9 ms·

Thank you Sweden for running a giant, country wide experiment to see if immunity is actually conferred after Covid infection. We all appreciate you using your c

Thank you Sweden for running a giant, country wide experiment to see if immunity is actually conferred after Covid infection. We all appreciate you using your citizens as Guinea pigs to see if we can try and collect evidence that shows whether herd immunity will occur or whether reinfection is likely. May the odds be in your favor, for your own sake. "No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected: WHO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-idUSKCN2270FB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-id...

mikem170 7y ago
>"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected Isn't temporary immunity the norm for these types of viruses? There's not reason to think this virus is different, is there? I think it's great what Sweden is doing. I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong. Their hospitals are not overwhelmed. Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually. They've only slowed it down a bit, not stopped it. It doesn't appear that it can be stopped, there will not be a vaccine in time. The same people will die in the end, right?
- jariel 7y ago
  "Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually." Actually a few have done that. Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives. FYI Korea has done it without harsh social distancing. New Zealand with similar advantages to Taiwan looks to be approaching this as well. "I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong." The issue is risk - their current daily-case rate is still growing somewhat and it's been shown that 'social distancing alone' doesn't fully flatten the curve. They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high. Any real data point to support the 30% rate for Stockholm would be a big deal because officially the country only has 18k cases.
  - FrojoS 7y ago
    All of these countries (South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand) lack frequently commuted land borders.
    - jariel 7y ago
      Fair point, but Sweden can effectively lock it's borders pretty well. They are surrounded by legit entities with managed borders. If they put up barriers, those barriers would effectively be respected, it's not like they're sitting on the Med with boats sneaking across daily.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    The idea of "official" case counts is largely fabricated. The reported number is a count of people who have tested positive, and like many countries, Sweden doesn't give coronavirus tests to everyone who's likely to have it. It's not intended to be an estimate of how many people are infected.
  - mikem170 7y ago
    >They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high. This was my understanding, also. I gathered the thinking was that they are seeing deaths up front instead of stretching the curve and seeing the deaths spread out over a longer period of time. I assume that as time goes on there will be more accurate counts of covid deaths and infection rates. I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus.
    - jariel 7y ago
      "I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus." The 'hard data problem' with their strategy is that they are willing to write of x% of their population without knowing what the real death rate is, which is obviously very risky. They went ahead with this plan it seems some time before we even had good visibility into this number. The Ambassador isn't releasing any data to back her claims, which is not good, but Stockholm has had 1K deaths which mean we can infer the Swedes think the 'true death rate' is 0.3%. But other nations put it higher, in some places above 1%. If it's 1% ... that would mean 3.4M dead Americans. About 100K dead Swedes. That's big. They are hoping for more like 20-30K dead which even then seems like a large number for a place like Sweden. Again - Korea is holding Coronavirus at bay and very few have died. Obviously, no land borders, but neither does Sweden really (or they could/have closed them).
- Grustaf 7y ago
  "Their hospitals are not overwhelmed." They most definitely are. They don't even administer oxygen to patients, they old, uninfected people die because they don't want to use the extremely few respirators we have. Sweden's death rate per day per capita is an order of magnitude higher than any neighbouring country, and is not decreasing, unlike our neighbours'. There's absolutely no reason to believe that there will be mass death in e.g. Finland later.
  - malandrew 7y ago
    > than any neighbouring country every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think that people are moving the goalposts to support their conclusion. Yes, it's important to recognize comparables, so we can learn something, but we're not just looking for approaches to this dilemma that work in Scandinavian countries. Sweden is worse health-wise and better economically than countries most similar that totally shut down, but they are doing a lot better than other countries both health-wise and economically than other countries that shut down. Choosing only their direct comparables, and someone will come to their conclusion that their solution was a failure, when the truth is that it was neither a total failure nor total success and we should look into it in more detail to extract some lessons that can be applied more broadly. Dismissing Sweden as a failure would be like Alexander Fleming discarding the penicillin contaminated petri dish as a failure instead of observing more closely and learning something valuable.
    - Grustaf 7y ago
      The thing is that Sweden’s numbers are not just slightly worse, they’re catastrophically worse than comparable countries. They’re also much worse than a lot of not directly comparable countries, but if I would bring that up then people would just dismiss it as not comparable. The bottom line is that the swedish strategy doesn’t work in Sweden and nothing indicates that it would work anywhere.
      - JPKab 7y ago
        NYCs numbers are catastrophically worse than Utah's numbers here in the US. Utah never did a lockdown at all and New York City did an aggressive one. The difference is obviously due to the fact that New York City is a global destination with huge inflows of people in and out of it. do you think that other Scandinavian countries are getting nearly as much travel in and out as Sweden is? I highly doubt it and I think that you are cherry picking to support your own agenda. Sweden should be compared to other global centers of commerce not to back waters like Finland and Norway. No offense to those countries but they don't register as a blip economically compared to Sweden and we all know it.
jhayward 7y ago
The WHO clarified their comment re: immunity. They fully expect that post-recovery antibodies confer protection; they do not yet have qualified clinical trials proving so. > Earlier today we tweeted about a new WHO scientific brief on "immunity passports". The thread caused some concern & we would like to clarify: We expect that most people who are infected with #COVID19 will develop an antibody response that will provide some level of protection. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1254160937805926405 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1254160937805926405
JPKab 7y ago
The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting. None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different paths, some erring more on the side of caution. I agreed with these efforts personally, because the little data we did have at the time supported these actions of "locking down." More time has passed, more data has come in. Increasingly, I'm starting to be convinced that I was incorrect in my original assessment, and that the lockdown wasn't necessary in the broader United States and Europe, outside of dense urban areas. (It should be noted that if you remove NYC from the equation, the US really has had no issues with hospitals being remotely close to capacity.) Sweden ran an experiment, and so did the rest of the world. It could have gone either way. My oldest brother owns a small business, as a professional dog trainer for high-end clients. He had just expanded into a new facility with much more capacity, hiring employees and taking on a lot of debt. His new facility is idle now, and his business is in trouble. He is personally distraught. The lockdowns were an experiment on what would happen to a society if you shut down most commerce, except for the lucky few like HN readers who get to work from a laptop. I'm pretty appalled at the unwillingness of HN readers to, like me, admit that maybe, just maybe, we all made decisions with little data, and that the increasing data and time elapsed is showing that most of us, myself included, were incorrect. That's ok, because it's really not anything people should be blamed for. However, it is a very bad thing to be unwilling to change one's mind after new data comes in. This is where the politicization of the issue is problematic. Leaders feel like they are betraying their "tribe" if they change their mind. At this point, continuing the lockdowns without acknowledging nations that didn't lockdown and are doing well is a form of generational warfare: wealthier people, often older and at higher risk and with little to lose economically, against poorer, younger people in the midst of their prime working years. We, the HN readers, are in the managerial/professional class elites who don't get hurt the same way other people our age are getting hurt. But don't worry, if we keep this up, it's going to get all of us as well.
- corpMaverick 7y ago
  Well, we really didn't know. This time is giving us time to make better decisions. I am glad we didn't gamble, I still think it was the right decision.
konschubert 7y ago
Absence of evidence doesn’t imply evidence of absence.
malandrew 7y ago
Sometimes I wonder if one of the biggest fallacies humans succumb to is an "discrete-over-continuous" fallacy, which I guess would be a special case of the false dichotomy fallacy. People have a tendency to experience a bimodal or even multimodal distribution and come to the conclusion that there are two or more distinct equally probably possible values, when the truth is that there is a spectrum between those values and that the probability of experiencing the different modes are not equal. In this case, we could plot immunity on one or two axes. The first access would be the duration of immunity, from no immunity to lifetime immunity and the second axis would be the strength of the immune response from no immunity to total immunity. In the case of this coronavirus, if similar coronaviruses are any indication, we're probably dealing with something with a modal peak with mild to strong immunity for 3-5 years. If you're re-exposed in that time people, you get very mild to no symptoms and re-new your immunity. If you get re-exposed outside that window, your symptoms are more likely to be severe with the severity proportional to how long your body has had to forget how to respond. Furthermore, not all humans are equal and have the same immune system, so it's possible that there is a small subset of people whose immune system isn't capable of forming an antibody response that lasts very long. With this all in mind, for most people, re-infection isn't likely a risk and if you are re-infected, your symptoms will be milder. The real problem here is that this disease will almost certainly become endemic that humanity will deal with forever, so we should just go ahead and return to normal at a pace that our healthcare systems can handle.
- ksk 7y ago
  In addition you need to account for the kind of antibodies that are produced, whether they can neutralize a different strain of the virus, etc. Also, as you get older, your thymus isn't quite as capable, and so your immune response gets impacted quite a bit, especially with memory B cells, which means that in the case of a vaccine for e.g. you might have to give them an adjuvant formulation, or maybe a double dose, etc. If you want to model the human immune response, you're going to need lots more axes! :) >The real problem here is that this disease will almost certainly become endemic that humanity will deal with forever, so we should just go ahead and return to normal at a pace that our healthcare systems can handle. But if you accept the current 2% fatality rate, that means 2% of your countries population might die. Is that acceptable for a developed country?
9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
If all the keyboard virologysts here were right, Sweden should be overwhelmed with patients and deaths, it's clearly not. They are doing well and is the only country where scientists are pulling the strings directly not politicians. I know which one I prefer.
- Scarblac 7y ago
  What they do isn't that different from the lockdowns in other countries, except that most of it is on a voluntary basis.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    Absolutely people do the common sense social distancing, but schools, restaurants and malls have remained open. Now most of the malls are empty and restaurants are not packed, but schools opened is huge compared to rest of the countries.
    - thebruce87m 7y ago
      Not all schools are open - High schools and universities are closed.
  - JPKab 7y ago
    And the US can't do the same? Would you go to a concert if lockdowns were lifted? Travel in the US ground to a halt before lockdowns were enacted. People aren't stupid. We aren't that different from the Swedes, despite the fact that everyone says that to argue against socialism here.

mikem170 7y ago

>"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected Isn't temporary immunity the norm for these types of viruses? There's not reason to think this virus is different, is there? I think it's great what Sweden is doing. I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong. Their hospitals are not overwhelmed. Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually. They've only slowed it down a bit, not stopped it. It doesn't appear that it can be stopped, there will not be a vaccine in time. The same people will die in the end, right?

jariel 7y ago
"Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually." Actually a few have done that. Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives. FYI Korea has done it without harsh social distancing. New Zealand with similar advantages to Taiwan looks to be approaching this as well. "I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong." The issue is risk - their current daily-case rate is still growing somewhat and it's been shown that 'social distancing alone' doesn't fully flatten the curve. They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high. Any real data point to support the 30% rate for Stockholm would be a big deal because officially the country only has 18k cases.
- FrojoS 7y ago
  All of these countries (South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand) lack frequently commuted land borders.
  - jariel 7y ago
    Fair point, but Sweden can effectively lock it's borders pretty well. They are surrounded by legit entities with managed borders. If they put up barriers, those barriers would effectively be respected, it's not like they're sitting on the Med with boats sneaking across daily.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  The idea of "official" case counts is largely fabricated. The reported number is a count of people who have tested positive, and like many countries, Sweden doesn't give coronavirus tests to everyone who's likely to have it. It's not intended to be an estimate of how many people are infected.
- mikem170 7y ago
  >They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high. This was my understanding, also. I gathered the thinking was that they are seeing deaths up front instead of stretching the curve and seeing the deaths spread out over a longer period of time. I assume that as time goes on there will be more accurate counts of covid deaths and infection rates. I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus.
  - jariel 7y ago
    "I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus." The 'hard data problem' with their strategy is that they are willing to write of x% of their population without knowing what the real death rate is, which is obviously very risky. They went ahead with this plan it seems some time before we even had good visibility into this number. The Ambassador isn't releasing any data to back her claims, which is not good, but Stockholm has had 1K deaths which mean we can infer the Swedes think the 'true death rate' is 0.3%. But other nations put it higher, in some places above 1%. If it's 1% ... that would mean 3.4M dead Americans. About 100K dead Swedes. That's big. They are hoping for more like 20-30K dead which even then seems like a large number for a place like Sweden. Again - Korea is holding Coronavirus at bay and very few have died. Obviously, no land borders, but neither does Sweden really (or they could/have closed them).
Grustaf 7y ago
"Their hospitals are not overwhelmed." They most definitely are. They don't even administer oxygen to patients, they old, uninfected people die because they don't want to use the extremely few respirators we have. Sweden's death rate per day per capita is an order of magnitude higher than any neighbouring country, and is not decreasing, unlike our neighbours'. There's absolutely no reason to believe that there will be mass death in e.g. Finland later.
- malandrew 7y ago
  > than any neighbouring country every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think that people are moving the goalposts to support their conclusion. Yes, it's important to recognize comparables, so we can learn something, but we're not just looking for approaches to this dilemma that work in Scandinavian countries. Sweden is worse health-wise and better economically than countries most similar that totally shut down, but they are doing a lot better than other countries both health-wise and economically than other countries that shut down. Choosing only their direct comparables, and someone will come to their conclusion that their solution was a failure, when the truth is that it was neither a total failure nor total success and we should look into it in more detail to extract some lessons that can be applied more broadly. Dismissing Sweden as a failure would be like Alexander Fleming discarding the penicillin contaminated petri dish as a failure instead of observing more closely and learning something valuable.
  - Grustaf 7y ago
    The thing is that Sweden’s numbers are not just slightly worse, they’re catastrophically worse than comparable countries. They’re also much worse than a lot of not directly comparable countries, but if I would bring that up then people would just dismiss it as not comparable. The bottom line is that the swedish strategy doesn’t work in Sweden and nothing indicates that it would work anywhere.
    - JPKab 7y ago
      NYCs numbers are catastrophically worse than Utah's numbers here in the US. Utah never did a lockdown at all and New York City did an aggressive one. The difference is obviously due to the fact that New York City is a global destination with huge inflows of people in and out of it. do you think that other Scandinavian countries are getting nearly as much travel in and out as Sweden is? I highly doubt it and I think that you are cherry picking to support your own agenda. Sweden should be compared to other global centers of commerce not to back waters like Finland and Norway. No offense to those countries but they don't register as a blip economically compared to Sweden and we all know it.

jhayward 7y ago

The WHO clarified their comment re: immunity. They fully expect that post-recovery antibodies confer protection; they do not yet have qualified clinical trials proving so. > Earlier today we tweeted about a new WHO scientific brief on "immunity passports". The thread caused some concern & we would like to clarify: We expect that most people who are infected with #COVID19 will develop an antibody response that will provide some level of protection. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1254160937805926405 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1254160937805926405

JPKab 7y ago

The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is interesting. None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different paths, some erring more on the side of caution. I agreed with these efforts personally, because the little data we did have at the time supported these actions of "locking down." More time has passed, more data has come in. Increasingly, I'm starting to be convinced that I was incorrect in my original assessment, and that the lockdown wasn't necessary in the broader United States and Europe, outside of dense urban areas. (It should be noted that if you remove NYC from the equation, the US really has had no issues with hospitals being remotely close to capacity.) Sweden ran an experiment, and so did the rest of the world. It could have gone either way. My oldest brother owns a small business, as a professional dog trainer for high-end clients. He had just expanded into a new facility with much more capacity, hiring employees and taking on a lot of debt. His new facility is idle now, and his business is in trouble. He is personally distraught. The lockdowns were an experiment on what would happen to a society if you shut down most commerce, except for the lucky few like HN readers who get to work from a laptop. I'm pretty appalled at the unwillingness of HN readers to, like me, admit that maybe, just maybe, we all made decisions with little data, and that the increasing data and time elapsed is showing that most of us, myself included, were incorrect. That's ok, because it's really not anything people should be blamed for. However, it is a very bad thing to be unwilling to change one's mind after new data comes in. This is where the politicization of the issue is problematic. Leaders feel like they are betraying their "tribe" if they change their mind. At this point, continuing the lockdowns without acknowledging nations that didn't lockdown and are doing well is a form of generational warfare: wealthier people, often older and at higher risk and with little to lose economically, against poorer, younger people in the midst of their prime working years. We, the HN readers, are in the managerial/professional class elites who don't get hurt the same way other people our age are getting hurt. But don't worry, if we keep this up, it's going to get all of us as well.

corpMaverick 7y ago
Well, we really didn't know. This time is giving us time to make better decisions. I am glad we didn't gamble, I still think it was the right decision.

konschubert 7y ago

Absence of evidence doesn’t imply evidence of absence.

malandrew 7y ago

Sometimes I wonder if one of the biggest fallacies humans succumb to is an "discrete-over-continuous" fallacy, which I guess would be a special case of the false dichotomy fallacy. People have a tendency to experience a bimodal or even multimodal distribution and come to the conclusion that there are two or more distinct equally probably possible values, when the truth is that there is a spectrum between those values and that the probability of experiencing the different modes are not equal. In this case, we could plot immunity on one or two axes. The first access would be the duration of immunity, from no immunity to lifetime immunity and the second axis would be the strength of the immune response from no immunity to total immunity. In the case of this coronavirus, if similar coronaviruses are any indication, we're probably dealing with something with a modal peak with mild to strong immunity for 3-5 years. If you're re-exposed in that time people, you get very mild to no symptoms and re-new your immunity. If you get re-exposed outside that window, your symptoms are more likely to be severe with the severity proportional to how long your body has had to forget how to respond. Furthermore, not all humans are equal and have the same immune system, so it's possible that there is a small subset of people whose immune system isn't capable of forming an antibody response that lasts very long. With this all in mind, for most people, re-infection isn't likely a risk and if you are re-infected, your symptoms will be milder. The real problem here is that this disease will almost certainly become endemic that humanity will deal with forever, so we should just go ahead and return to normal at a pace that our healthcare systems can handle.

ksk 7y ago
In addition you need to account for the kind of antibodies that are produced, whether they can neutralize a different strain of the virus, etc. Also, as you get older, your thymus isn't quite as capable, and so your immune response gets impacted quite a bit, especially with memory B cells, which means that in the case of a vaccine for e.g. you might have to give them an adjuvant formulation, or maybe a double dose, etc. If you want to model the human immune response, you're going to need lots more axes! :) >The real problem here is that this disease will almost certainly become endemic that humanity will deal with forever, so we should just go ahead and return to normal at a pace that our healthcare systems can handle. But if you accept the current 2% fatality rate, that means 2% of your countries population might die. Is that acceptable for a developed country?

9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago

If all the keyboard virologysts here were right, Sweden should be overwhelmed with patients and deaths, it's clearly not. They are doing well and is the only country where scientists are pulling the strings directly not politicians. I know which one I prefer.

Scarblac 7y ago
What they do isn't that different from the lockdowns in other countries, except that most of it is on a voluntary basis.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  Absolutely people do the common sense social distancing, but schools, restaurants and malls have remained open. Now most of the malls are empty and restaurants are not packed, but schools opened is huge compared to rest of the countries.
  - thebruce87m 7y ago
    Not all schools are open - High schools and universities are closed.
- JPKab 7y ago
  And the US can't do the same? Would you go to a concert if lockdowns were lifted? Travel in the US ground to a halt before lockdowns were enacted. People aren't stupid. We aren't that different from the Swedes, despite the fact that everyone says that to argue against socialism here.