We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.
Every country had to find some balance between freedom and health. I don't think Sweden is to blame more than anyone else. They had less death than most European countries.
Following you reasoning, how many more death did the US have compared to China? would you advocate to lock up people like China did?
And not just freedom, but more important things such as a functioning society in general with regards to childrens education, babies being born, the economy doing well etc etc. It's not like lockdowns are only affecting some dude's ability to go and drink beer. And they are actively harmful to people's health too, so actually it's about finding a balance between everyone and everything, and the immune compromised people at risk from cold viruses.
Did china get less freedom because of covid lockdowns? That is, surely people faced absurd restrictions, but given the length of the restrictions, which is better for people?
I know that I would prefer 1 month hard lockdown than 1 year soft. But idk how it actually went there (curious to know!)
Talking to friends in China, they've been mostly open since the initial lockdowns. Every once in a while there are hard localized lockdowns, but majority of people majority of the time is life as normal.
Sweden indeed has a worse z-score compared to Norway or Denmark, but better compared to France, Netherlands or Belgium (or Germany, for that matter). And much better than Italy or Spain. I say they indeed found a sweet spot and escaped lockdowns.
People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter. I think that has a big impact on how sick people get
Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, north of France and Germany had a closer climate (and more accustomed to heating), that's why I looked up their z-score first.
Yeah, and in germany using the heating in your home is basically considered an unnecessary luxury, while in Sweden it's always included in the rent, and always on.
The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though.
That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure how effectively a nation's health care system treated infections.
Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors:
At times, yeah. The closer you get to capacity the more the staff are overworked, the more likely you are to be attached to the old/cranky/unreliable ventilator, the more likely you are to be seen by fill-in staff pulled from other departments, the more likely it is that your hospital will run out of some medication and have to substitute, etc...
So all other things being equal, you'd expect CFRs to rise with case load. Probably not linearly, but measurably.
That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population - but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden.
The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population.
The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates
A sweet spot, were the elderly first were not properly protected, and then euthanized instead of given at least a treatment effort? Not even C-Pap, just panic-relieve and pain-medication. Not even given a choice, just scratched out of the book by politics.
And by 'Sweet Spot' we mean a materially higher death rate than immediate peers ...
The lockdowns were imminently effective.
In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we cloistered again and the numbers came down.
If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down drastically.
Here you go [1]
In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down.
Lockdowns in Canada were ridiculous, particularly in Ontario. People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. My parents couldn't drive to their cabin up north in fear of being ticketed.
My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband who resented her for going to work because he thought she was going to get him killed.
Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to disregard rules later on?
> People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes.
If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).
> During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering.
to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside
> Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.
It's a tiny bit glib to lament 'science denialism' in a pandemic for which we do not have any living memory of dealing with, a new kind of disease for which there are many unknowns, serious concerns with equipment and personnel shortages, high mortality, time constraints, a state of emergency, and most evidently the very low social cost of 'not gathering in groups' outdoors.
In hindsight, they probably didn't need to go that far, but that's hindsight.
Along with the vaccine denialism, the other thing that has surprised me among the concerns of the plebes, is how they have difficulty grasping what an emergency implies.
There is a term called 'Fog of War' that military people are aware of, hinted at in the term 'No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy'.
Running government is like running a company - it's operational. But governing in an Emergency is more like running a startup but where all your personnel are 9-to-5 functionaries not used to such situations. It's managed chaos at best, nothing will be optimized.
It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just because those particular places have an increased risk of infection but also to stop people from traveling to and from those places.
I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk.
I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.
So shut down the trains. If someone is driving to their cabin, there is no reason to stop them. It was always completely irrational to prohibit solitary or family-oriented outdoor activities. They did that around here for a while, in a largely rural state in the US Pacific Northwest region.
Senseless "do something!" edicts like that give a lot of rhetorical ammunition to the denialists and antivaxxers, while doing nothing to address the spread of COVID.
Another reason to keep people from traveling is to make sure they stay where there's available healthcare.
If everyone traveled to their cabin and got sick, the local hospital wouldn't be able to handle all the cases.
Not anymore, as the virus is already anywhere. But there absolutely was a reason to stop potentially infected from travelling large distances and carry the infection into other regions.
I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup could be much worse than in the US.
Nobody has ever dealt with these problems before in living memory there are far too many unknowns, and there are very serious consequences i.e. death, hospitals overflowing, staff shortages, it's a very real emergency.
If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers, it's visceral.
It's managed chaos at best.
Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same time encouraged people to 'get out'.
But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but if we can bring a national emergency down to something more bearable, so be it.
If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to get outdoors).
I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were). And that was my point -- such people may be less inclined to follow certain guidelines in later phases of the pandemic.
> The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm.
I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't been locked down at all with zero mandates since last June and while it's certainly not rainbows, it's not nearly "untold harm" either.
Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?
"I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were)"
'That you can't visit some parks' is not material in the face of the fact that you 1) cannot go to work 2) cannot gather with people 3) must wear a mask 4) cannot go to restaurants or cinemas 5) numerous other restrictions and especially 6) Must stay at home unless you have a reason to leave.
Most of those restrictions are legitimate in the fact of a drastic spike in COVID cases, which makes the 'Don't Go To A Park' a footnote in that context.
"The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes" -> "But Florida didn't have Lockdowns"
"Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"
Every situation is a bit different, and the data is not perfectly clear, but the evidence points to 'the total social changes due to lockdowns' do actually work, moreover, none of that was known in May 2020.
We had no examples but the crisis in China and Europe back then.
Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason even if they erred a bit too much on the side of caution here and there. 'That we cold not go to parks' just isn't very relevant. If we have to do another lockdown, we will probably be able to go to the park.
> That you can't visit some parks' is not material
Disagree. Being in California I was grateful to comfortably meet with friends to go for a hike. The risk was trivial and I value social interaction. The fact that I cannot go to work or gather with people made things that you regard as immaterial in this context a lot more important to me.
> Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason
Certainly, but it was clear within a few months (Jul 2020) that being outdoors was reasonably safe, especially if you are decently distanced. But you still had places restricting people from laying on a beach, or swimming in a beach. There was no scientific support for either of these stupid policies.
> "Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!"
this is a silly analogy because health policies have multivariate outcomes, it's just about deaths, etc. and it's not something you can readily experiment on scientifically; these are people's livelihood, wellbeing, and prosperity. Optimizing for a single variable is foolish.
>" People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes"
This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns. What was discouraged is big companies having party in the parks.
I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking from experience.
We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.