1) From the comments of the blog post: "todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20."
So one theory is that people are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as surgery this year. I am sure that people are driving less, flying less, working less, and in general, doing less that can increase the risk of death.
2) There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I am always wary of some totally random fact. "Least deadliest September on record." There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.
> There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.
Really? I can think of a narrative here about the virus being not as serious as people thought.
I can't relate to your complain at all. We want more straight fact not "helpful" opinions. If someone can't form an opinion on their own it's fine, just dont participate in the discussion. The last thing we want is some people joining some discussion just to magnify other people's thoughts.
Please don't post snarky or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. It makes the threads worse and evokes worse still from others. Thoughtful critique, on the other hand, is welcome.
What's funny is that your comment doesn't contribute to the discussion or meaningfully respond to the parent. The parent comment touches on the statistical folly of overgeneralizing from small sample sizes, as well as points out a potential confounding factor to the death rate, which is implicitly considering Sweden's covid strategy. The parent doesn't attempt to judge the merit of their minimalist approach to covid response. So you're shoehorning the comment into a debate it wasn't trying to be in, it was merely attempting to contextualize the clickbait headline.
Germany has eight times as many inhabitants but only twice as many fatalities so far. Sweden messed up the beginning of the pandemic but the current numbers do not look worse than in other countries now. Let's hope for the best.
Edit: I (heavily) edited the comment, there was way more snark initially than I should have posted. My apologies.
One point to consider there is how poorly managed our elderly care is, well before this crisis. It's hard to determine for sure but I can't imagine that it didn't factor into our high mortality among the elderly.
Staff went to work without PPE, and some were ordered to go to work despite showing symptoms.
The effects of COVID19 are not tied solely to the immediate actions in March and April but are affected by systemic issues too.
The most important factor is how well you protect the elderly and in particularly nursing homes. Sweden did a relatively poor job at that. New York did a very poor job at that. Strict lockdowns don't seem to help. In fact, some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths.
Sweden's approach may have been a good idea for Sweden, but it wasn't directly applicable everywhere.
Still, they did, and currently do, worse than their neighbours[0][1].
The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia. We don't do that with any other region in the planet. At any rate, their Covid deaths have been at near zero per day for over 3 months now. They're living life. They aren't cowering in fear from a virus with an extremely high survival rate.
> The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia.
the population density, demographics, intergenerational living, and healthcare are vastly different between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe.
For example, Sweden has a density of 25/km2, while Belgium has 383/km2. The Stockholm county, the worst hit, has less population density than Lombardy (360/km2 vs 420/km2), while Lombardy has more inhabitants than the whole of Sweden.
You can easily see how population density relates closely with the intensity of the epidemic[0]. See also household size[1]
The one _really_ doing well is Germany.
But as I said: Sweden's choice may have been perfectly good for Sweden! It just doesn't translate as-is to all countries, because each country is different.
Anyway, the problem was never the survival rate, but the overloading of ICU, if that is less likely to happen you'd do very well to not have a lockdown, but this was not and is not the case everywhere.
Haven't corona infections and deaths been relatively higher in Sweden than in other countries? I.e when looking for a confirmation for "Sweden being right" then I'm not sure this is the data that proves it.
Deaths and infections have been much higher (per capita too) in Sweden compared to nordic (who had lockdowns) countries. But faired better compared to UK, which had several madatory lockdowns. So its not either or, but a gray area. There are several reasons that could explain why Sweden had high death rate.
UK had mandatory lockdowns only after they tried herd immunity which caused the virus to go wild in their population. By the time they had mandatory lockdowns, infections were already through the roof.
In general, scandanivian countries should be much better protected against the virus, all other things being equal. Scandinavian countries tend to have much lower population density, they culturally require more personal space, they have much lower average dwelling occupancy, in fact they have a lot of people living alone in their apartments etc.
If you compare Sweden with their Scandinavian neighbors you can see how their coronavirus policies failed. If you compare England with their European neighbors and peers (e.g., France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium), you can see how their policies failed.
Comparing Sweden and England is not as instructive. These are two countries that both had failing policies but Sweden did much better because it was better demographically and culturally set up for a pandemic.
People seem to really want to correlate all kinds of things together with this virus when in reality we just don’t know. There are 1000s of variables- many of which we don’t even know of yet.
One thing I’ve personally found interesting in the US is that nobody talks about the general poor health of a plurality of Americans. We lead the way in obesity and related diseases. Surely that is a factor in covid deaths but I haven’t seen anyone say it aloud.
Americans probably have the worst health, or more precisely immune system fitness, in the world, as evidenced by the epidemic of chronic disease.
My opinion is that, along with population density, is the only significant factor.
The reason it's not discussed much is that society as a whole is still under the pharma paradigm, where individual agency on health is all but negated, and "health", is mostly dispensed by a doctor prescribing medicine. Hence the focus on things like masks and expensive drugs like Remdesivir (which is useless) VS getting proper vitamin D status, for example (which is crucial for immune system function and has been shown to be a major factor in COVID).
That "epidemic of chronic disease" isn't an American phenomenon, it's a global one. The percentage of people suffering from chronic conditions is surprisingly stable from country to country. It's the prevalence of acute diseases that changes due to quality of healthcare and (in the case of COVID) transient government competence.
The each step in the shift from subsistence agriculture => industrial labor => sedentary lifestyles are characterized by their own maladies. It starts with chronic malnutrition, then moves to chronic diseases cause by pollution, then to chronic obesity and heart disease and is compounded by climate. Each country has its own unique mix of the four but the overall rates don't change much.
I agree, it's not American but it's an American invention and as such America has it more extreme: nowhere else do you see such extreme obesity, and so much processed food...
I don't agree that America doesn't have the highest rate of lifestyle-induced disease, of that's what you were implying.
You can't judge a chronic disease by whether or not it's a lifestyle choice. A chronic disease is a chronic disease and in most cases, it doesn't just go away - otherwise, it'd be called an acute disease.
It's not even particularly right anyway. Most of the western world is a few years or a few decades behind the United States in obesity rates and not far behind at all on heart disease.
I read that in studies, including a meta-study showing no difference in mortality rate.
I suppose it's not strictly "useless" as it apparently can reduce time spent in ICU in patients who would get better anyway, but in my view to call it useful it should affect outcomes.
I'm also betraying my frustration with pharma's hold on the medical system and minds, where common sense interventions like correcting deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc etc. are seemingly ignored. Even the media is in on it. It's really an awful situation.
talking about the poor general health of americans is brushed aside seemingly because it only stirs negative feelings like helplessness, even though improving nutrition and fitness would do much more to reduce illness, declined quality of life, and premature death than nearly any other health mitigation (even in relation to covid).
it's the same as with the performative aspects of masks: worn in public to feel affirmed for positive action but having no meaningful impact, while doing nothing in private (due to psychosocial awkwardness and its negativity), where some distance can meaninfully reduce transmission rates but provides no positivity (esteem).
You need to compare relatively similar countries to verify how successful their strategy was vs differences in population demographics etc from playing a role. As such Sweden vs Norway shows how Sweden failed from a public health standpoint, but both countries had significant advantages over the UK due to their dramatically lower population density.
In that context Sweden’s strategy is actually reasonable for such a low population country to attempt.
Population density really doesn't matter in these discussions regarding spread. How does the huge Canadian arctic influence any spread happening in public transportation in Toronto? It doesn't. Same with Sweden and the other Nordic countries with vast forests between towns.
A more general measure is urbanization, and by that measure Sweden is more urbanized at 88% than both Germany at 77.5% and United Kingdom at 84%.
The most useful metric is the density as relating to people not land. Aka how many people are within 1 mile of each other on average.
As such nationwide population density isn’t that important, but local population density can be a very useful metric. Norway has 5,432,580 people and Óslo Norway is by far the the most populous city has 952,000 people or 17.5% of the population in the urban area at 8,500/square mile.
London has 8,961,989 people out of 63,182,000 (14.2%) in the Uk at 14,670/sq mile. And Birmingham at 1,141,816 people at 11,040/sq mi and you see the UK might have similar rates of urbanization, but it’s significantly more densely packed.
As to Stockholm Sweden, again the largest city out of 10,367,232 people in Sweden 1,605,030 million (15.5%), are living at 11,000/sq mi.
Of course this is still just an approximation. 1,000 people in a single apartment building sharing elevators adds a risk of transmission those same people living in duplex housing doesn’t.
urbanization doesn't matter either. it's indoor mixing density (which population density and urbanization poorly approximate in this case) that matters. that's again why the key mitigation is to avoid breathing others' direct exhaust, which is most directly heuristicized by distancing indoors (which implicitly addresses density, unlike masks which only help at the margins and are mostly performative due to their counterintuitive failure modes, such as every breath rehydrating and potentially dislodging virus particles otherwise caught in the mask).
The most important factor is how well you protect the elderly and in particularly nursing homes. Sweden did a relatively poor job at that in the beginning. New York did a very poor job at that. Strict lockdowns don't seem to help. In fact, some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths (UK, France, Italy...)
Strict lockdowns, if properly followed or enforced, do help to get the number of cases down. They are no panacea though. They help to reduce the number of cases in short term but they absolutely need to be followed up with other action.
Germany has an extensive contact tracing scheme in place that allowed us to find and quarantine as many contacts of infected people as possible. This limited spread and is why we fared better than others so far. The relatively low numbers gave a false sense of security unfortunately which lead to increasingly risky behaviour of people. Currently, we are seeing a rise in case numbers, albeit not as bad as in neighbouring countries which easily report multiple times the number of cases per 100000 inhabitants and week.
Local health authorities are slowly reaching their limits with contact tracing at the moment, this is why measures similar to lockdowns are used locally to get them back under control. The Bundeswehr, that is the german military, also trained a few thousand soldiers to support local health authorities with their tracing work, so all is not lost yet. Turns out that having a large number of decently organized people that are easily deployed to where they are needed are a good thing, after all ;)
I don't see any evidence that that explanation wasn't considered. What I do see is cautious scientific skepticism and a willingness to investigate the truth and take all evidence into account instead of jumping to a politically-correct conclusion.
I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you saying that Sweden's coronavirus policy somehow led to all deaths in Sweden lowering?
Looking at the graph, the clear trend is death rate lowering year after year since the 60s. That would mean that each new year, statistically, there will be several months that happen to be the 'lowest' ever. I don't see how this data proves (or disproves) any coronavirus strategy.
I think what some people take from this is the opposite: that Sweden's strategy hasn't been a catastrophe many predicted (aside from poor initial elderly protections).
The opposite of what? I'm not making any claim here. Even in countries like the US, relative deaths from Coronavirus are small in comparison to overall deaths (ex. In US - an extremely hard hit country - between 3/1 and 8/1, 1.34M deaths occurred, only about 150K attributed to covid19).
My point was that one can't draw any CV conclusion from the Sweden death graph in the month of September 2020.
As to the strategy and effectiveness, that is subjective - they had a higher mortality rate than their Nordic neighbors but not a catastrophic level, I guess.
Wasn’t the point that when those neighboring countries eventually open up, then the people that would have died will probably still end up dying and the numbers will look the same?
Bold claim Cotton, let's see if it works out... Joking aside, that is based upon the mostly discredited 'herd immunity' theory. It is not the case that someone who is in a vulnerable population is somehow doomed to die from this disease, and there are many different ways to mitigate the problems as countries respond to the ebb and flow of the different Covid waves. When the neighboring countries open up (and several of them have partially opened at times) they have more medical resources available to mitigate the effects and they are more prepared to revert to lockdown if necessary.
Of course, there is a lot riding on this. Different countries took different approaches and they will have severe consequences, not only the death toll, but economic impact.
"During the 15th week of the year, we saw the highest death rate in Sweden this millenium. " [0]
Statistics are just so hard to interpret and translate into a narrative that headlining a single data point is often misleading. I'm not interested enough to dive into this particular issue so I'm still not sure which claim is "true".
Yup. Redistribution, people dying in March didn't die in September.
In France as well we had severely negative excess mortality in June. The combo of preloading deaths that would have happened later and lockdown measure preventing other diseases/road accidents, etc.
They aren't contradictory. 2019 had unusually few deaths, in part due to a mild flu season: https://www.icuregswe.org/globalassets/dokument/influenza-in.... So there were lots of vulnerable people who likely would have died in the next year, but COVID compressed many of those deaths into a few weeks.
The biggest misunderstanding for the media and politicians in this pandemic is that individual citizens are making their own response decisions rather than solely relying on government policy. So, Sweden was more lax from government policy perspective, but that doesn't mean Swedes were completely unafraid and behaving recklessly. They're not out recreating their own version of the Sturgis rally daily.
I have a few friends at Spotify working in Stockholm. Anecdotally, it seems that in general Swedes have never really shared the global concern for COVID. No masks, no real social distancing, still working in the office all summer, plenty of holiday fun with friends, and yet somewhat low hospitalizations anyway. Seeing how life has been there since the lockdown here in the USA I have been admittedly quite jealous.
Not true. People are working from home when they can and are recommended to do so at least until 2021. People do practice social distancing. As in all countries some are better and some are worse at following recommendations.
When it comes to analyze why death rates are lower, I guess one thing to consider is that we have been social distancing, working from home and making fewer visits to doctors and had cancelled operations. If Sweden would have managed covid the way some people think we have managed covid (no measures) the death rate would probably been on an ATH for September.
People may be working from home but they are shopping in retail with no masks, going out to eat in restaurants, taking public transportation with no masks, etc. They never closed schools. They've been fully open with no mask policies whatsoever. They're a free country and they're getting the same or better results than many draconian police states, like UK and Belgium.
Stores ask people to stay outside, provide hand sanitizer at the entrance, remind people with signs and speakers to keep a distance.
Restaurants have sparser seating arrangement to keep people apart.
Hosting any event with 50 people or more is illegal.
In some regions any private gatherings, like parties, are discouraged.
Schools being kept open in the belief that it is actually a net benefit. Not being a significant contributor to the spread while parents are freed up to do important work. It’s been the goal all along to keep health care capacity above demands.
Last I heard it is still believed that there is no scientific basis supporting masks as an effective measure, if beneficial at all. (It’s often mention with a reiteration that the primary measure for any person with symptoms is to stay at home)
> Schools being kept open in the belief that it is actually a net benefit. Not being a significant contributor to the spread while parents are freed up to do important work. It’s been the goal all along to keep health care capacity above demands.
I agree with that and wish more people were thinking this way in the U.S.
> Last I heard it is still believed that there is no scientific basis supporting masks as an effective measure, if beneficial at all. (It’s often mention with a reiteration that the primary measure for any person with symptoms is to stay at home)
I believe this is correct. Masks only work in sterile environments and only if they are truly medical grade. I see people sniffling all over their masks and they are probably hosting tons of bacteria for the wearer. And people touch them and then touch other things.
Spotify employees started working from home in March though, just like most tech companies. Yes, some people still go to their offices, but they are small minority unless they have a job where they can't work from home.
I live in the outer suburbs of Stockholm and (normally) commute into town by train every day. Every year around midsummer (20 June), the trains start getting noticeably less crowded, as people start going on their summer holidays. Then it takes until late August before the rush-hour crowds are back to normal. Is seems an extraordinary coincidence that it was during this period that Covid-19 essentially petered out in Sweden. Since the beginning of September, the number of positive tests has been climbing again, more or less exponentially. The number of deaths is lagging behind, but there is a definite uptake the last couple of weeks. As usual, deaths seem to be going down during the last week because of lagging statistics. My guess is that the final number for friday 23 october will end around 7, and 30 October around 10 (but I hope I am wrong!). At least this seems to indicate that you do not need a full-blown lockdown to stamp out Covid-19 — "Swedish summer" is a sufficiently low level of activity!
I never know what people mean when they say "can't." We can -- it's been demonstrated possible in several different countries, some of which had very significant spread of the virus before they managed to get control. I feel like "can't" isn't the right word to describe our situation. "Won't" or "choose not to" feel more appropriate.
Do you really think China is being truthful? I don’t trust their government to be honest about anything, let alone something that makes them look bad to a global audience.
According to Caixin Global, a state-sponsored yet more critical media authority in China, cases were extremely high in the beginning and there was some effort to hide the number of actual deaths. But it seems now China has controlled Covid due to being able to repress the population into it. They were able to withstand the heavy economic fallout (which was noticeably shortened due to the repressive measures), and get back up to normalcy in other parts of the country much earlier.
I'm currently in the UAE and it's a similarly interesting story. The UAE is divided into 7 Emirates, with Abu Dhabi as the wealthiest, Dubai as the next wealthiest but heavily in debt, and the northern Emirates under the financial leash of Abu Dhabi. The difference between Dubai and the other Emirates is night and day - Abu Dhabi dictated very harsh terms (by fines, and even prison time for those voluntarily spreading the disease by licking groceries, etc) and rigorous testing, and the 5 northern Emirates followed suit. Dubai was hurting (because it's a tourism economy), and opened up much sooner, leading to a very heavy spike in cases - most of the current cases in the UAE are in Dubai, which like Europe could not afford to stay closed. Even now, travel between Dubai and Abu Dhabi is only allowed under exceptional circumstances.
In the beginning, there were folks who did that iirc, and folks who hosted parties and large weddings. Masks are mandatory, but Dubai has a lax attitude towards them, while Abu Dhabi has been fining people like its their God-given mandate.
China is not sufficiently insular that they could hide widespread COVID infection if that were happening. It is not a situation like North Korea where very few foreigners visit and most of the local population has zero access to the public internet. If they do have any spread of COVID, they are keeping it well suppressed.
They already did. That's why it's all over the place now.
They went so far as to force doctors to recant their statements that it was human-human transmissible. For example, the hero doctor Li, who eventually died of the disease.
I don't deny that they'd be able to hide transmission for a period. But they would not be able to hide thousands of cases a day. Since the virus has logistic transmission properties when not suppressed, if what they are doing were not sufficient we would quickly see them having too many cases to keep under wraps.
Li's first statemen† was 30th Dec, the WHO also found on on 30th Dec, and had set up an incident management team by Jan 1st.
Before 30th Dec nobody knew this was a new disease, they were still trying to identify it. By Jan 10th the WHO was warning people of person-person transmission. Western leaders ignored the warnings.
Sigh. The WHO said that China had found no clear evidence of human-human transmission but based on similar diseases it's certainly possible and health care systems should be prepared.
That is a responsible scientific response.
Your link says "By Jan 2, 2020, 41 admitted hospital patients had been identified as having laboratory-confirmed 2019-nCoV infection"
4 days after the first cases were identified.
Clearly there would be unidentified cases before that. Hindsight is very powerful.
Singapore is technically an island, but it's connected with the mainland and has a lot of daily trade and crossing - with (pre-covid) 200,000 daily commuters from Johor in Malaysia, including many lorry loads of fresh produce.
I'm not sure how Singapore kept up with trade, but they benefited form Malaysia being competent. I know that the "quarantine" the UK laughably imposes on people from France is pretty much irrelevant, with the number of people exempt longer than the number of people it actually applies to.
Most likely this is due to a rapidly changing age distribution in Sweden.
It seems, probably mainly due to immigration, that the population of ages 20-60 have increased significantly since 2010, while the population of ages 60+ have increased less.
Early in the pandemic I wondered if all of the isolation would have the same effect here - fewer deaths due to driving, flying, flu, etc. But the CDC says we’ve had 300000 excess deaths this year: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm?s_cid=mm...
Really makes one wonder about differences in the US and Swedish population, especially regarding widespread obesity and diabetes.
Excess deaths went down, not up, during very strict lockdowns in European countries as measured by EuroMomo data. Excess deaths also correlate quite well with reported corona deaths in this and the US dataset.
Both these facts point towards excess deaths being mostly corona-related, and not lockdown-related.
Mental issues have longer term consequence. I wouldn't assume that a few months of lockdown will cause a suicide spike as to compare to most new diseases. Isolation will affect social life which will affect mental health which will affect social life etc. E.g. I'd assume consequences to recursively culmulate even after lockdowns have ended. Which arguably would increase suicides and decrease general happiness for a time longer than the lockdowns.
Lockdowns also reduce other causes of death which may participate in that (reportedly) high correlation between excess death and covid deaths.
I agree that there may be longer term consequences to a lockdown, but the way I read OPs comment was that they were implying that the current excess deaths were in fact attributable to these effects.
Fwiw I can also imagine long term consequences like PTSD in people from heavily affected regions like northern Italy.
"One forgotten contribution could possibly be the large number of canceled surgeries.
The last number I saw was appx 30k canceled surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20. Historical data from Argentina, Israel and Denmark show significant reductions in death rates when doctors go on strike. The last strike was in the 1960's and I have been repeatedly promised (by doctors) that "..it is different now.."
We have also noted a quite dramatic reduction of cancer diagnoses because of reduced screening for breast- and gyn cancer. The common wisdom among "experts" is that there is a large number of undiscovered cases which will show up later and with much more severe and deadly cancer in the months and years ahead. I doubt this. I have read a couple of the research papers defining guidelines for interpretation of pathological finds and they state explicitly that it is better to "overdiagnose" by at least a factor of 10 (and in reality up to a factor of 50) in order to not miss any "real" cases of cancer. Better to cut nine healthy breasts or prostates than to have one undiagnosed case.
Well, in just a couple of years we will have clear and unambigous evidence for or against the efficency of the cancer screening programs. This is a form of full scale clinical trial happening in front of our eyes."
And
"Oh, todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20."
This is complete FUD. Overtreatment is a real concern that oncologists take seriously - for cancer precursors the recommended treatment now is often just "monitoring"
It doesn't change the problem of the large number of canceled surgeries. The narrative from the linked post is "because Sweden went through a different route to fight COVID-19 than France and Germany, now they are paying the price".. and the comments add some variables to this equation.
> defining guidelines for interpretation of pathological finds and they state explicitly that it is better to "overdiagnose"
Was it definitely after pathology reporting? It's normal to have a low threshold to send people to biopsy. From the number of developed cases you can get some idea about what ratio of "ok" results you should have as a referring doctor. (this is tracked) But once you do biopsy / further checks I haven't heard of overdiagnosis by a large factor - not the "you should have surgery" overdiagnosis anyway. "Wait, see how it develops, retest" seems more common.
The Economist graph shows "covid-19 excess deaths".
The article is about "September 2020 least deadly month ((...)) 2020 third least deadly year ever so far".
AFAIK there is no normalized way to count COVID-19-induced deaths.
If so there is no way to compare official "COVID-19-induced deaths", because a given case may be counted as such in a country and not in another one, or even in the same nation by a given doctor and not by another one.
The total amount of deaths seems more objective.
Moreover the pandemics is running, therefore any comparison offers only a peek on a fraction of the challenge. Isn't this "herd immunity" approach a sort of "let's endure more short-term deaths, then durably much less afterwards" bet? In such a case any accounting may be moot for years.
a) The spread of contagion before measures where imposed. Sweden was a few days later than the other Nordics in taking action, and may have been in a further advanced state to begin with.
b) Safety equipment. Sweden had no functioning central reserves for health care gear.
c) Failure to protect the vulnerable. The nursing homes are a mix of private and public, but all are administered at the municipal level. Proper care was not taken to protect the elderly, largely due to lack of local know how and incompetent central response.
I’ve been a staunch defender of the Swedish strategy, but it seems like there’s no avoiding the conclusion that the path taken by the other nordics may have been smarter in that it contained the spread until adequate supplies could be secured, good routines established and treatment options better understood. (To be fair to FHM that devised the strategy, b and c are certainly on other authorities.)
Significantly, although all the nordics now have a climbing number of cases, none has seen a sharp rise in the number of deaths. Mean time from hospitilization to death is around 18 days, so the resurgence has been ongoing for long enough that it’d have been noticeable by now.
It seems like the Swedish path may have two main benefits left:
1) Fewer vulnerable children were hurt by being sent home. Fewer women locked in with abusive partners. Nordic lock downs were less drastic, and may have avoided some of it, but at the global level it’s numbing to think of the suffering of children this year.
2) In terms of GDP growth, the indication is that Sweden didn’t do much better than the other nordics, but I think it’s still to early to gauge the long term economic benefits of a soft strategy. Maybe Sweden ended up taking on less debt per capita, for instance? I haven’t seen numbers on that, but school closings in particular are expensive, and so seems like reasonable speculation. Time will tell.
The economic benefits are probably not going to turn out to be compelling enough to justify the potentially avoidable deaths. From a utilitarian perspective, I think the first point may be though. The deaths have largely been people towards the end of their life. I think the constructive way to view it is that we should consider all years of a humans life equal. Is it worth sacrifying an 80 year old to save a 10 year old from being beaten up at home? If it hurts that kid for life in a tangible way, then yeah, that grim calculus may just work out.
The 20th century was the least deadly century ever, but we shouldn't conclude poison gas or misinformation are safe.
If you're summing all effects, you're looking at all data at once, and probably are doomed not to learn anything particularly actionable. Its in the breakdown that we kind find meaningful bits for future reference.
COVID-19 has at least 2 main solutions, which are mutually exclusive: (lockdown) or (no lockdown).
If there is no major other new pertinent factor, then when it comes to compare those solutions (deciding when to assess is a challenge) there are (proportionally) less deaths where the more efficient one is implemented.
There are many intermediate stages of lockdown, have a look at the different strategies of the various (smaller) European countries.
Besides, counting an integral number of deaths gives you an integral number. You'll only know the cumulative effect of whatever state the country is in, which is the result of many factors, among which the precise state of the lockdown.
Indeed, and this doesn't forbid comparisons if we can assess each effective stage. More datapoints, yay!
Those many factors cumulative effects are indeed difficult to assess, and this is true for each of such analysis.
If we try to find correlations, here between lockdown effective intensity and the amount of victims, and if a trend becomes perceptible for most nations...
It shows 2020 weekly deaths in comparison with a 2015-2019 average which is a good indication of the normal - precovid rate. You can see how there was a massive spike around week 12 to week 21, which is exactly when the initial covid outbreak hit and Sweden's disastrous "herd immunity" policy failed.
Now Swedes have been scared and changed their behavior and covid deaths are less. Furthermore, the defensive behavior of covid prevents other deaths. People, do not drive, do not party, do not engage in sports, do not take drugs, or over-drink or over-eat at parties, so that other causes of death go down.
So it is possible that covid isolation reduces death rate more than the deaths caused by the virus itself. But that is not a solution, people cannot live in covid isolation forever.
Anecdotally, we were all scared shitless in March and that’s when there was a drastic change in behavior. People stayed at home and stopped traveling. The period after which you describe is actually the period in which travel restrictions was relaxed, and people became _less_ careful.
More formally, the decline after mid April was probably due to widespread immunity and weather effects. That’s only my conclusion, but based on the following:
* https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publ... - A model releases mid april bases on march data which accurately placed the peak around mid april. It’s a standard SEIR model, so it predicts that it tapers off only based on population immunity.
* https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-t... - Study showing much higher incidence of T-cell immunity in Stockholm than the incidence of individuals with anti bodies, indicating that the true population immunity is much higher than what anti body studies will show
* https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/846 - Another mathematical modeling study, based loosely on Stockholm dynamics, which demonstrates that hers immunity thresholds may be much lower when accounting for social stratification. In particular, Sweden asked ages 70+ to isolate themselves, so it’s likely the case that immunity rates are much lower in that group.
* Finally, warm weather surely helped drive down the spread.
Both mobility data and the curves of ICU cases and deaths, which are fairly reliable proxies for the infection level in the society regardless of variations in testing capacity, are orthogonal to your claims.
ICU cases peaked early april, deaths a week later, then a fatter tail happened due to a less restrictive approach. See the official Swedish data by the public health agency. [0] The mobility showed a similar curve, creeping back up to 10% less than baseline early June and staying there. [1]
Why do you say this is "orthoganal to my claims"? It seems pretty supportive of my claims. Looks like swedes moved around less which means that they changed their behavior due to covid which resulted in less non-covid deaths than previous years.
You claimed that we did that in response to being scared by “the disastrous herd immunity strategy”. Week by week data (reported on in the weekly reports here: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/folkhalsorapportering-st...) shows that it happened as soon as restrictions were announced though, so that doesn’t actually support your thesis.
This is a stronger effect than in many other countries with official measures in place, e.g. Germany has -21% and was at -8% before case numbers started spiking again a few weeks ago.
The excess deaths during the pandemic are not subtle in these graphs. If the data is accurate and the comparison with Sweden is valid, then it does tend to support the importance herd immunity to this virus.
How does this support herd immunity? Herd immunity wouldn’t lead to the distinction between the US and Sweden unless Sweden achieved herd immunity before the virus was being tracked.
Explain what you mean by "herd immunity"? It is normally achieved through vaccination; if you mean "wait until most of the population has had the disease", you'd need to wait until the US death toll was much higher to achieve that.
Week 02 2017 France and neighbors had mortality of around 12 standard deviations above the baseline. I think number of standard deviations are a bad measure when the data is so chaotic, especially since the standard deviation can vary strongly from year to year and from country to country. Lets say that one country had a few lucky years with few abnormalizes, while another country faces catastrophes regularly. Then a minor catastrophe in the first country will look way worse than in the second.
It’s probably worth all of us with different views about lockdowns and restrictions bearing in mind that Sweden is not a control group for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is not a control group for Sweden.
The Swedish authorities never suggested that lockdowns wouldn’t work in controlling the pandemic, in fact they acknowledged that they definitely would work in the short term; their core assertions were that the Swedish population would not be able to sustain involuntary restrictions until better treatments or a vaccine arrived, and that the harms caused by restrictions would be a net negative for their society. The jury is still out on those decisions, but they are rational.
In fact we’ll probably never know who chose the optimal policy mix to cope with the pandemic, and as a result we should give those with differing views an awful lot of slack as they try and negotiate it with limited resources and foresight (i.e. as humans).
For now, let’s just enjoy this good news about the people in Sweden at face value–we need it!
What is it about Sweden that makes people like cherry-picking facts from it? There's a whole right-wing conspiracy meme about muslim no-go areas that doesn't match the reality observed by Swedes.
Similarly, Sweden didn't have no restrictions in response to coronavirus.
Zones where it’s not safe and police must negotiate with criminal gangs of foreigners are real in my town Gothenburg, and certainly in Malmö, Uppsala, Stockholm etc. I’ve personally witnessed them shooting and burning cars outside of my apartment.
The image many foreigners have of Sweden is outdated due to mass immigration (HN PC may dislike it, but I call it population replacement) - that image is from when it was a homogenous country.
The article also states "So far the year 2020 has been the third least deadly year per capita ever in the country, despite the tragic and global Covid-19 pandemic.", so no.
Lower population growth rate. As the median age increases, mortality rate will naturally increase. Also obesity has been increasing, which is a known killer.
Definitely not. Very few people die of traffic accidents, and that number has been sinking steadily since 1970. (1950: 595, 1960: 1036, 1970: 1307, 1980: 848, 1990: 772, 2000: 591, 2010: 266)
Increased car usage may also mean more air pollution and a more sedentary lifestyle.
If we shifted from walking (or biking or horseback riding, though seems less likely) then I'd expect heart disease to be much more of an issue.
The shift is from from buses and trains, heart disease is likely less of an issue, but air pollution still could be. We've also cleaned up our exhaust a lot over the years, which may offset that a lot.
I do think the other poster's comment about lower birth rates meaning an older population would likely be a much bigger contributor.
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1) From the comments of the blog post: "todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20."
So one theory is that people are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as surgery this year. I am sure that people are driving less, flying less, working less, and in general, doing less that can increase the risk of death.
2) There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I am always wary of some totally random fact. "Least deadliest September on record." There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.