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3x more people died than in places that did the consensus strategy. And they haven't stopped having more cases either. 4000 more people died than in the other s

3x more people died than in places that did the consensus strategy. And they haven't stopped having more cases either. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. It will take a long time before that difference disappears, if it ever does, and it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore. What exactly has been vindicated?

triceratops 6y ago
> What exactly has been vindicated? Judging by some of the comments here, News Corp's ability to spin gold out of shit.
orangecat 6y ago
it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore. What exactly has been vindicated? If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world. Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths, economic impact, and behavior restrictions. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average, people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer, so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  The idea that Sweden had no lockdown measures at all and other places had draconian lockdowns where the whole population was closed down for three months is a strawman. They are also near the bottom on all those indicators you mentioned. Doing better than the US or Brasil is a very low bar for this. And what we're discussing here isn't that their strategy is "obviously wrong" it's that it's very definitely not "vindicated".
  - elcritch 6y ago
    The vindication - to my mind - is that if broad government enforced lockdowns were truly effective then Sweden should be an extreme outlier for their general region, which is Western Europe. They're not. They’re about middle of the pack there, and as others point out there’s chance involved to a large degree. Belgium introduced lockdowns but is much worse off than their bordering neighbors and Western Europe. Sweden has a large immigrant population which for various reasons have resulted in a lot of worse outbreaks like say Nothern Italy which had lots of immigrants from China and Wuhan. So essentially lockdowns don’t seem much more effective than chance in many measurements.
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      Sweden is not middle of the pack. They are in line with the worst death rates in Europe when their comparable neighbors have the best rates. And they achieved that while still doing quite a few lockdown measures, just less. In numbers of cases we've already gone from high to low and back to high again in direct correlation to the lockdown measures that were taken. We've done that in multiple places and at different times. I don't see any way to argue that lockdowns are not more effective than chance. Not even Sweden argues that, they just think they can manage the extra cases and achieve herd immunity soon.
      - elcritch 6y ago
        According to this Statista data, they’re roughly in the middle for Western Europe, not precisely but they certainly aren’t ahead of the pack: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat... Just because your bordering countries do better, is a possible indicator there methods worked better but there’s a lot more confounding variables that would need to be isolated, as I mention in another comment. For example perhaps the Nordic countries have similar age distributions (or not). They do have what seems to about 1/3 more immigrants than the other nordics per capita (https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_attachment/204333?_ts=1497ab86428 https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_...). Immigrants aren’t bad, just this particular virus hits elderly people more severely so having more elderly living in stratified homes means more elderly exposed. Certainly stricter and government enforced lockdowns slow down progression rate of the disease for a while, but other factors also appear to have a larger cumulative effect. Timing, population composition, age distribution. It’s more akin to anti-depressants, as in clinical studies of many potential anti-depressants show they have similar rates of effect as placebos. The degree of the covid deaths per capita has as much to do with societal, geographical, and even luck in many countries. I grant that well executed lockdowns have better success, especially in as in New Zealand, but they’re more of an anomaly I’d say. Now presuming, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy weren’t completely incompetent in their governmental lockdowns then other factors appear to be as big a factor as those policies. France from the Statista data only has a per capita mortality rate that 25% larger, which isn’t a large effect given the uncertainty of the data, and especially for epidemics which generally follow exponential curves (e.g. a tiny initial difference in starting conditions can lead to large differences very quickly). Take this (older graph) and it’d difficult to statistically say which countries have lockdowns or not. Again just including nearest neighbors isn’t sufficient since other neighboring countries like Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands have pretty big variations between them as large as Sweden to Norway. So do say the US and Canada. I don’t believe the absolute number of COVID-19 cases matters as much given a virus where 5-80% of cases are mild or asymptotic (https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-asymptomatic/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-a...). Many serological studies point to 10x the number of cases, which if so, all the cases numbers are off by an order of magnitude (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-suggesting-vast-undercount-coronavirus-infections-may-be-unreliable https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-sug...). A bit callous perhaps, but the more cases of sars-cov-2 overall with the same number of fatalities means the less deadly it is overall. Also, the countries that had/have stricter lockdowns will likely continue having larger waves of deaths until their overall numbers look more like Sweden (your point of achieving herd immunity sooner).
worker767424 6y ago
> And they haven't stopped having more cases either. They have fewer new cases than Spain and France.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  Yes, their numbers are very similar, in some cases better, to the places in Europe that had the worst outbreaks. Meanwhile their much more comparable neighboring countries have 5 to 10x better outcomes.
  - worker767424 6y ago
    Sweden is currently averaging around 170 new cases per day. Its populaton is 10.2 million. France is averaging 7,000 new cases per day. Its population is 67 million. But you said neighbors. Denmark's new case rate is around 150 per day, but with a population of only 5.8 million. Sweden is currently seeing fewer new cases per capita than Denmark, Spain, and France, and Spain and France are surging. My point is it's not clear that what medium hard lockdowns accomplished is sustainable.

triceratops 6y ago

> What exactly has been vindicated? Judging by some of the comments here, News Corp's ability to spin gold out of shit.

orangecat 6y ago

it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore. What exactly has been vindicated? If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world. Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths, economic impact, and behavior restrictions. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average, people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer, so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.

pedrocr 6y ago
The idea that Sweden had no lockdown measures at all and other places had draconian lockdowns where the whole population was closed down for three months is a strawman. They are also near the bottom on all those indicators you mentioned. Doing better than the US or Brasil is a very low bar for this. And what we're discussing here isn't that their strategy is "obviously wrong" it's that it's very definitely not "vindicated".
- elcritch 6y ago
  The vindication - to my mind - is that if broad government enforced lockdowns were truly effective then Sweden should be an extreme outlier for their general region, which is Western Europe. They're not. They’re about middle of the pack there, and as others point out there’s chance involved to a large degree. Belgium introduced lockdowns but is much worse off than their bordering neighbors and Western Europe. Sweden has a large immigrant population which for various reasons have resulted in a lot of worse outbreaks like say Nothern Italy which had lots of immigrants from China and Wuhan. So essentially lockdowns don’t seem much more effective than chance in many measurements.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    Sweden is not middle of the pack. They are in line with the worst death rates in Europe when their comparable neighbors have the best rates. And they achieved that while still doing quite a few lockdown measures, just less. In numbers of cases we've already gone from high to low and back to high again in direct correlation to the lockdown measures that were taken. We've done that in multiple places and at different times. I don't see any way to argue that lockdowns are not more effective than chance. Not even Sweden argues that, they just think they can manage the extra cases and achieve herd immunity soon.
    - elcritch 6y ago
      According to this Statista data, they’re roughly in the middle for Western Europe, not precisely but they certainly aren’t ahead of the pack: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-europe-by-country/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat... Just because your bordering countries do better, is a possible indicator there methods worked better but there’s a lot more confounding variables that would need to be isolated, as I mention in another comment. For example perhaps the Nordic countries have similar age distributions (or not). They do have what seems to about 1/3 more immigrants than the other nordics per capita (https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_attachment/204333?_ts=1497ab86428 https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_...). Immigrants aren’t bad, just this particular virus hits elderly people more severely so having more elderly living in stratified homes means more elderly exposed. Certainly stricter and government enforced lockdowns slow down progression rate of the disease for a while, but other factors also appear to have a larger cumulative effect. Timing, population composition, age distribution. It’s more akin to anti-depressants, as in clinical studies of many potential anti-depressants show they have similar rates of effect as placebos. The degree of the covid deaths per capita has as much to do with societal, geographical, and even luck in many countries. I grant that well executed lockdowns have better success, especially in as in New Zealand, but they’re more of an anomaly I’d say. Now presuming, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy weren’t completely incompetent in their governmental lockdowns then other factors appear to be as big a factor as those policies. France from the Statista data only has a per capita mortality rate that 25% larger, which isn’t a large effect given the uncertainty of the data, and especially for epidemics which generally follow exponential curves (e.g. a tiny initial difference in starting conditions can lead to large differences very quickly). Take this (older graph) and it’d difficult to statistically say which countries have lockdowns or not. Again just including nearest neighbors isn’t sufficient since other neighboring countries like Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands have pretty big variations between them as large as Sweden to Norway. So do say the US and Canada. I don’t believe the absolute number of COVID-19 cases matters as much given a virus where 5-80% of cases are mild or asymptotic (https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-asymptomatic/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-a...). Many serological studies point to 10x the number of cases, which if so, all the cases numbers are off by an order of magnitude (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-suggesting-vast-undercount-coronavirus-infections-may-be-unreliable https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-sug...). A bit callous perhaps, but the more cases of sars-cov-2 overall with the same number of fatalities means the less deadly it is overall. Also, the countries that had/have stricter lockdowns will likely continue having larger waves of deaths until their overall numbers look more like Sweden (your point of achieving herd immunity sooner).

worker767424 6y ago

> And they haven't stopped having more cases either. They have fewer new cases than Spain and France.

pedrocr 6y ago
Yes, their numbers are very similar, in some cases better, to the places in Europe that had the worst outbreaks. Meanwhile their much more comparable neighboring countries have 5 to 10x better outcomes.
- worker767424 6y ago
  Sweden is currently averaging around 170 new cases per day. Its populaton is 10.2 million. France is averaging 7,000 new cases per day. Its population is 67 million. But you said neighbors. Denmark's new case rate is around 150 per day, but with a population of only 5.8 million. Sweden is currently seeing fewer new cases per capita than Denmark, Spain, and France, and Spain and France are surging. My point is it's not clear that what medium hard lockdowns accomplished is sustainable.