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That rate is in line with the US and most European countries. The US lost 40 million jobs and spent $4 trillion dollars to achieve the same outcome as Sweden.

by cwhiz 6y ago

That rate is in line with the US and most European countries. The US lost 40 million jobs and spent $4 trillion dollars to achieve the same outcome as Sweden. And now the US is reopening and attempting a similar approach to Sweden. You can’t shut the world down for months and months waiting for a vaccine.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
It is a doubling or tripling of other places. 5% of all deaths due to a single infection. The US lockdown had concrete effect, limiting cases to what the hospitals could manage. Further, we understand more now (1000's of studies and papers published in a few months). To compare blindly ignoring the disease and crossing fingers (Sweden's approach) vs wait-measure-respond, I know which way I prefer.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Doubling or tripling? Belgium 8.2, UK 5.8, Spain 5.8, Italy 5.5, France 4.4, Netherlands 3.5, Ireland 3.3, US 3.3. The US lockdown may not have had any impact. Mobility trends are disconnected from government orders. The people more likely stemmed the tide in the US more than any government action. Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Again, as someone else up thread pointed out, you’re just comparing various notches on the “bad response” scale. Your calculus doesn’t work if you compare Sweden to Taiwan or the US to South Korea, even with adjustments to population. If your argument is that “it doesn’t make that much of a difference choosing between doing nothing and pursuing a bungled, haphazard response,” then sure, a lot would probably agree with you. But these are not the only choices any of these countries had. The economic damage is part and parcel of the overall mismanagement, which is why Taiwan and South Korea are doing better with both handling the pandemic and the state of their economies.
    - thu2111 6y ago
      You're cherry picking data points. JP Morgan amongst others have studied all the data and found no correlation or even declines in infection rates before and after lockdowns: https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/20/jp-morgan-infection-rates-decreasing-states-that-ended-lockdowns/ https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/20/jp-morgan-infection-rates... Sweden is about middle of the pack. Most of that is because of the virus getting into care homes, which a lockdown can't prevent anyway given the staff have to come and go, and blocking the elderly from all visits forever is deeply inhumane. Given their age many of them would rather catch the virus than live longer but always be alone, and have said so. So far it appears lockdowns didn't affect the virus much at all. However, they are definitely killing people if you look at the changes in suicide rates, the backlogs for cancer treatment that have built up and so on. The problem with believing that Taiwan and South Korea are doing better for fundamental reasons is that it may simply be random. Japan did very little or nothing, probably due to trying to avoid the Olympics getting cancelled, and had similarly good results. The differences in testing levels and definitions between countries alone make comparisons based on reported infection and death rates meaningless.
      - claudeganon 6y ago
        I can’t really parse this “article,” which appears to be from a right-wing opinion site, mostly linking tweets from a CNBC anchor. Taiwan and South Korea being random seems a spurious claim. Taiwan’s Vice President is an epidemiologist invested with a great deal of executive authority in dealing with public health crises and has guided the country’s response from the outset. South Korea was trending in a quite bad direction with the church outbreaks and quashed them through massive interventions in testing and mobile hospital capacity. And neither country has mass-scale lockdowns like the west (because they didn’t need them).
        mikem170 6y ago
        Taiwan and South Korea also had first hand experience with SARS, and were much better prepared for COVID. Mask wearing was already a thing there, they had supplies, and they had contact tracing in place and ready to go. They did a good job with this. Other countries can invest in the same readiness. It's always a decision of limited resources and many opportunity costs (poverty, infrastructure, climate, security, etc). Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?
  - useerup 6y ago
    > Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that. Sweden took less drastic action than the US. Sweden did take some action early, encouraging social distancing, increased hand hygiene etc. Then again, in Sweden you can take sick leave with full pay. More people will stay home if they feel sick. Parts of the US took more drastic actions, but very, very late (during a pandemic where number of cases double every 4-5 days, one week is late, several weeks is very late). Shutting down borders to foreigners doesn't cut it when the virus is already spreading in the communities. While they ended up in almost the same place, you really cannot compare them. The Swedish circumstances are so different from those of the US, that you cannot expect the Swedish same strategy to work the same way in the US. And before you claim that the Swedish strategy is a success, consider how Sweden compares to its Nordic neighbors, where you can compare the circumstances. Per 1,000,000 inhabitants: Sweden 4042 cases, 450 deaths Denmark 2040 cases, 101 deaths Finland 1247 cases, 58 deaths Norway 1567 cases, 44 deaths
    - kspacewalk2 6y ago
      Why are we cherry-picking Nordic neighbours? Because they happen to back one of several competing narratives? We can find plenty of other countries that have implemented stringent lockdowns and have similar or higher cases and deaths per capita. That's the beautiful thing about these almost meaningless cross-country comparisons - the data is so low-quality and heterogenous that you can pick a pair of countries and validate pretty much every hypothesis with it.
      - BlackNitrogen 6y ago
        The comparisons aren't meaningless, cause they are very similar. People who want to defend Sweden don't like how terrible Sweden looks. Because of idealogical reasons around locking down a lot of people want Sweden's strategy to work, and they torture themselves into weak arguments to justify killing a lot more people. If you can't compare them for some reason, then you basically can't do any comparisons because you ruled out their nearest neighbors.
blaser-waffle 6y ago
A vaccine which might never come. Or which may come in a year or more. Or which has side effects.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Just the beginning of it. There are antibody treatments, new knowledge about ventilators vs oxygen, triage and testing advances. All because we took the time for that.
MagnumOpus 6y ago
You compare two of the worst approaches in the world and present a false fallacy of "shut down the world" when in fact the countries with stricter quarantine/tracing/tracking approaches had far better outcomes: Germany, and Japan, and Korea, and Taiwan lost far fewer jobs, killed far fewer people per capita and nearly eradicated the pandemic while it is still rampant in the US and Sweden.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  Worst approaches? In what way? Certainly not in outcome. Just in your mind?
- tlear 6y ago
  Japan is an interesting one. They did next to nothing. Life is almost back to what it was before atm. How did Tokyo not have a massive outbreak is an absolute mystery. But it did not. Was it that 99% of people when told to started wearing masks and people do not hug or shake hands? We have no idea, no tracing, very small amount of testing, no house arrests of any kind.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    They didn’t do “next to nothing.” They used a cluster-based approach through their public health center network, that was put in place to combat TB in the 30s. Turns out, that was pretty effective at combatting COVID. > In 1935, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Japan opened its first public health centre (PHC) in Tokyo. The country then put in place a programme that led to the building of another 187 nationwide. They survived the war and the occupation. But the thing of note is that before and after the war, their priority, says Taniguchi, was always to “stay watchful all the time” for the emergence of TB cases. If one was found, they were tasked with rushing to the patient's residence, checking for clusters and sterilising the house Seventy-five years on, 469 PHCs are in operation across the country, with each manned, on average, by 64 medical professionals, including one to two licensed doctors. They still locate clusters, track links and conduct tests. It is this “accumulated wealth of expertise, rarely found elsewhere” that has made the difference. Japan has not had to rely on mass testing strategies because it’s health care history had already left a cluster-crushing strategy embedded in its system https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/601264/cluster-busting-japan-success-fighting-covid-19 https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/601264/cluster-...

by cwhiz 6y ago

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

It is a doubling or tripling of other places. 5% of all deaths due to a single infection. The US lockdown had concrete effect, limiting cases to what the hospitals could manage. Further, we understand more now (1000's of studies and papers published in a few months). To compare blindly ignoring the disease and crossing fingers (Sweden's approach) vs wait-measure-respond, I know which way I prefer.

cwhiz 6y ago
Doubling or tripling? Belgium 8.2, UK 5.8, Spain 5.8, Italy 5.5, France 4.4, Netherlands 3.5, Ireland 3.3, US 3.3. The US lockdown may not have had any impact. Mobility trends are disconnected from government orders. The people more likely stemmed the tide in the US more than any government action. Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Again, as someone else up thread pointed out, you’re just comparing various notches on the “bad response” scale. Your calculus doesn’t work if you compare Sweden to Taiwan or the US to South Korea, even with adjustments to population. If your argument is that “it doesn’t make that much of a difference choosing between doing nothing and pursuing a bungled, haphazard response,” then sure, a lot would probably agree with you. But these are not the only choices any of these countries had. The economic damage is part and parcel of the overall mismanagement, which is why Taiwan and South Korea are doing better with both handling the pandemic and the state of their economies.
  - thu2111 6y ago
    You're cherry picking data points. JP Morgan amongst others have studied all the data and found no correlation or even declines in infection rates before and after lockdowns: https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/20/jp-morgan-infection-rates-decreasing-states-that-ended-lockdowns/ https://dailycaller.com/2020/05/20/jp-morgan-infection-rates... Sweden is about middle of the pack. Most of that is because of the virus getting into care homes, which a lockdown can't prevent anyway given the staff have to come and go, and blocking the elderly from all visits forever is deeply inhumane. Given their age many of them would rather catch the virus than live longer but always be alone, and have said so. So far it appears lockdowns didn't affect the virus much at all. However, they are definitely killing people if you look at the changes in suicide rates, the backlogs for cancer treatment that have built up and so on. The problem with believing that Taiwan and South Korea are doing better for fundamental reasons is that it may simply be random. Japan did very little or nothing, probably due to trying to avoid the Olympics getting cancelled, and had similarly good results. The differences in testing levels and definitions between countries alone make comparisons based on reported infection and death rates meaningless.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      I can’t really parse this “article,” which appears to be from a right-wing opinion site, mostly linking tweets from a CNBC anchor. Taiwan and South Korea being random seems a spurious claim. Taiwan’s Vice President is an epidemiologist invested with a great deal of executive authority in dealing with public health crises and has guided the country’s response from the outset. South Korea was trending in a quite bad direction with the church outbreaks and quashed them through massive interventions in testing and mobile hospital capacity. And neither country has mass-scale lockdowns like the west (because they didn’t need them).
      - mikem170 6y ago
        Taiwan and South Korea also had first hand experience with SARS, and were much better prepared for COVID. Mask wearing was already a thing there, they had supplies, and they had contact tracing in place and ready to go. They did a good job with this. Other countries can invest in the same readiness. It's always a decision of limited resources and many opportunity costs (poverty, infrastructure, climate, security, etc). Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?
- useerup 6y ago
  > Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that. Sweden took less drastic action than the US. Sweden did take some action early, encouraging social distancing, increased hand hygiene etc. Then again, in Sweden you can take sick leave with full pay. More people will stay home if they feel sick. Parts of the US took more drastic actions, but very, very late (during a pandemic where number of cases double every 4-5 days, one week is late, several weeks is very late). Shutting down borders to foreigners doesn't cut it when the virus is already spreading in the communities. While they ended up in almost the same place, you really cannot compare them. The Swedish circumstances are so different from those of the US, that you cannot expect the Swedish same strategy to work the same way in the US. And before you claim that the Swedish strategy is a success, consider how Sweden compares to its Nordic neighbors, where you can compare the circumstances. Per 1,000,000 inhabitants: Sweden 4042 cases, 450 deaths Denmark 2040 cases, 101 deaths Finland 1247 cases, 58 deaths Norway 1567 cases, 44 deaths
  - kspacewalk2 6y ago
    Why are we cherry-picking Nordic neighbours? Because they happen to back one of several competing narratives? We can find plenty of other countries that have implemented stringent lockdowns and have similar or higher cases and deaths per capita. That's the beautiful thing about these almost meaningless cross-country comparisons - the data is so low-quality and heterogenous that you can pick a pair of countries and validate pretty much every hypothesis with it.
    - BlackNitrogen 6y ago
      The comparisons aren't meaningless, cause they are very similar. People who want to defend Sweden don't like how terrible Sweden looks. Because of idealogical reasons around locking down a lot of people want Sweden's strategy to work, and they torture themselves into weak arguments to justify killing a lot more people. If you can't compare them for some reason, then you basically can't do any comparisons because you ruled out their nearest neighbors.

blaser-waffle 6y ago

A vaccine which might never come. Or which may come in a year or more. Or which has side effects.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Just the beginning of it. There are antibody treatments, new knowledge about ventilators vs oxygen, triage and testing advances. All because we took the time for that.

MagnumOpus 6y ago

You compare two of the worst approaches in the world and present a false fallacy of "shut down the world" when in fact the countries with stricter quarantine/tracing/tracking approaches had far better outcomes: Germany, and Japan, and Korea, and Taiwan lost far fewer jobs, killed far fewer people per capita and nearly eradicated the pandemic while it is still rampant in the US and Sweden.

cwhiz 6y ago
Worst approaches? In what way? Certainly not in outcome. Just in your mind?
tlear 6y ago
Japan is an interesting one. They did next to nothing. Life is almost back to what it was before atm. How did Tokyo not have a massive outbreak is an absolute mystery. But it did not. Was it that 99% of people when told to started wearing masks and people do not hug or shake hands? We have no idea, no tracing, very small amount of testing, no house arrests of any kind.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  They didn’t do “next to nothing.” They used a cluster-based approach through their public health center network, that was put in place to combat TB in the 30s. Turns out, that was pretty effective at combatting COVID. > In 1935, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Japan opened its first public health centre (PHC) in Tokyo. The country then put in place a programme that led to the building of another 187 nationwide. They survived the war and the occupation. But the thing of note is that before and after the war, their priority, says Taniguchi, was always to “stay watchful all the time” for the emergence of TB cases. If one was found, they were tasked with rushing to the patient's residence, checking for clusters and sterilising the house Seventy-five years on, 469 PHCs are in operation across the country, with each manned, on average, by 64 medical professionals, including one to two licensed doctors. They still locate clusters, track links and conduct tests. It is this “accumulated wealth of expertise, rarely found elsewhere” that has made the difference. Japan has not had to rely on mass testing strategies because it’s health care history had already left a cluster-crushing strategy embedded in its system https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/601264/cluster-busting-japan-success-fighting-covid-19 https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/601264/cluster-...