rather subjective. I have felt nothing of the sort. I don't think it's enough of a concern to justify such an overreach of government power.
Quantifying the value of life as a number is icky but necessary if you're making decisions of this scale.
> People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
You can do it - although you can't calculate happiness completely, you can make models and reason about it in a mathematical/economic way. How much you believe the theory maps onto the real world is a valid criticism, however there are entire sections of the social sciences that attempt to do this to help inform policy and decisions (see: Happiness Economics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics).
In fact, the concept of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a very common healthcare economics concept which is used in the UK (NICE) to decide how to allocate drug funding and direct policy.
> There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects.
1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death.
> People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns.
These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing?
If that's true, then lockdowns aren't a valid answer either.
And on the side of not having lockdowns you'll find things that are much worse than some assumed percentage loss of happiness: people dying in total isolation despite not being sick, people dying of medical care that was withheld because they were too afraid to go to the hospital, a generation whose growth was stunted by lack of education and simple lack of human contact (according to one study, babies during the pandemic had a 22% lower IQ than babies from other years [1]), etc. We have done incredible damage to ourselves.
At the beginning of the pandemic this was justified, since we didn't know if this was going to be a mild case of the sniffles or some kind of air-transmissible ebola. Once we knew it was much closer to the first than to the second, however, we should have adjusted our policies, and we never did. I'm terrified that in the coming months we might see a return to lockdowns, as cases will inevitably rise again, and our politicians know only one answer.
I know an elderly couple that literally hasn't left their house, nor received any visitors other than for things like grocery deliveries, since the beginning of the pandemic. Considering how terrified they now are of the outside world, they will live out their lives in a self-chosen prison cell. They are both fully vaccinated (doctor came to their house for it), but refuse to step outside. Is that life?
As another poster here put it so eloquently: life shouldn't be treated as nothing other than a transmission vector for the virus.
How would you feel about a government policy where people are killed two years before their estimated 'normal' date of death, in order to spare society the massive medical cost of the last few years of living? Evil, right?
How do you feel about a policy where those two years are also taken by the government, but in the middle of your life? Sure, we weren't actually killed; we were allowed to keep producing. The only thing that was taken from us were all the things that made life worth living...
Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater.
I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.
On the other hand, you have to consider people who were single and dating. They had a way worse last 18 months than those in a committed, cohabitating relationship.
Unless we make a judgement-call on value how can we balance taking away peoples freedoms over extending other peoples lives?
Consider the following questions:
* Would you accept 70 million people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?
* Would you accept 500 people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?
* Would you accept 5,000 people staying inside for a year to extend 10 peoples life by 10 years?
* Would you stay inside for an hour to save another persons life by a year?
* Would you stay inside for a year to save another person life by 1 year?
These are the real questions that we have to answer, and they will absolutely (and unfortunately) need people to face into the question of the value of life.
My personal answer to these questions is (in sequence) No, No, No, Yes, No. A reasonable person could answer completely different - there is no absolute right answer in any of these!
We can pretend that the answer to these questions is impossible - but these are the real decisions that policy makers need to make. How much is someone's freedom worth compared to the life of a stranger?
I agree with that as precisely stated, but one can reasonably make subjective judgements (and indeed our politicians are doing so at the moment).
If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!”
It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.
> The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself
I didn't assign zero value - I assigned it as 90% value compared to a year with no restrictions.
It's nice you used the time to improve your relationship with your wife, but I'm single and wasn't able to see my friends or family for 6 months. I like that you managed to make the most of it - but my life was put on hold.
> The idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching Netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids.
This post assumes that me being inside for a year stops someone else being suffocated - but actually it's probably more like 100-500 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated (although they will still die of another cause instead, on average a few years later but sometimes many years later). Besides, it's the idea that my freedom (and that of hundreds of others per life saved) should be traded for someone else's health is my issue. Selfish? Sure, but we all are. Everyone on this forum could donate all their earnings this year to save tens of strangers lives in less developed countries but very few do in reality.
> Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic?
See the trolley dilemma - this is a different ethical decision (based on positive action, i.e. doing vs allowing harm).
There isn't much difference between active and passive harm. The most notable thing about the trolley problem is our inate resistance to thinking rationally about that.
People in their 30s and 40s are dying and losing decades of life. Kids Even. Slowing down the spread and then vaccination has saved so many millions from rolling that die.
For myself and my wife for example my wife would virtually certainly be dead if she had contracted it and I wouldn't have great odds either. My lungs don't work that well now without benefit of covid
Then there is the damage done by the disease how do you properly value ravaged lungs and damaged bodies that decrease quality of life for the remainder of a life and end it prematurely? Better than half of asymptomatic survivors have lung damage even!
Then every case as a trillion chances at a better covid. How do you value THAT in your equation? Do you try to assign probability to various future death rates and multiply by probability of being realized?
> but actually it's probably more like 100 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated.
Plus 12 from being hospitalized and having substantial damage done to their bodies that decreases their lifespan by 5 years. Plus 20 more who didn't feel serious symptoms but still sustained substantial lung or cardiovascular damage and lost a year.
Even playing the same game I think you are behind the 8 ball.
We are all selfish. It's true but it's a vice not a justification. We ought to strive for better. The life you save may be your own.
Victoria took 110 days of lockdown to get back to "normal" in lockdown number 2. We are now on lockdown number 6 and have spent over 200 days in lockdown. Can't go more than 5km at current have a 9pm curfew. I would not say it is working well.
You mean places like Australia, that are still in strict lockdowns 18 months later and deploying soldiers to ensure people aren't leaving their house without government permission?
It boggles my mind that some people desire to live in a system like that.
I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high. I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk) than the long, drawn-out yo-yo lockdowns (where we lock down too late and open up too early - meaning community transmission remains high) we've been having. Better to rip the band-aid off quickly than slowly.
> I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high.
I'm truly sorry you've had to go through that. My mom has a compromised immune system so she went through much of the same until she was able to get vaccinated. I still worry about what would happen to her with a breakthrough infection.
> I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk)
If that was a choice, I'd gladly take it. But Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam, etc. have shown that even the best lockdown implementations fail eventually. New Zealand may be the single outlier, but I'm not sure what their end game is as it requires completely sealing their country from the rest of the world, which is also unsustainable.
We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.
I can't speak for NZ, but in AU domestic tourism has more than picked up the slack - domestic tourists have spent more money than international tourists
When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.
So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.
It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.
It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.
I guess I'd be worried about the rate of breakthrough infections amongst vaccinated people in Israel, the first good data we have (the reason for booster shots). That same data showed that natural immunity was much better. [0]
It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.
Taiwan had only a few weeks of full lockdown last year, and then a few months of softer lockdown during the second outbreak this year. During the recent outbreak it was WFH and takeout from restaurants with certain businesses closed. About 100 days later most things are open again.
They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.
> Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare
George Orwell, who actually died of an infectious disease ( Tuberculosis ), being recruited posthumously to the "lets spread disease without restraint" brigade is quite low.
Contact tracing is looking for people that came in contact with infected individuals. When a coworker gets covid they investigate where they went and who they came in contact with so that person can get tested. Not sure how that is Orwellian.
What people would consider Orwellian is the app you can use to scan in at places. That's voluntary, but almost everyone uses it and you still have to sign in on paper if you don't.
Personally, I don't mind. We all carry around GPS tracking devices every day, and it's silly to think that governments can't already track those. Even with GPS off you can be tracked if hitting wifi or different cell towers.
Actually in terms of Orwellian nightmares, normalizing mask wearing in public is an incredibly significant blow you can strike against the surveillance state.
I suppose one "solution" is one of those fake masks that looks real, but does nothing. Technically compliant with the letter of the law, but still striking a blow, with the bonus of hiding your face.
NZ and AU are faring pretty differently. AU is wracked with crisis and NZ has been business as usual for ages. The key difference as I understand it is that NZ sacrificed easy international travel for domestic wellbeing and AU didn't.
NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.
Agree that there's no guarantee of success. However, the political environment and compliance with lockdowns is very different between the two countries. For example, New Zealand is seeing nothing like the widespread protests in Melbourne and across Victoria.
The impression I get as an internet observer from the West Island is that on the whole the NZ government has done a much better job of public communications, maintaining social cohesion, and not trying to police their way out of a pandemic than Australia has. But we'll see whether that lasts. The political environment can change - see NSW - and if level 4 restrictions last more than a few weeks I think you might see the protests start up.
AU has certainly sacrificed international travel also - there are still Australians trying to get back. Aus outbreaks were mostly from escapes from hotel quarantines, and the quarantines were in the major cities.
For outbound travel Australians are required to get a government exemption to leave the country. Australia also has far fewer inbound quarantine places per capita.
Also internally most states require entry/exit permits and frequently close thier borders to one another.
Australia sacrificed international travel too. It still leaked in which led to occasional limited lockdowns. Until Delta strain hit and spread too fast for the small lockdown strategy to contain it.
Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.
Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup plan.
But even the AZ rollout was a debacle with no one sure if they were eligible or how to get it. And the Prime Minster excusing it all by saying "it's not a race".
If Australia had the vaccination rate of the US or the UK (which was absolutely achievable) then Australia would still be the envy of the world.
> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.
New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.
Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).
The issues with the non-AZ vaccines was that they didn't lock in early supply dates soon enough. For example, in June (which was already late for what was needed) Australia only had 1.7M Pfizer doses available[1] and now the PM is putting out press releases about obtaining extra supply from Poland[2].
Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October.
You mean Israel and nowhere else, yes? Because nowhere in Europe had lockdown so short. Australia managed to make all its work for nothing by comprehensively fucking up the vaccine rollout.
Do you have any direct source for that statistic? The article that you've linked to is the Babylon Bee -- a site best known for their satire and fake articles -- lifting some infographics from an (uncited) article in the Daily Mail. Neither of these sources inspires confidence.
That actually says something subtly different than what the other article was claiming. Not only does it point to the pandemic as a whole as a cause rather than lockdowns in particular, as the Babylon Bee article did, but it suggests that the most problematic changes in behavior were increases in drinking among people who were already heavy drinkers, not people "becoming alcoholics" who didn't previously have a drinking problem.
Very sound logic (/s)! With this sort of reasoning people invaded the Capitol on January 6th, because they were certain their country was about to be taken over by a Chinese-backed coup. Guess what, they also think what they heard was legitimate, and they think their reasoning work(ed) perfectly fine.
Actually, notthebee.com is very clearly not babylonbee.com
"Not the Bee is a humor-based news, opinion, and entertainment site from the creators of The Babylon Bee and Disrn. Like the name suggests, it'll feature some absurd and hilarious (but real) news that seems like it should definitely be satire."[0]
That link that apparently got @jmnicolas flagged, actually does cite an external source[1] which says, "the alcohol-related death rate increasing by 20 per cent in 2020 to the highest level since records began.[...] PHE data showed there were 6,893 deaths blamed on alcohol in 2020, compared to 5,819 in 2019 before the virus reached Britain."
(edit) This seems to be backed up by a gov.uk press release.[2](/edit)
NotTheBee definitely has a opinion/bias to their articles [3] but I don't think it deserves to be called "fake news."
Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. This also fails to acknowledge that there might be a worthwhile set of cost:benefit ratios to compare your single data point against.
> but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.
People accuse the COVID situation of being political and dividing people. I think one of the major lines of division is in the expectations that one has about their daily life in a given society, and how few some people have about their own.
Each to their own, but the failure to acknowledge the validity of the opposing point of view, even in a polite tone, is a troubling development.
>Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures.
I don't know about the US or Spain but the lockdown measures in the UK were halfhearted. Somehow we managed to have the worst of both worlds, the biggest economic hit in the OECD and the worst health outcomes.
A huge challenge in Norway, was that all our retired ethnic Pakistani people panicked and booked flights from Pakistan to Norway. They didn't trust that Pakistani hospitals would handle the pandemic. Sweden probably has a lot more foreign residents with swedish citizenship than Norway?
I firmly believe that to be part of the answer, our "CDC" also said as much in 2020. Lots of clusters of infection popping up in parts of the population that lives very tightly and in large family groups, and those are predominantly immigrants and their kids. Im not sure how it looks in the third wave though. That and the care homes for elders were a big problem early on, but lately it seems to be a more general spread which is probably even harder to stem.
I have not yet seen anyone try correlate socio-eoconomic status and/or overcrowding to infection in a nice way?
I think only looking at number of deaths from covid is a huge mistake. What about the quality of life of all of those who survived?
A lockdown is no small thing. It's forcing millions of people into forced isolation, which has hard to forsee consequences for mental health and social development, means destroying innumerable small businesses, and with it, people's livelihoods, closing schools, with devastating effects to education [1], etc.
Also worth noting that the initial projections for covid deaths in Sweden vastly over-estimated the pandemic's eventual lethality:
However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.
The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios. On an average day you'll notice multiple anti-remote working articles parroted by Cabinet ministers. Why should they care how businesses conduct their business, especially if it's more convenient and can lead to a happier and more efficient workforce? Follow the money.
It used to be - many years ago - a stodgy and conservative yet reputable newspaper (they fired Boris Johnson for lying, now he moonlights as a columnist). As with other newspapers (e.g. WSJ) it went off the deep end a long time ago.
It continues to astonish me how far the telegraph (and conservatism generally) has left people like Oborne behind. Really quite something to behold, and pretty deeply alarming.
For example, I read the guardian pretty much everyday, and various other papers, even though although culturally I am a proper grauniad-reader type, politically I am not - but by virtue of actually reading the articles text you can actually (believe it or not?) determine both the facts and the flavour separately.
Be careful. It takes conscious effort to read sceptically; whenever your attention slips you'll find yourself absorbing the views the writer wants you to.
I'm glad to see someone call out the WSJ... I was a subscriber for many years and it was a conservative yet outstanding source of information. Today it's crap, yet still trades on its historic reputation. Really breaks my heart as I've not been able to find a replacement.
I think the downhill started when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought it. Anything they touch turns into ... bad things. Why is that? Because there are people who crave propagandists news. It is good business, tell us what we want to hear ..
Bloomberg has major problems; they have no proper separation between advertising and editorial (a high-profile article on corruption in the Chinese government, following up on an article that had narrowly missed out on the Pulitzer the year before, was spiked in what very much appeared to be a move to protect Bloomberg terminal sales in China), and they still haven't retracted (or clearly stated that they're standing behind) their dubious "hack chip" story.
It shocks me that people believe manufacturer denials on this particular issue but still claim to be immune to commercial propaganda.
It's unlikely there will ever be undeniable proof available to the general public one way or the other on this. But the story was well sourced, was definitely technical credible and the parts that could be checked all checked out. Literally the only thing against it was manufacturer statements saying "nah".
In particular, check out page 71 of [1], where a former US Marine testifies under oath in a federal case about a similar things happening with Lenovo laptops in 2008 in Iraq. Quote:
A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the
US military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that
would record all the data that was being inputted into that
laptop and send it back to China.
I'm glad to hear that Bloomberg is still talking about this - there was a point where it looked like they were just going to wait for it to fade away.
If it's real, it really shouldn't be that hard to prove conclusively - find the chip, scan it, dump what's in it. The technical parts are possible but not that plausible - not just the manufacturer but large internet companies with the right expertise were sceptical, and most of the people who thought it was genuine seemed to be non-technical. E.g. "had a chip encrypted on the motherboard" does not inspire confidence that this is someone who knows what they're talking about.
> The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios.
I'm curious, how does it work in reality? A boardroom meetings where landlord's representative decide what to publish in the next issue to get people into commercial property? A weekly reviews of editors where they have their KPI tied to how well they lure people into buildings? Phone calls from commercial union leaders to publishing houses asking for specific results? Do we have some good articles which would describe mechanics of that or is it all successful clandestine operations?
You know in an interview loop where you consider "culture fit?" That's it. That's the conspiracy.
For a journalism job at the Telegraph you're going to need to have a resume where you've written the right kinds of articles with the right kind of tone. Have a bunch of articles that you've written sympathetic to Corbyn and those around him and you ain't getting the job.
They won't even need to police you that hard once you've gotten the job, because you've spent 20+ years being brought up a certain way and you're probably not going to massively deviate from your past all of a sudden, particularly not if you're clearly getting paid well based on your current trajectory. Once you get vetted in the interview process they know what they're getting based on the way you present yourself, the way you talk, your background, where you grew up, the schools you went to, etc. And when you've been there long enough you'll vet other candidates the same way.
And its largely the same kind of interpersonal mechanics that govern the formation of cliques in high school, enforced by interviews and performance reviews, with large incentives where if you conform you climb the ladder and gain more wealth and power. Nobody needs to write it all down just like there's no written rules that he art nerds tend to hang out with the art nerds (and I'm sure there's examples of people who you think you can point to who broke the molds there, but they're notable precisely because they broke the molds).
Excellent summary for people who think that there needs to be actual explicit indications for conspiracies (in the original sense of the word) to exist
Marriage and friendship networks. Particularly those formed in the public school (“public” means paid in UK) system. I doubt it’s official meetings, but rather discussions outside work.
Yep, it’s the dinner after the committee meeting, the bar after that. The weekend adventures, etc. That’s where the politics are discovered. And then coordinated.
In the olden days the only way to get an education was through privately tutoring.
So establishments where everyone was educated together were “public” - even though you paid to attend.
Nowadays “public meaning paid” implies one of these original public schools (Harrow, Eton and the like).
I went to a paid school, founded in 1513, but it wouldn’t be called “public” because it’s not one of those original schools and therefore not high enough in the class system. It would be called “private”.
“Public as in free to attend” schools are known as state schools.
Just on a detail, I discovered recently that there have been various official definitions of "public school" and lists of public schools, and FWIW your school probably counts as one according to those. But I agree with your main points and your explanation.
The public schools would say their role is to prepare the future rulers of the country. And my school produced two former Chancellors of the Exchequer so I guess that makes sense.
Mine wasn’t a boarding school though which probably counts for something.
"State" school are the free, government run schools. "Public" schools are typically fee-paying, and are named so because when they were founded, anyone who paid could send their children there, rather than it being restricted by class or religion. They were "public" because the general public could send their kids there.
Micromanging is not necessary. They just set the tone and don't hire people who would write anything opposed to their policy [1] which they rarely need to explicitly convey, although they do at times of course. People write things that they really like get rewarded.
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explains how this work with a very large number of examples.
Internet commenters love to think their enemy's minions are stupid.
In reality they're just as smart as you are and don't need to be specifically told what the people in charge do and don't want published and/or what tone they should take.
the same way gravity works, you don't start floating through the room even if you don't actively believe in it. The financiers of these papers know the editors and managers they hire, they set the tone, they dine in the same circles, their kids go to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, for ideology to proliferate there are no 'mechanics' required.
When you want to see how bad it can get, see the Czech Republic in the top ten. We are land locked, quite high density and with a lot of neighbors with a lot of regular cross border traffic. There were lockdowns though arguably too late, chaotic and often ignored.
End result ? 30000+ dead.
Well, at least it looks like the ammount of people who got infected was quite massive as with only 50% vaccination rate right now things are not going back to hell so far, with hardly any precautions still in place.
Your comment about counterfactuals reminds of a saying, or what I would call a more accurate version of a common saying - "Hindsight is 50/50". (Note, that doesn't make hindsight necessarily wrong, just difficult to have confidence in.)
Yes, that is the point. The original saying is Hindsight is 20/20, implying it is very accurate. This version of the statement contradicts that, implying you can't really say what would have happened if things were different.
> But 50/50 would be effectively the same meaning as 20/20.
This isn't obvious; consider that having 3,000/3,000 vision ("I can't read text all that well when it's half a mile away") says pretty much nothing about how clearly you can see things that are 20 feet away.
Nearsightedness and farsightedness are both characterized by "normal vision" at certain distances which becomes markedly worse at certain other distances.
I should have been more clear. 20/20 refers to vision and is used in the traditional form of the expression and is supposed to mean "very good". 50/50 refers to percentages, meaning 50% chance of being correct and 50% chance of being wrong, which would be very bad.
Yes, this just means you (first number) can see at 20 feet what the normal person (second number) can see at 20 feet. I don't know why 20 feet became the standard for comparison.
What is perfect vision? I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see. Would perfect vision being able to see everything in the electromagnetic spectrum? How big would one eyes need to be?
> Some birds of prey, such as hawks, are believed to have an acuity of around 20/2; in this respect, their vision is much better than human eyesight.
The scale of how good vision can be keeps going and going indefinitely (presumably until you get into physical limitations to resolution related to wavelengths). While 20/20 is considered normal and not in need of correction, it doesn't mean it's the best vision observed among human beings, or the best that's physically possible (for human beings or other animals).
Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland, even though they are neighbors. Also, being low population density is irrelevant (you could have a huge country with everybody crammed in a city, actually Stockholm is much denser than Oslo for instance). Also, even within a single country, fatality rates vary greatly.
I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.
> Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland
Pedantic “every country is a different country” aside; Norway and Finland are absolutely fine comparatives.
The population density (in the populated areas), culture and genetic make-up of these countries is so similar that they may as well be considered the same country socioeconomically.
Hell, they used to even _be_ the same country (the union of Kalmar).
I’ve lived in Finland and currently live in Sweden. As a British person I see more similarities than differences. (Language of Finland vs the Scandinavian languages not withstanding)
Your perception of a country doesn't make a scientific evidence on why Norway of Finland could be taken as reference point to assess Sweden strategy regarding Covid.
The pandemics is extremely complex. Fatality rates have looked very different in seemingly similar countries, and even within different areas of a single country.
Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong.
I do suspect Sweden would have had less fatality had they implemented a lockdown. Would it then be comparable to Norway? I wouldn't bet may life on it. France has almost twice as many covid death as Germany even though they implemented a much stricter lockdown.
It seems some people hate Sweden for choosing their way to deal with the pandemics. Could have they done better otherwise? maybe, but overall, no cataclysm happened there, they did ok in terms of fatality compared to rest of Europe, and much better for the other metrics, as stated in the article.
"Lockdown" is also an almost meaningless term. People adjusted behavior almost everywhere--including Sweden. Furthermore, very few places actually implemented a hard lockdown that largely prevented people from leaving their homes. Certainly no where (?) in the US did. Restaurants closed for indoor dining isn't really a lockdown.
> Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong.
Nobody has claimed that it is, and in fact in this very thread you've seen it correctly noted that Sweden's approach to old age homes was responsible for a significant part of the fatalities -- although here too there's a lot of debate about whether it's the percentage of % in age homes (a bit higher in Sweden), the Swedish tendency to have larger homes, or the Swedish COVID policy decision to treat people at the homes instead of hospitalizing them.
But, again, if you have alternative hypotheses or factors that you think differ greatly between the countries, let's hear them. Because as a native of the region, I'd struggle to find many, at least when it comes to factors a virus would care about (as opposed to, say, preferring sweeter jam with meatballs).
Over the last four years the all cause mortality has been the same for Sweden and Norway [0]. So it would appear more people died in Norway before the pandemic, and more people in Sweden since, equalling out over the last four years.
Maybe this explains the difference during the pandemic - Sweden had more old people.
> I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.
So first you claim we don't know. Then you claim they've "done quite well". Which is it? What was the purpose of the first sentence?
I'm claiming we don't know what would have happened under different policies (lockdown vs no lockdown) - and those who pretend otherwise don't have scientific evidence to back up their claims. Regardless, I'm claiming they've done quite well under all possible objective metrics compared to other European countries.
You should compare Sweden to its closest neighbors, not to all of Europe or all of the World).
Countries geographically close to each other are more similar than countries far apart. Therefore you can
more readily attribute the difference in death-rates to differences in policy.
And use Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates is most probably the correct one: lack of lockdown. It just makes (common) sense.
What is your explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates between Sweden and its closest neighbors? Do you have a simpler explanation than the lack of lockdown?
Well, first of all it's 10x compared to Norway and 3X compared to Denmark.
There are huge differences in demographics between the Scandinavian countries. Over 20% of the Swedish population have been born outside of the country, mostly in the Middle East or Africa. This group has been hit disproportionately by Covid. The risk of needing intensive care for Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden is 6 times higher than for people with Swedish ancestry, and the risk of dying is 2.8 higher [0].
There are also pretty big differences in how elderly care is organized and run.
I'm not saying we did a good job in Sweden, but I definitely think that there are more factors than lockdown in play.
Surely there are many contributing factors always. The question to ask is: "Would Sweden have done better had it implemented lockdown like its neighbors?
In hindsight, would they still make the same decision, if (and when) a new equally deadly pandemic rises again?
Telegraph has an anti-lockdown agenda to push in the UK; it is not an impartial source here.
In the UK the praise for the "Sweden model" comes particularly from the conservative-aligned pro-business anti-lockdown lobby; who are producing PR for their proposition that "lockdowns do more (economic) harm than they do (public health) good". Right or wrong, it's certainly not impartial reporting on a foreign country, it's selling the idea that this should be policy at home.
If you're reading such an article from a UK publication and you're not in the UK, then you are not the target of this marketing exercise. You are informational Bycatch.
Your argument is that we should ignore news media with an “anti lockdown” agenda?
It may come as a surprise but not every smart, well meaning person supports the lockdowns. You can look at all the publicly available data and come to the conclusion that they were a colossal public health blunder.
I would argue the pro lockdown crowd have a huge bias toward ignoring any bit of data that demonstrates lockdowns are a bad idea.
> Your argument is that we should ignore news media with an “anti lockdown” agenda?
The argument may be more 'be aware of the biases of the news media you consume'.
Contrast:
> Sweden has recorded more COVID-19 cases per capita than most countries so far: Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.
[…]
> Sweden's economy still shrank 8.6% from April to June of last year — its largest quarterly fall in at least 40 years. By comparison, Denmark's economy shrank 7.4% during that time, Norway's 5.1%, and Finland's just 3.2%. (None of these economies shrank by more than 4% over the course of 2020, though.)
> Sweden's unemployment rate also rose from 6.6% in March 2020 to 9.5% in March 2021. Norway, Denmark, and Finland all saw unemployment rise by smaller margins: around one percentage point, on average.
Compared to the UK (where the Telegraph is based) Sweden did pretty well—but that may not be a valid apples-apples comparison for a variety of reasons. Compared to the other Nordics—which may have more similarities (economy, demographic, geography)—Sweden did not do as well AFAICT.
One part of the problem is that the debate got incredibly polarized with ad hominem and thinking of the children. The majority of people on the internet citing 'science' and 'data' (regardless of side) are people who have an opinion and found a fact to support it to which they then cling for dear life.
Another part of the problem is the degree to which our understanding of facts has evolved. Take, for instance, the body of evidence for and against PPE of all types and compare it to what was being said in March of 2020.
The major failing of public policy was, in my opinion, the inability to articulate the difference between what we knew and what we thought. This was enhanced and exacerbated by the public wanting answers now, and refusing to countenance "we don't know".
When historians looks back at this period of history, they are going to marvel at the degree to which we lionized people who "stuck to their guns" and the degree to which we denigrate people who change their opinion when the facts change.
The overall sentiment in Sweden is that they should have done more. Even their chief epidemiologist publicly regretted their policy and wished they had followed their neighboring countries.
Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK, except an ad-hominem jab on a more liberally-oriented website like HN?
There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK (Labour is mired in one scandal after another and can't elect a proper leader), whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.
> Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK
When it comes to UK newspapers of course it does.
> There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK
That's certainly an opinion, but one that is not relevant to talking about newspapers.
> whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.
UK lockdowns were consistently too late, because the Conservative government did not want too admit the necessity. That's why the lockdowns had to be so long and repeated. Pressure like this article exits because the UK Government is know to be susceptible to it. Because they don't have their own serious plans for COVID, or actually for anything else either.
I don't understand your argument. You seem to be saying that since there aren't any viable non-conservatives the Conservatives are not conservatives and that this newspaper isn't conservative.
Have you ever noticed that the people who reject model-derived predictions for things like pandemic and climate are extremely confident about their economic forecasting ability? If only some of these super-geniuses would share their unquestionable brilliance with other fields, not to mention eliminating recessions and financial panics.
CO2 doesn’t try to stymie your mitigation plans; a virus has selective pressure but it’s stochastic rather than directed by an intelligent adversary. In contrast, the stock market has a huge number of people with massive resources who can make enormous profits when they find a way to exploit some aspect of the system.
The article provides evidence to support the claim made in the headline, but there are important caveats included at the end:
> The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
> And Dr Bhatt does not think another, non-Nordic country such as Britain could have copied Sweden’s policies and got the same results.
> With about 23 people per square kilometre, Sweden has about a tenth of the population density of the UK, while about half of Swedish households comprise just one person - a major factor in local transmission.
If you're going to quote that, you should add the directly relevant information from the other side:
* "But that death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and well below those of France, Spain, Italy and the UK"
* Dr Bhatt concedes "it worked for Sweden"
* Dr Bhatt is "one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy"
That last detail is important. Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK. If he said anything else, that would become the story. What's remarkable is that someone in his position is conceding as much as he has.
>But that death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and well below those of France, Spain, Italy and the UK
I mean one reason why you might want to compare Sweden to other Nordic countries is because you might assume that Nordic countries are more similar to each other than they are to Italy etc.
While that is very true. One thing to note is that we are also very different countries. One of my main gripes during the last almost 2 years now is the implication that Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are basically the same. Which is far from true.
I agree that there are differences but from outside (at least where Norway, Sweden and Denmark are concerned) a lot of these differences might seem very 'Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.' especially when comparing any of these countries against a southern European, Latin language family one.
Edit: I am wrong. The population density of the Stockholm urban area is 4200 (2019), not 400 as I originally said. That number is for the county, not the municipal area. Leaving the rest of the comment so others can learn. Clearly the population density of Stockholm, which holds about 10% of the Swedish population, is not the relevant factor.
> Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK.
I'm guessing he didn't say it because he didn't think it was true.
In Stockholm there are ~400 people per square km.
In Milan there are 2000, in Madrid there are 5400, in London there are 5700, and in Paris there are 20,000. This detail alone -- ignoring other cultural and demographic differences between northern and southern Europe -- could be enough on its own to soften the blow.
FWIW, the main Wikipedia page on Stockholm lists a “Density” of ~5200, an “Urban Density” of ~4200 and a “Metro Density” of ~400. I admittedly don’t know which is the most useful one here. Population density metrics are tricky.
And not to be too scold-y, but 400 people per sq km is the population density of small middle-American towns. I know Stockholm isn’t the biggest city by any means, but it’s still a national capital and a cosmopolitan old-world city; a moment of reflection tells you it’s gotta be denser than, like, Little Falls, Minnesota.
Definitely a learning moment for me. Means that the question of Sweden may not be so simple.
That said, most of the population doesn’t live in Stockholm, so that probably was not the right idea to start to begin with.
As another commenter pointed out, Sweden did worse than its neighbors who have a similar population distribution, and I think that's the more interesting take.
As someone who lives in Stockholm and who has visited Milan multiple times I would say both cities have a pretty similar population density and any difference you might see will be due to how the city borders are selected. Neither city is particularly dense or particularly sparse.
Population density is meaningless for countries as a whole. Most of Sweden is wilderness where hardly anyone lives. Swedes mostly live in cities, just like Brits.
I've become increasingly aware of news articles spending many paragraphs advancing a particular thesis only to apply significant caveats to that thesis in the closing paragraphs.
I assume this is done with the full knowledge that the final paragraphs are the least read in any article.
What I find particularly interesting is that Sweden wasn't the only country that did this -- Brazil also did a no-lockdown strategy, and it was basically a disaster there.
Evidently, there must have been some other factors at play besides the boolean of lockdown true/false. Better healthcare, maybe?
I think the most important difference is that ~50% of the population here thought the government was being incompetent/paralyzed and then performed a voluntary lockdown, much harsher than the government-mandated restrictions.
Since lots of those people who disagreed with the government (in)actions work as "knowledge workers", it was also relatively easy to make the switch to work from home, and they did, along with pretty much everone who was able to do WFH.
Possibly related: the current social democrat prime minister Stefan Löfven made a surprise announcement today that he'll be stepping down in November, a mere ten months before the next election.
I think it's natural that it would play out differently in Brazil - so many differences in the structure of the work force, access to information, English language skills, personal economic reserves, etc etc.
Your comment reminds me of the NYC Metro use data that (I think) was posted here at the very beginning of the pandemic. IIRC it showed subway use plummeted before the city or state government enacted any measures to combat the pandemic at all.
Yep. A lot of what got blamed on lockdowns was widely happening without government mandates, and I don't get how people keep making mistakes about this when looking at the effects of policy.
When I argue with people, I use the term "lockdown" to exclusively mean government-imposed lockdowns.
After we've witnessed the experience of northern Italy in February / March 2020, most informed/reasonable people concluded that the situation is more serious than previously indicated, so it's obvious that people's habits would change. People are somewhat rational, after all.
But arguably self-imposed/-chosen changes in human behaviour can both better account for individual differences (in health, exposure, and risk aversion) as well as respond much faster to short-term, local changes of the situation, compared to government policy.
And the clearest counter example to this ridiculous assertion is the US right now; faced with numbers not seen since the winter the population has only minimally changed it’s behavior over the summer and so far there has been no political will for any distancing restrictions returning.
That exactly what was happening here in Thailand. We even had a saying "who needs lock downs when no one wants to go out anyway". Despite many people here being young and healthy not many would care to risk covid exposure just to have dinner or to shop around.
This sounds exactly like what happened where I live in the USA. Many people who could WFH did. People who could not, did not. Everyone made a personal risk assessment and went about his life accordingly.
His ministry lost a no-confidence vote in parliament, but no-one else was able to form a new government so he was asked to form a new one.
This latest announcement is that he will be stepping down as the leader of the Social Democrats. There's a new election in Sep 2022, and to me (a Swede) it looks as if no-one is interested in an extra snap election right now (the regular election will be held in Sep 2022 as planned anyway).
Yeah.. the electoral situation in the parliament hadn't really changed, so that was kinda stupid. Mostly it was just a way for the socialist (borderline communist) eternal support party to the social democrats to flex its muscles, for once.
That doesn’t prove the people doing these voluntary lockdowns had any different of an outcome than if they did nothing at all.
Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control.
If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it. We had as little control over covid as we have control over other natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes.
> If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns not doing anything. The virus did what it did no matter how hard humans tried to control it
Tell that to New Zealand, who have had less than 3,000 cases in a population of 5 million. They did this with strict border controls (people on inbound flights must isolate for 2 weeks) and quick response to community transmission (several lockdowns totalling 40 days).
Yes we locked down over one case. The next day we had a few more, and then more and more and more (21 in each of the last two days). Delta is amazingly spreadable.
Because we are locked down straight away, every case is easily contact traced, and people that did catch COVID are already isolated in their bubble, so cannot re-transmit easily behind that. As people are diagnosed they are taken to isolate in a hotel.
So there will be an end, even though we were unluckily enough to have had a number of very large spreader events (conferences, churches, schools etc.).
The oft-touted alternative from activists outside NZ is to vaccinate and open up. We are vaccinia go quickly, but that plan does not work. (NZ had no right/need to get vaccines early - we did not need them. We are now ramping up quickly, all to the plan.)
But vaccines do not prevent transmission.
Vaccines do not provide population immunity with Delta until a very large percentage (90%?) of all people, kids included, are vaccinated.
Vaccines do not eliminate illness (including long COVID) and death. They do reduce it a lot, but many people will die, especially the vaccine hesitant. Meanwhile anti-vaxers spread disinformation, much as the similar or overlapping anti-lockdown crowd do. (Think about that)
Vaccines are not available to kids, and some very vulnerable.
It has been really amazing living essentially a normal live while most the rest of the world “lives with COVID”. We want that back.
From our experience here in Queensland, it's definitely not lost. We managed to get on top of a delta outbreak that peaked at NZ's current daily cases with a week of lockdown less than a month ago.
Of course they have an effect. Take, for example, the UK. All three local peaks of covid deaths (Apr 20, Nov 20, Jan 21) all came exactly 2-3 weeks after each of the 3 national lockdowns.
That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random. You’d have no way to tell which of our theories are true. None of these lockdowns were proven to work prior to everybody jumping on them.
> That doesn’t mean anything at all. It could just be random.
This is not a serious response. The correlation is far too definite to be mere chance; and the mechanisms that cause it not hard to understand. Or in plain English: it's not random.
It’s a very serious response, and it isn’t my job to prove. All the lockdown proponents need to prove their draconian, Stone Age mitigation’s did anything at all. As far as I can see it’s just blind luck that one region “did better” than a other.
The pandemic respond we got was not at all what we planned. It was using something completely untested and unproven with huge massive negative side effects.
It was and still is unethical and immoral.
Science has nothing to do with these NPIs because science doesn’t tell society what do to.
Such dishonest statistics, this source. For example,
> One of these neighboring Southeastern states had a statewide mask mandate. The other two did not.
> [Shown: COVID-19 Deaths, per million, 7-day average]
But mask mandates do not claim to prevent COVID-19 deaths, rather transmission. A state with relatively low transmission but poor healthcare infra will see similarly unintuitive/surprising trends.
All disasters have physical parameters. Fires need flammable materials and a level of dryness. Tornadoes and hurricanes need atmospheric pressure differences to propagate in a given direction. Earthquakes happen near fault lines. COVID has to be transmitted (somehow, physically, whether through air, aerosols, water, contact, but something).
There is almost no way that lockdowns did nothing. It may have been overkill, there may have been a single aspect of lockdowns that far outperformed everything else, and we could have just practiced that. But this fatalistic view is lazy, unscientific and reductive, and in a societally harmful way.
The article talks about this at the end. They have very low population density, a tiny population to start with, and most people live alone. Compared to their immediate neighbors with similar densities and culture, they did far worse in deaths.
"no-lockdown" is unfortunately "technically true but far from the truth". I consider poor journalistic reporting a major contributor to this...
I can't remember the exact date, but I think in march or april 2020 there were restrictions put in place by government to limit the number of people that could attend a public event. Organizers and event-goers would commit a crime if they attended an event with more than 50 people.
Sure infected people did not get literally locked into their own homes, but "lockdown" is clearly more of a scale where some governments effectively locked the doors to everyones homes and some told everyone to stay home.
This is speculation from my side,
based on my interactions with health care in Sweden over the past year. They are good at distancing and precautions in situations where it probably matters a lot, health care settings. People that had cold symptoms didn't get mixed up with regular patients. Like sitting in a waiting room. If you were going to have a child and you were going to have a meeting with a nurse then you were the only one allowed in, not even your husband/boyfriend was allowed to accompany you.
They've had regular city-wide/regional lockdowns all throughout. If someone in your apartment complex tests positive SURPRISE you cant leave for two weeks. Normal is gone, it's not coming back. When you move the goal post from "not overwhelming our medical system" to attempting "covid zero" this is the new normal you end up with, somewhere between China and Australia.
Right now it seems quite the opposite. Their vaccines are not very effective against the Delta variant, and they're having several outbreaks. They recently shut down a huge port. They never learned how to do partial lockdowns and just dealing with low levels of infection, so if they don't manage to eliminate the virus, they're screwed. What are they going to do with the Delta variant? Import foreign vaccines? Wait for better domestic vaccines? What if a new more infectious variant comes along that's even less affected by their vaccines?
I think China may be a case of the cure being worse than the disease. We know their approach has killed people, and the huge amount of resources spent on these lockdowns and massive amount of testing may have been better spent saving lives elsewhere. But we'll never know because they don't publish reliable data on excess mortality.
Consider which of those possibilities would make it easier to publish experimental results, and consider the distinct lack of clear published results despite this being a topic of significant interest.
See but since there was no actual randomized test the fact that Brazil did a no-lockdown strategy (which I guess some say is false)… it could have been just as big of a disaster even with a lockdown.
There is basically no real way to prove that lockdowns did a single thing. The fact so many countries were so willing to jump onto a completely unproven non pharmaceutical intervention that has massive negative side effects is pretty scary.
The fact so many people get hot and bothered by this and just assume that lockdowns worked at all… it’s quite disturbing.
Its proven. It’s physics. I can’t catch covid from you because we’re probably on different continents. Living across the street works as well if I don’t open the door. This has been tested for every transmissible disease every organism has had that we’ve managed to witness. Similarly, fewer interactions result in fewer opportunities for transmission. Reduce transmission and the numbers go down. What’s to prove here?
Lockdowns are an incredibly fragile “solution”. It’s a multi agent problem with lots of probabilities. All lockdowns allow some “essential workers” to not lockdown. You could have only 2% of workers deemed essential—and there is no general rule since all geographies are different and in situations like the exact details matter—and have the exact same long term outcomes as no lock down at all. It’s fun to run multi agent simulations and see how easy it is to screw up any centralized plan through the injection of little probabilitities.
In my opinion anything that does not allow people to exercise conditional probability at the last mile is bound to have negative expected value.
Things that I do think make a difference: better airflow,
more outdoor time, less obesity, better testing, a public equipped
with better tools to diagnose and treat conditions at home, vaccines, better data infra and publishing of medical data, etc. Dumb blanket mandates that are applied across a population are stupid.
While many people might point out that Sweden did in fact have more deaths, the verdict on that is still out.
They are getting far fewer cases and deaths than many other areas now, and have been for many weeks.
Couple that with the not-lost social interactions and economy etc, and the fact that this was always (more or less) every country’s pandemic plan before we changed our mind for covid, and it becomes a troubling indicator that our entire response may have been irrational.
> While many people might point out that Sweden did in fact have more deaths, the verdict on that is still out
Other people would point out that Sweden experienced economic effects and other indicia of behavioral changes roughly equivalent to places that notionally, at least, had lockdowns.
A lot of people think what we did was part of some plan but nope. If you go back and read various pandemic plans you’ll see we did basically the exact opposite of what they recommended.
> When Sweden decided for no lock-downs, we knew very little about the virus. It was effectively a jump into the unknown.
And lockdowns were a jump into an economic unknown, which also had very unpredictable effects. There's no way you can say it was an error given the evidence available at the time. We'll see how it works out in the end.
Assuming that in any give situation, the only correct decision in the absence of any knowledge is the most conservative one. Which this would disprove and thus the argument is provably false.
Except that being wrong about how bad a virus is can be catastrophic, especially when nearly every nation was woefully underprepared. You can easily do math to demonstrate how small changes in the variables of a virus can lead to more dire outcomes.
What if China had taken the most conservative policy in response to the appearance of covid-19? Maybe we would have been spared the turmoil and disruption of this pandemic. You're way too confident declaring this as "provably false".
Hopefully our knowledge is greater and our preparedness will be better such that we don't have to always take such an aggressive policy position when faced with a novel virus.
The job of Governing is not solely to minimise loss of life, or to utterly avoid tail risks irrespective of cost. (imo)
Focussing so myopically on the above has had unmeasurable consequences on a huge variety of fronts. My prime fury is reserved for closing schools. Extraordinary damage done, gulfs in opportunity and experience widened. Nobody cares much. Death stats are, after all, the only thing that matters to the media at large
This isn't what my comment is arguing. This is about the outbreak phase when we don't know much. I appreciate some of the points you're making but it's also not a binary choice.
As we acquire more information, policy should evolve with it. Limits on individual freedoms are blunt policy tools that should be used only when necessary, because they aren't zero cost.
I don't think we should have forever lockdowns at all. I'm in the camp of "get vaccinated and move on with your life" and that we should be more upfront about how covid-19 isn't going to be eradicated anytime soon.
You're pro having 30 people breathing in a small room with bad airflow for multiple hours when there's a pandemic?
If you don't know how it's transmitted, then try various things and see if they help. We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it, if it didn't change the situation we would have tried other things instead.
Yup. I think that fucking up the education of children, especially those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, is worse than the deaths not doing it causes.
It is not that lockdown is bad or wrong. It is that I do not agree with all the things which were hit. I acknowledge there is a price to keeping education open but I believe it would have been worthwhile.
Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.
> Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.
Actually I believe that’s table stakes for good governance. Trading known deaths for possible impact to development of children isn’t even in the realm of equal, which is why most places didn’t do it.
And, early on it was not sure how Covid would affect children. Their lives and health are still more important than their education. Better be conservative in hazardous circumstances. Better safe than sorry
There is very little proof that lockdowns worked. We had no clue if they worked going in and we still can’t prove they worked, let alone well enough to justify their immense societal costs.
We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it
No, we tried lockdowns, they did not work well, then extended them, then again. In my country some school children did not go to school for a whole year because people with anxiety disorder thought opening schools would kill children, parents and grand parents.
> Even if the decision proves beneficial, it was an error
That's subjective: It depends on how much risk you're willing to take on. People here were pretty supportive of the policy, so presumably willing to take on more risk than you. Like you, I wasn't but that's just how it goes.
Not sending kids to school, eliminating social interactions, shutting down businesses, this was the drastic unknown experiment not the other way around. The effects are becoming more apparent now and I'm sure there will be a lot written about the subject in the future. Gloating doesn't seem appropriate at this point but sure after a year of the world screaming how bad we handled it maybe a Swedish moderate amount of national pride is warranted.
One interesting, and quite unexpected, effect was on the suicide rate in the United States. Specifically, the fact that it has declined slightly. This is especially surprising given the seemingly inexorable rise on that same rate for decades. We are only now starting to see analysis of this data, and while I hardly think that this is enough to make any sizable statements about lockdowns, it's also certainly not the case that we know they were more harmful than unchecked covid.
Wow, looks like closer to 30% in the US. Interesting that suicides went down and overdoses went up, I wonder how you would go about disentangling those numbers.
I don't know what model you're using in order to be able to say that and I don't have any way to quantify it either but clearly some people are willing to jump off cliffs without knowing whether there's spikes or a mattress below and it's obvious that they're willing to take more risk than people who aren't, so your quantification point is moot.
> When faced with a cataclysmic, albeit low probability, event, the only course of action is the cautious one.
This is nothing but extreme risk aversion. Some people, most, do not share it with you.
Lockdowns are a jump into the unknown. They have never been done in the history of humanity before. Not just cities, not just nations, but entire civilizations locking down has never been done before. The risk groups were already well known by then end of March 2020. People at the end of their life with an average of 2.7 comorbidities.
Please make no mistake, lockdowns will go down in history as the biggest mistake of the modern human history. The only reason why we're still arguing in here is because it's damn near impossible to admit one made the biggest mistake in modern human history.
We’re done with the death comparisons over distancing measures — we’ve been past the point where that was in the running for most effective intervention for months now. If Sweden fared poorly during the time it was true, that’s the conclusion. We’re in the phase where the comparisons are basically about social/logistic/resource issues for vaccine uptake.
Also, the idea that the playbook has always been low-distance intervention for pathogens of similar impact is wrong.
Non-Swede who lived in Sweden basically all of 2020 here.
We basically self isolated most of the year and only did grocery shopping with masks and keeping distance but a lot of people really did not care about social distancing or masks. My wife and I were often very uncomfortable being out of the house and really did not like the relaxed guidelines. We commuted a lot to Denmark and the contrast was huge. We felt so much safer and comfortable being out shopping in Denmark compared to Sweden.
We moved to Denmark start 2021 and has been back and forth between the two countries monthly and there’s still a big difference in behavior.
Practically everyone is vaccinated now, or very soon. Most people who were in favor of social distancing measures don't want this stuff to be codified indefinitely, just because they like limiting people's lifestyles.
The intention has always been to mitigate the worst health effects of covid, which means temporary measures.
It really depends who you're comparing with. If you're comparing with high population countries with lots of neighbors / travel links, then they did great.
If you're comparing with literally any of their neighbors, then they did really really badly. Their excess mortality was around 1000 per million (i.e. around 10,000 more people dead than expected), while Denmark, Finland and Norway were much much less.
With hindsight, there's certainly a discussion to be had about the Covid response of any European country that experienced significant excess mortality in April 2020, because it didn't have to be that way.
There may be extenuating circumstances in some instances, but in case of Sweden, I'm not sure what they would be. As far as I can see, policy makers rolled the dice and lost (assuming preservation of life is the metric of choice) - though that failure becomes less significant as time goes on and the fraction representing initial excess mortality starts shrinking...
I see a lot of articles about how government reactions were good or bad for COVID. I have seen nothing regarding how a country's environment and population density affect COVID, I guess it is hard to push an agenda with that narrative. It seems the country's that "responded" the best all have low population density and/or are physically isolated from other countries. I see people praising leadership from places like New Zealand and South Korea, but maybe it is just easy to keep people out of these places.
> I see people praising leadership from places like New Zealand and South Korea, but maybe it is just easy to keep people out of these places.
There's two components to this. The first is indeed that both countries are relatively isolated islands. Yes, South Korea is technically a peninsula, but the part that connects it to the mainland is separated by the best guarded border in the world, so...
But the second component is how the situation was (and still is) handled: instead of waiting for exponential growth of the rate of new infections, both countries went into full emergency mode immediately. South Korea in particular applied lessons learned during the SARS crisis about a decade earlier and invested heavily in automated testing equipment, etc.
In Europe, one of the critical failures was the inability to quickly and cost-effectively ramp up testing due to the lack of automated lab equipment.
Other critical aspects of disease control included traceability, which worked exceptionally well in South Korea due to the excellent cell coverage and prevalence of smartphone app usage (plus permissive and practical data protection laws) and willing participation and support of the population.
New Zealand is quick to order measures even if a single case is being reported. This prevents exponential spreading and keeps measures such as lock-downs short and reduces the overall negative impact.
So it's really not just the location, but a number of measures that most other countries simply failed to take.
South Korea/Taiwan don't have low population density. Best response comes from states with educated citizens with good basic hygiene and understanding of exponential so are able to accept early intervention. NZ have the benefit of citizens actually trust the government; bit of a wet dream for many politicians around the world.
Is it just me or there are A LOT of articles about how Sweden is better in doing X coming from the US and the UK recently?
What's going on here?
Frankly it seems a bit of nationalist content marketing after the 10th article I read in 3 years.
Most of the times the articles claim Sweden is doing
better X but that X could easily be applied to several other countries in Europe.
"Sweden offers free health care and education"... yeah A LOT of countries in Europe do that.
For this article too it seems the overall achievement of Sweden are shared by many other countries by somehow Sweden is being singled out.
The funny thing is that the people glorifying Sweden's COVID-19 response historically reject comparisons with the country in other areas like human rights, penal policy, economic model, taxation policy etc. etc.
"The highest number of confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in the Nordic countries as of August 18, 2021, had occurred in Sweden at 14,664. Denmark followed with 2,562 deaths, Finland with 1,008, and Norway with 811."
Did you know that the same number of people have died in Sweden and Norway over the last four years? [0]
For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up. They are tied over the last four years.
More people may have died of covid in Sweden because there were more old vulnerable people in Sweden.
So? Being vulnerable marks you as ok to die? The argument would only work if both countries had the same measures and there died more people in Sweden.
I didn't mean it as an argument. Just throwing an additional fact out there. It seems to be relevant, given the impact that covid has on people over 60/70/80/90 years old.
The Queensland experiment: how 70 days of lockdown led to 448 days of paradise
The Telegraph's title glosses over other factors, so hey: This one ^ does too!
I am relieved by my region's luck and the collective will to move the goalpost of success to be 'limiting the number of people dying of COVID'. It has been basically normal life domestically besides scattered lockdowns for 5 million people, without losing parents, grandparents; 1 death per M here compared to Sweden's 1425, USA's 1895.
National vaccination rate is lagging, on track to be sufficient in October, when the national modelling (Doherty) shows we will be sweet to test, trace, isolate, quarantine our way to control/suppression without need for further lockdown ad infinium. Just one precarious month in the way...
Sweden has ~14k official COVID deaths. Neighbouring Norway, at half the population and a moderate lockdown/PPE policy, has ~800 COVID deaths. The culture, climate, population density and demographics are very close.
All these extra Swedes died for sheer ineptitude of their government. There's hardly any difference in economic impact either.
The socioeconomic group that had the most deaths were people of foreign background aged 65 or more. Maybe Sweden just has a proportionally larger group of those?
Covid deaths aren't the same as "excess deaths". It's just one of many causes of deaths over a year. Excess deaths is the difference between expected (typically an average of the past 5 years) and actual number of deaths in a year. IOW, due to the circumstances, excess deaths can be 0 despite Covid deaths being > 0.
I’m genuinely curious: Couldn’t a quick Google give you this data? Where did you get your position from?
Lots of folks have post fact information these days, based on FB articles and other sources, but how did you end up with yours as a long time user here?
One good source of excess mortality data for a large part of Europe (plus Israel for some reason) is at https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/, which also groups data by age in addition to country.
It may come as a surprise that, in the area covered by this source, excess mortality for children age 0-14 was actually negative in 2020.
Just because there were no government mandated lockdown doesn't mean that everyone was living as usual. There are plenty of people that are still working from home today, and have been since spring 2020. I don't have any numbers, but my impression was that pretty much everyone that could worked from home most of 2020 and the first half of 2021. There were (and still are to a certain extent) heavy regulation on restaurants. Cell phone network data showed a marked difference in people's mobility [0]. Grocery stores ask people to shop alone and have separated entry and exits. Universities and highschools have had distance learning for months at a time. Etc. Swedes were not unaffected by the pandemic, but they weren't fined by police if they left their home more than once per day, or other ridiculous rules that way too many seems to be ok with.
One thing to note in the near time is how the infection rate is low at the moment [1] (the data for spring 2020 is inaccurate due to lack of testing). This is not because of some government initiative or similar, in fact it was very low last summer as well before it got really high during winter. This shows the enormous difference it makes when people are spending less time indoor, and pretty much everyone has a month off work. The infection rate is currently rising, mainly among young people that has chose not to get vaccinated. My attitude about it is that in about a months time everyone will have had the chance to have had two vaccine shots, so if people want to put themselves at risk we should let them, and not force the rest of us to protect them by limiting ourselves. At least as long as the hospitals can manage.
I know a lot of right-wing types like to point to Sweden as an example. But I'd argue whether what they did was right or wrong the Swedish population was better prepared. Compared to the USA the Swedish socialized medical system would mean that most of their citizens probably started off healthier.
Access to medicine is pretty terrible in Sweden for less critical issues.
You have to pay for doctor's visits between $30-60 and often have to wait 4-8 weeks even with the fee. Almost everything requires a prescription compared to other countries, so the delays are problematic as there is no opportunity for self-medication at all.
But there's definitely something to be said for the overall health of the population like obesity rates, smoking rates, etc.
- Significantly higher mortality than immediate neighbors
- Economy suffered the same as neighbors, and the government was quick to help big companies like Volvo (which immediately paid dividends to shareholders), but small businesses couldn't get their voices heard (even not-so-small businesses like airports)
Alternative history re-writers already hail this as the greatest achievement ever.
Also, how accurate are IQ tests on 1 year old and younger babies?
I'm not sure why IQs would be lower (if indeed this is the case) - parents are still around. In fact parents have been more often around during the pandemic given the increase in work from home policies.
Pretty interesting read and it does make sense intuitively. My few thoughts after skimming it that I'd like to learn more about:
Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover?
> However, since all study visits take place in a clinical setting, parents
less concerned about the pandemic, and those with strong social support networks, may have been
more likely to participate than those with greater concerns.
This seems pretty impactful to me. If you consider that people more worried about the pandemic were avoiding doctor visits, and the study showed parent's education reduced the effect they saw...
They kind of glossed over the fact that children born just before the pandemic didn't have lower scores. I'm curious about that since the first few weeks/months for newborns they are not leaving the house much, so a pandemic shouldn't have changed a whole lot there. Why were they immune if the stages were they would've expected to start leaving the house (4+ months) were taken away, just like babies born during the pandemic?
Good questions, I think a lot more research has to be done on this subject.
"Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover?"
It may sound like a silly comparison, but puppies need to be challenged and introduced to experiences in the first weeks as there is a limited window of opportunity to stimulate neural development which results in brain development. During the first eight weeks of age, skills not acquired may be lost forever.
Maybe similar to how children can easily pick up a (new) language, but learning a language at a later age is a real struggle.
Why are you people even picking these fights. Are you SERIOUSLY doubting that the past year of isolation and reduced interaction and reduced opportunities for training immune systems will have an impact on infants? Like, is this your actual position?
Compared to all the surrounding countries, Sweden had more deaths and did not do better when it comes to mental health and economy.
It did better than western Europe, but that's not because of the policy, it is because Sweden is Sweden and not Italy or Spain or France.
First is population density, much lower, and the countries are less connected.
And there is the population. The Swedish government and their people have a more trusting relationship than in many other countries, so, more recommendations than obligations. Scandinavian countries also have the highest level of content in the world (they are the "happiest" countries), which is likely to have a positive effect on mental health in the face of hardships. They are also not people who are know for hanging our in large groups and hugging strangers.
Scandinavia has advantages over the rest of Europe when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, and it shows. But out of all these countries, the one that did worst is Sweden, the country of no lockdowns.
Please, let’s not ban one of the rare place where people of different opinions can exchange links and arguments with a pretty decent average scientific ground. Banning and expelling difficult topics from the public space has become far too common.
> Anti lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns works
Even if they do work it's barely relevant to the argument that lockdowns should be avoided. Lockdowns would have to work and be less harmful overall than cutting off or reducing access to everything else people depend on in society, like schooling, mental health services, cancer diagnostics and treatment, and so on and so forth. That's a tall order.
Anti-lockdown people who claim lockdowns don't work are surely employing motivated reasoning.
