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Finland has roughly half Sweden's population but 5% of their COVID deaths. Sweden's economy contracted 8.6% to the EU's 11.9%. Hope those 5000+ unnecessary dea

Finland has roughly half Sweden's population but 5% of their COVID deaths. Sweden's economy contracted 8.6% to the EU's 11.9%. Hope those 5000+ unnecessary deaths were worth 3.3%. "Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway." Wow.

matz1 6y ago
It would be worse if Sweden did implement lockdown.
gnicholas 6y ago
Your Finland comparison misses the author's argument. His claim is not that they haven't had many more deaths than Finland, but that Finland will catch up with Sweden. His theory seems to be that there will be a more-or-less fixed number of deaths per million, unless countries are willing to wait for a vaccine (which he thinks they won't do).
- agildehaus 6y ago
  Delusional. For that, ~2700 more people would need to die in Finland. 14 people have died in Finland since June 1st and they're typically reporting 0 now. In Sweden, 40 people died ON June 1st. Both countries have it under control now. But it's clear Finland's shutdown saved lives.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    Perhaps! I'm not an expert on COVID, and I've not been following trends in Europe. His claim would only make sense if Finland's low current rates are due to lockdown, and Sweden's low current rates are not because of lockdown but because COVID is no longer spreading much due to prior spread.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Finland has it under control for now, but they should expect to see future waves of infection, since nearly every country that did a hard lockdown has. So the question is, will they be able to do the same severe response 2, 3, 4 times before they get the required supply of vaccines?
  - chrisjs96 6y ago
    It's not clear anything is saving lives. Once everything opens up we could be right where we started. Also we've said basically that people with coronavirus matter more than other illnesses. There will be millions of deaths around the world because of shutdown. Things like AIDs medicine. Then thousands due to lack of treatment of cancers and people not going to doctor(England did a study on this). Then you'll have the domestic violence, murder rate increase. Then the negative effects on children decades later. It's only a trade off of lives, not a net saving of lives. If you think it's "clear" that any lives are being saved then I would challenge you to think more critically. The shutdown will be looked back on in 10 years as one of the worst mistakes the world has ever made.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Why are you counting the increased ill effects of staying home but not the decreased ill effects of leaving home? No more car accidents, for example.
      - chrisjs96 6y ago
        I know you live in a tech bubble, but people still have to physically go to a thing called work. You're telling me that some car accidents go down that will offset aids, tuberculosis, malaria. Not to mention cancer treatments, cancer not getting caught early, etc. You really do live in a bubble. While we cry about not having internet or that a face mask isn't covering someones nose completely, millions of people die around the world due to very preventable or treatable diseases. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberculosis-aids-malaria.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberc... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30388-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
    - mcguire 6y ago
      This is one reason you need to look at all cause mortality. Another is that COVID specific counts don't catch all related deaths and include possible unrelated deaths.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    If and only if there is an effective vaccine within a year or two. Sweden didn’t make this bet. Finland, Norway, and New Zealand did. Sustained lockdown and lack of travel will be very costly if it has to be maintained for two years; and the fatigue from maintaining it will undo all of the supposed success. This is not decidable at this point in time, and likely not within the next 5 years.
tripletao 6y ago
At $100k per quality-adjusted life-year and 10 QALY lost per death, those 5k deaths are $5B, about 1% of Sweden's GDP. So by the same math used to determine if medical treatments are cost-effective, it's breakeven if that GDP difference persists for about four months. We should also account for QALY lost due to people who get severely ill but recover, but I'd guess the net result is surprisingly close to breakeven. Perhaps this means the policymakers just chose different but roughly equivalent (by that math) options, or perhaps that's just chance. Of course you could say that math is horrible and inhumane, and any equation involving dollars and human lives will feel that way. But the point is that health care spending is already rationed by something like that standard, and every dollar of GDP that disappears is a dollar that's unavailable to spend in other ways (including medical treatments that are cost-effective by that standard). To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost-effective to me by that standard. Their response otherwise seems reasonable to me, not obviously better than stricter approaches but not obviously worse.
- nopinsight 6y ago
  Plausible long-term damage to the brain of a significant percentage of COVID patients, in both severe and non-severe cases—-according to a Lancet paper—should change the QALY-based calculation by a great deal. https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137738752 https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...
  - femto 6y ago
    Perhaps the cost-benefit analysis should also include improvements in the technology to develop vaccines as a benefit? There's a good chance that the injection of resources into the development of COVID-19 vaccines will put us in a better position to respond to the next pandemic.
  - timr 6y ago
    That is an incredibly bad paper. They have gone on a fishing expedition across dozens of algorithmically detected differences, barely adjusted their statistical significance thresholds to make up for the fact that they're searching for something that might be "significant", and even then, the best they can do is come up with...50% of people have something. A coin toss. This is the medical literature version of the xkcd green M&M comic: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
hh3k0 6y ago
Wow, indeed. What a quote. I can't believe a doctor wrote this.
neilwilson 6y ago
And Belgium - the seat of EU power had vastly more deaths. The highest deaths per capita in the world. As did Peru. Despite following WHO globalist advice to the letter. Why is your cherry pick right and mine wrong?
Markoff 6y ago
you are missing the point and should look at yearly death stats from all causes so yes, temporarily Sweden stats may look worse because people who would die this or next year died in short time window in these few months, but those people will be missing in stats down the road it's already happening in UK, for 6 consecutive weeks they have lower than 5yr average death toll and excess deaths are shrinking because oft his https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032 https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032 so while you may pat yourself on shoulders how good you done without spike in the end you both reach pretty much same result spike or not

matz1 6y ago

It would be worse if Sweden did implement lockdown.

gnicholas 6y ago

Your Finland comparison misses the author's argument. His claim is not that they haven't had many more deaths than Finland, but that Finland will catch up with Sweden. His theory seems to be that there will be a more-or-less fixed number of deaths per million, unless countries are willing to wait for a vaccine (which he thinks they won't do).

agildehaus 6y ago
Delusional. For that, ~2700 more people would need to die in Finland. 14 people have died in Finland since June 1st and they're typically reporting 0 now. In Sweden, 40 people died ON June 1st. Both countries have it under control now. But it's clear Finland's shutdown saved lives.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Perhaps! I'm not an expert on COVID, and I've not been following trends in Europe. His claim would only make sense if Finland's low current rates are due to lockdown, and Sweden's low current rates are not because of lockdown but because COVID is no longer spreading much due to prior spread.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Finland has it under control for now, but they should expect to see future waves of infection, since nearly every country that did a hard lockdown has. So the question is, will they be able to do the same severe response 2, 3, 4 times before they get the required supply of vaccines?
- chrisjs96 6y ago
  It's not clear anything is saving lives. Once everything opens up we could be right where we started. Also we've said basically that people with coronavirus matter more than other illnesses. There will be millions of deaths around the world because of shutdown. Things like AIDs medicine. Then thousands due to lack of treatment of cancers and people not going to doctor(England did a study on this). Then you'll have the domestic violence, murder rate increase. Then the negative effects on children decades later. It's only a trade off of lives, not a net saving of lives. If you think it's "clear" that any lives are being saved then I would challenge you to think more critically. The shutdown will be looked back on in 10 years as one of the worst mistakes the world has ever made.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Why are you counting the increased ill effects of staying home but not the decreased ill effects of leaving home? No more car accidents, for example.
    - chrisjs96 6y ago
      I know you live in a tech bubble, but people still have to physically go to a thing called work. You're telling me that some car accidents go down that will offset aids, tuberculosis, malaria. Not to mention cancer treatments, cancer not getting caught early, etc. You really do live in a bubble. While we cry about not having internet or that a face mask isn't covering someones nose completely, millions of people die around the world due to very preventable or treatable diseases. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberculosis-aids-malaria.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/health/coronavirus-tuberc... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(20)30388-0/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
  - mcguire 6y ago
    This is one reason you need to look at all cause mortality. Another is that COVID specific counts don't catch all related deaths and include possible unrelated deaths.
- beagle3 6y ago
  If and only if there is an effective vaccine within a year or two. Sweden didn’t make this bet. Finland, Norway, and New Zealand did. Sustained lockdown and lack of travel will be very costly if it has to be maintained for two years; and the fatigue from maintaining it will undo all of the supposed success. This is not decidable at this point in time, and likely not within the next 5 years.

tripletao 6y ago

At $100k per quality-adjusted life-year and 10 QALY lost per death, those 5k deaths are $5B, about 1% of Sweden's GDP. So by the same math used to determine if medical treatments are cost-effective, it's breakeven if that GDP difference persists for about four months. We should also account for QALY lost due to people who get severely ill but recover, but I'd guess the net result is surprisingly close to breakeven. Perhaps this means the policymakers just chose different but roughly equivalent (by that math) options, or perhaps that's just chance. Of course you could say that math is horrible and inhumane, and any equation involving dollars and human lives will feel that way. But the point is that health care spending is already rationed by something like that standard, and every dollar of GDP that disappears is a dollar that's unavailable to spend in other ways (including medical treatments that are cost-effective by that standard). To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost-effective to me by that standard. Their response otherwise seems reasonable to me, not obviously better than stricter approaches but not obviously worse.

nopinsight 6y ago
Plausible long-term damage to the brain of a significant percentage of COVID patients, in both severe and non-severe cases—-according to a Lancet paper—should change the QALY-based calculation by a great deal. https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137738752 https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...
- femto 6y ago
  Perhaps the cost-benefit analysis should also include improvements in the technology to develop vaccines as a benefit? There's a good chance that the injection of resources into the development of COVID-19 vaccines will put us in a better position to respond to the next pandemic.
- timr 6y ago
  That is an incredibly bad paper. They have gone on a fishing expedition across dozens of algorithmically detected differences, barely adjusted their statistical significance thresholds to make up for the fact that they're searching for something that might be "significant", and even then, the best they can do is come up with...50% of people have something. A coin toss. This is the medical literature version of the xkcd green M&M comic: https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/

hh3k0 6y ago

Wow, indeed. What a quote. I can't believe a doctor wrote this.

neilwilson 6y ago

And Belgium - the seat of EU power had vastly more deaths. The highest deaths per capita in the world. As did Peru. Despite following WHO globalist advice to the letter. Why is your cherry pick right and mine wrong?

Markoff 6y ago

you are missing the point and should look at yearly death stats from all causes so yes, temporarily Sweden stats may look worse because people who would die this or next year died in short time window in these few months, but those people will be missing in stats down the road it's already happening in UK, for 6 consecutive weeks they have lower than 5yr average death toll and excess deaths are shrinking because oft his https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032 https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032 so while you may pat yourself on shoulders how good you done without spike in the end you both reach pretty much same result spike or not