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>It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be giv

>It’s also contained because unleashing it would totally overwhelm almost any nation’s hospitals, cause a cascading death toll because no treatment could be given. This is clearly not true because it didn't overwhelm Sweden's hospitals, or Japan's, or South Dakota's, even though they didn't have lockdowns, just voluntary social distancing.

fabian2k 6y ago
I intentionally mentioned behaviour changes first in my comment, we can't fully separate rules and lockdowns from voluntary behavioural changes. In the end all that matters is the changed behaviour, not whether it was enforced or not. Full lockdowns are also not the best way to handle increasing numbers now, they were necessary earlier this year because we didn't know much about the virus and which situations are the most dangerous. With the knowledge we have today we can use more specific interventions to contain the virus.
martyvis 6y ago
Japan has a culture of wearing masks when conditions prevail (normally pollution related but also disease). They also tend to be not into physical contact in social settings, and are more likely to be in compliance to societal laws.
cygx 6y ago
Not as clear as you make it sound: Swedes did change their behaviour/travel patterns in response to Covid-19, the Japanese instituted mask etiquette a century ago, and no one lives in South Dakota.
- thu2111 6y ago
  No, it's pretty clear. Relatively minor changes in behaviour (Swedes were famously out chatting in cafes and shopping at a time when many other places were under universal curfews and business closures) cannot explain the huge deviation from what the models predicted, at least not without making the models entirely unfalsifiable. Meanwhile masks are useless. Look at the graphs of almost any country that has a mask mandate and when that mandate was introduced - no inflection point is visible. Nowhere! If masks worked, at least some places would show a clear change in growth rate $incubation_period days after the mask mandate was enforced, but it never happens. As for "nobody lives in South Dakota", well, tell the people who live there that. And don't forget Belarus. The usual excuse for that is "you can't trust anything out of Belarus", although of course many people live there and no overflowing hospitals were reported by any foreigners there either. There's a very clear and visible pattern here, which is a really deep desire to believe that epidemiology as a field knows what it's doing, that the models work, that lockdowns weren't useless. But the data is as clear as day. No correlation between lockdowns and health outcomes. No lockdowns yet no ICU exhaustion in Sweden despite Sweden having one of the lowest ICU capacities in Europe - the exact opposite of what we were told to expect. Mask mandates have no visible impact on the spread of 'infection' (PCR positives, not quite the same thing).
polytely 6y ago
Well it probably depends on the amount of IC beds / ventilators / trained personnel available per location. I know that here in The Netherlands they narrowly avoided a triage situation where your condition decided if were going to get treated. A second order effect that might not be obvious is that during the first wave a lot of non-emergency procedures were postponed, a lot of these non-emergency procedures can still be quite urgent and can have negative consequences for the people who had to wait.
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  Att the start of the pandemic Sweden had the next-lowest number of ICU places per capita in Europe (Portugal had the lowest). The capacity was doubled, field hospitals were built... and not used since the hospitals could handle the inflow. This was partly due to some very controversial and in my opinion unethical guidelines which mandated morphing instead of oxygen for certain groups of elderly (i.e. involuntary euthanasia) but it is unknown if those policies had much effect on the park ICU occupation. Apart from some bad mistakes in the beginning where the infection was allowed to spread in care facilities Sweden has weathered the epidemic (as in the local version of the pandemic) no worse than surrounding countries and certainly no worse than e.g. New York.
  - cygx 6y ago
    no worse than surrounding countries Deaths per 1k population: total last month Sweden 0.59 0.0058 Denmark 0.11 0.0053 Finland 0.063 0.0016 Norway 0.051 0.0020
    - goalieca 6y ago
      I’m tired of seeing scoreboard style comparisons everywhere as some sort of gotcha. Any scientific analysis worth its salt will look into the values to start explaining the numbers and put it all into context. For instance, can we explain where Sweden’s deaths occurred? Large care homes (100+ residents) that were ill prepared? Are they expected to have a large amount or average amount of excess deaths at the end of 2020? Why is it tracking average and why are some lockdown heavy countries tracking much higher (because lack of health care due to shutdowns?) What even represents a covid death or case?

fabian2k 6y ago

I intentionally mentioned behaviour changes first in my comment, we can't fully separate rules and lockdowns from voluntary behavioural changes. In the end all that matters is the changed behaviour, not whether it was enforced or not. Full lockdowns are also not the best way to handle increasing numbers now, they were necessary earlier this year because we didn't know much about the virus and which situations are the most dangerous. With the knowledge we have today we can use more specific interventions to contain the virus.

martyvis 6y ago

Japan has a culture of wearing masks when conditions prevail (normally pollution related but also disease). They also tend to be not into physical contact in social settings, and are more likely to be in compliance to societal laws.

cygx 6y ago

Not as clear as you make it sound: Swedes did change their behaviour/travel patterns in response to Covid-19, the Japanese instituted mask etiquette a century ago, and no one lives in South Dakota.

thu2111 6y ago
No, it's pretty clear. Relatively minor changes in behaviour (Swedes were famously out chatting in cafes and shopping at a time when many other places were under universal curfews and business closures) cannot explain the huge deviation from what the models predicted, at least not without making the models entirely unfalsifiable. Meanwhile masks are useless. Look at the graphs of almost any country that has a mask mandate and when that mandate was introduced - no inflection point is visible. Nowhere! If masks worked, at least some places would show a clear change in growth rate $incubation_period days after the mask mandate was enforced, but it never happens. As for "nobody lives in South Dakota", well, tell the people who live there that. And don't forget Belarus. The usual excuse for that is "you can't trust anything out of Belarus", although of course many people live there and no overflowing hospitals were reported by any foreigners there either. There's a very clear and visible pattern here, which is a really deep desire to believe that epidemiology as a field knows what it's doing, that the models work, that lockdowns weren't useless. But the data is as clear as day. No correlation between lockdowns and health outcomes. No lockdowns yet no ICU exhaustion in Sweden despite Sweden having one of the lowest ICU capacities in Europe - the exact opposite of what we were told to expect. Mask mandates have no visible impact on the spread of 'infection' (PCR positives, not quite the same thing).

polytely 6y ago

Well it probably depends on the amount of IC beds / ventilators / trained personnel available per location. I know that here in The Netherlands they narrowly avoided a triage situation where your condition decided if were going to get treated. A second order effect that might not be obvious is that during the first wave a lot of non-emergency procedures were postponed, a lot of these non-emergency procedures can still be quite urgent and can have negative consequences for the people who had to wait.

Yetanfou 6y ago
Att the start of the pandemic Sweden had the next-lowest number of ICU places per capita in Europe (Portugal had the lowest). The capacity was doubled, field hospitals were built... and not used since the hospitals could handle the inflow. This was partly due to some very controversial and in my opinion unethical guidelines which mandated morphing instead of oxygen for certain groups of elderly (i.e. involuntary euthanasia) but it is unknown if those policies had much effect on the park ICU occupation. Apart from some bad mistakes in the beginning where the infection was allowed to spread in care facilities Sweden has weathered the epidemic (as in the local version of the pandemic) no worse than surrounding countries and certainly no worse than e.g. New York.
- cygx 6y ago
  no worse than surrounding countries Deaths per 1k population: total last month Sweden 0.59 0.0058 Denmark 0.11 0.0053 Finland 0.063 0.0016 Norway 0.051 0.0020
  - goalieca 6y ago
    I’m tired of seeing scoreboard style comparisons everywhere as some sort of gotcha. Any scientific analysis worth its salt will look into the values to start explaining the numbers and put it all into context. For instance, can we explain where Sweden’s deaths occurred? Large care homes (100+ residents) that were ill prepared? Are they expected to have a large amount or average amount of excess deaths at the end of 2020? Why is it tracking average and why are some lockdown heavy countries tracking much higher (because lack of health care due to shutdowns?) What even represents a covid death or case?