21 ms·

It's so weird to see people still claiming this. Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/Bla

It's so weird to see people still claiming this. Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average. The difference between them and their neighbors isn't small. Counterfactuals are always hard, and there might be valid non-lockdown related excuses for why Sweden did so poorly, but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.

Closi 5y ago
Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below: * Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years. * If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost. If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct. If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater. I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    On the other hand, you have to consider people who were single and dating. They had a way worse last 18 months than those in a committed, cohabitating relationship.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      The larger point is that its impossible to objectively value other people's lives and any reasoning based on doing so is faulty.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I agree with that as precisely stated, but one can reasonably make subjective judgements (and indeed our politicians are doing so at the moment). If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!” It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.
      - Closi 5y ago
        Unless we make a judgement-call on value how can we balance taking away peoples freedoms over extending other peoples lives? Consider the following questions: * Would you accept 70 million people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years? * Would you accept 500 people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years? * Would you accept 5,000 people staying inside for a year to extend 10 peoples life by 10 years? * Would you stay inside for an hour to save another persons life by a year? * Would you stay inside for a year to save another person life by 1 year? These are the real questions that we have to answer, and they will absolutely (and unfortunately) need people to face into the question of the value of life. My personal answer to these questions is (in sequence) No, No, No, Yes, No. A reasonable person could answer completely different - there is no absolute right answer in any of these! We can pretend that the answer to these questions is impossible - but these are the real decisions that policy makers need to make. How much is someone's freedom worth compared to the life of a stranger?
- gizmo385 5y ago
  That comparison of life hours isn't valid though. There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. And that's not to mention the potential overwhelming of the healthcare system, resulting in many other lives being lost or severely impacted. People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
  - matvore 5y ago
    Imperfect comparison but still valid. All lives are eventually lost causing some grief. (If I may summarize what you've said) Saying that a large number of coincident deaths causes a collective grief that wouldn't have happened otherwise is rather subjective. I have felt nothing of the sort. I don't think it's enough of a concern to justify such an overreach of government power. Quantifying the value of life as a number is icky but necessary if you're making decisions of this scale.
  - mikem170 5y ago
    > There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death. > People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation. I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns. These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing? [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-coronavirus-deaths-in-sweden-by-age-groups/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
gpsx 5y ago
Your comment about counterfactuals reminds of a saying, or what I would call a more accurate version of a common saying - "Hindsight is 50/50". (Note, that doesn't make hindsight necessarily wrong, just difficult to have confidence in.)
- ismaildonmez 5y ago
  "Hindsight is 20/20" because perfect eyesight is 20/20: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/what-does-20-20-vision-mean https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/what-does-20-...
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    20/20 is actually just normal vision, not perfect eyesight.
    - irrational 5y ago
      What is perfect vision? I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see. Would perfect vision being able to see everything in the electromagnetic spectrum? How big would one eyes need to be?
      - schoen 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Expression > Some birds of prey, such as hawks, are believed to have an acuity of around 20/2; in this respect, their vision is much better than human eyesight. The scale of how good vision can be keeps going and going indefinitely (presumably until you get into physical limitations to resolution related to wavelengths). While 20/20 is considered normal and not in need of correction, it doesn't mean it's the best vision observed among human beings, or the best that's physically possible (for human beings or other animals).
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > What is perfect vision? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#Powers,_abilities,_and_weaknesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#Powers,_abilities,_an... > I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see. No, of course not. Try looking at Saturn at night. Then try looking through a telescope. Odds are you'll see it better with the aid.
jchook 5y ago
Notice the article doesn't mention countries where proper lockdown worked very well and took only around 100 days.
- jmnicolas 5y ago
  It's not like there are no adverse consequences to lockdowns : Tragedy: 1 MILLION more Brits have become alcoholics since Covid lockdowns began https://notthebee.com/article/nearly-1-million-more-brits-addicted-to-alcohol-since-covid-lockdowns-began- https://notthebee.com/article/nearly-1-million-more-brits-ad...
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    Do you have any direct source for that statistic? The article that you've linked to is the Babylon Bee -- a site best known for their satire and fake articles -- lifting some infographics from an (uncited) article in the Daily Mail. Neither of these sources inspires confidence.
    - jmnicolas 5y ago
      Sorry I saw this circulate a few days ago and linked the first thing I found on DDG. I have no reason to think it's fake news.
      - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
        > I have no reason to think it's fake news. Very sound logic (/s)! With this sort of reasoning people invaded the Capitol on January 6th, because they were certain their country was about to be taken over by a Chinese-backed coup. Guess what, they also think what they heard was legitimate, and they think their reasoning work(ed) perfectly fine.
      - belltaco 5y ago
        Everything in Babylon Bee is 100% satire and fake. It's used as a fake news source by people wanting to spread misinformation.
yodsanklai 5y ago
Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland, even though they are neighbors. Also, being low population density is irrelevant (you could have a huge country with everybody crammed in a city, actually Stockholm is much denser than Oslo for instance). Also, even within a single country, fatality rates vary greatly. I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.
- dijit 5y ago
  > Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland Pedantic “every country is a different country” aside; Norway and Finland are absolutely fine comparatives. The population density (in the populated areas), culture and genetic make-up of these countries is so similar that they may as well be considered the same country socioeconomically. Hell, they used to even _be_ the same country (the union of Kalmar). I’ve lived in Finland and currently live in Sweden. As a British person I see more similarities than differences. (Language of Finland vs the Scandinavian languages not withstanding)
  - yodsanklai 5y ago
    Your perception of a country doesn't make a scientific evidence on why Norway of Finland could be taken as reference point to assess Sweden strategy regarding Covid.
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      You're the one asserting they're not comparable here, so please trot out some factors where Sweden is measurably different from its neighbors then.
      - yodsanklai 5y ago
        The pandemics is extremely complex. Fatality rates have looked very different in seemingly similar countries, and even within different areas of a single country. Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong. I do suspect Sweden would have had less fatality had they implemented a lockdown. Would it then be comparable to Norway? I wouldn't bet may life on it. France has almost twice as many covid death as Germany even though they implemented a much stricter lockdown. It seems some people hate Sweden for choosing their way to deal with the pandemics. Could have they done better otherwise? maybe, but overall, no cataclysm happened there, they did ok in terms of fatality compared to rest of Europe, and much better for the other metrics, as stated in the article.
Gwypaas 5y ago
Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? It is a completely irrelevant metric, lets include the Canadian arctic when calculating the density of Toronto and the effects of Covid, makes a whole lot of sense! A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density. "Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at which the average citizen lives. It is calculated by taking weighted average of the density of all parcels of land that make up a city, with each parcel weighted by its population" [0] By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741. [1] Concluding that Denmark did amazingly well given the cards they were dealt and Sweden is at the average of Europe due to very a urbanised population compared to the size of the country. [0]: https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-luisa-udp-pwd-ref2016 https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-luisa-udp-pwd-ref2... [1]: https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/LUISA/SecondaryOutput_Indicators/Europe/REF-2016/UDP/PWD/ https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/LUISA/Secon...
- yyyk 5y ago
  >Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? Because the effective Swedish population density is very low? The effective density is affected by household size, and about 40% of Swedes live alone without children[0]. Sweden had the biggest Corona infection vector neutered and still did horribly. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/526013/sweden-number-of-households-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/526013/sweden-number-of-...
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I suggest the measure density is a single value based on housing units and not the right measure to care about in itself. Instead look at public and private hygiene, isolation practices and incident response profiles, per hundred thousand or so.. not hectares per hundred thousand.
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  Sure, there're a lot of factors that can affect how disease spreads, like demographics, genetics, climate, health system, sociability, temperature, cafe culture, saunas, wfh incidence, international travel, travel links, tourism... I'm quite happy to accept that 'population density' is inadequate - I mention it only in passing in my comment, the point I'm making is that Sweden is not a country you would expect to perform at the european average, and given that, the most natural thing to do is to compare a country with its neighbors. Neighboring countries usually share many factors, and on top of that, they have a direct transmission effect too. Sweden did much worse than its neighbors. The explanation for that is either in the ways that Sweden is different from its neighbors, or in the difference in public policy. I certainly don't know which to blame, but I don't want to hear any more lionization of the Swedish approach that doesn't solidly get to grips with that question.
danjac 5y ago
The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios. On an average day you'll notice multiple anti-remote working articles parroted by Cabinet ministers. Why should they care how businesses conduct their business, especially if it's more convenient and can lead to a happier and more efficient workforce? Follow the money. It used to be - many years ago - a stodgy and conservative yet reputable newspaper (they fired Boris Johnson for lying, now he moonlights as a columnist). As with other newspapers (e.g. WSJ) it went off the deep end a long time ago.
- corney91 5y ago
  It was The Times that fired Boris Johnson for lying, The Telegraph hired him after that. They have gone off the deep end though. Some good coverage of The Telegraph's fall in standards is Peter Oborne's resignation letter: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...
  - hkt 5y ago
    It continues to astonish me how far the telegraph (and conservatism generally) has left people like Oborne behind. Really quite something to behold, and pretty deeply alarming.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Is there anyplace a conservative can find real news anymore?
      - mhh__ 5y ago
        Anywhere reputable. For example, I read the guardian pretty much everyday, and various other papers, even though although culturally I am a proper grauniad-reader type, politically I am not - but by virtue of actually reading the articles text you can actually (believe it or not?) determine both the facts and the flavour separately.
anigbrowl 5y ago
The Telegraph leans strongly conservative just as the Guardian leans strongly left. This seems like a very slanted article; it buries the mortality impact of CVOID until near the end. I seriously doubt that Norway would prefer to swap its ~10x lower death rate for Sweden's GDP numbers. Further: In a paper published last week in science journal Nature, Dr Bhatt, together with the UK's former government advisor Neil Ferguson and other researchers, estimated that if the UK had adopted Sweden’s policies, its death rate would have been between two and four times higher. "What Sweden did was a pandemic response that involved large numbers of interventions, a considerable amount of reliance on population behaviour and population adherence, and a reliance on the intricacies of what makes Swedish culture Swedish culture,” Dr Bhatt said. "If the UK had adopted what Sweden did, I have no doubt in my mind that it would have had an absolute disaster." ¯\(°_o)/¯ Notably, the Telegraph is not calling for people int he UK to be more like Swedes.
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though? They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding. If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x. And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in Norway and 10 people died in Sweden, I don't think we'd be debating much. Even in Sweden, they did not have as many deaths as most other countries, and a lot of them were very early on.
  - Jedd 5y ago
    > Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes ... If the data in the graph shared by kybernetikos is correct, the claim that 'it's all because of elder deaths in early 2020' seems to be misguided, given the 2021-01 peak, and the steady first-place position throughout the last ~18 months. https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
eckesicle 5y ago
In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that. Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times. The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart). It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat? I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms. In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.
- yyyk 5y ago
  >The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. It's called the 'dry tinder' hypothesis, and it isn't born out when researchers look at the data, e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34213362/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34213362/
  - eckesicle 5y ago
    Thanks!
- user-the-name 5y ago
  > In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same. Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.
tpmx 5y ago
Swede here: It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this. I see two main failures: 1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up. 2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is where most deaths happened. Norway in particular handled this so much better. And of course we should compare ourselves to e.g. Denmark/Norway/Finland. I think the root cause of all this is that Sweden has not been involved in a war in a very long time, unlike our neighbors. We're pretty good when things are stable, but apparently awful when things are dynamic/shit is going down. Of course I have very specific opinions on what "actually" went wrong and why, but that would be too detailed to be useful here and also way too partisan.
- Moru 5y ago
  The biggest problem with the discussions on most subject is that everyone cherrypicks their data or just don't have whole picture. And this picture is a realy big one. For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?
- zibzab 5y ago
  I think you are forgetting two important facts that counter your arguments: 1. A significant number of Swedes were in Lombardy (northern Italy) at the time the European outbreak started there. Furthermore Sweden has at least two major companies with presence around Wuhan. So by the time government noticed the issue it was too late. 2. Elderly care employees in Sweden are basically gig workers, resulting in a huge rotation in care givers and further spreading of the virus. The Social Democrats (and the Left party V) have often been opposed to this. Two more things to consider: 1. This difference between Sweden and its neighbours is also clearly visible in the flu pattern over the year. It is simply due to different living and travelling conditions. 2. The municipalities are somewhat independent of the central government. Some with the highest death numbers among the elders where controlled by the opposition (e.g. Stockholm). So while the government could have done a MUCH better job, your comment is already fairly partisan by cherry picking or ignoring facts.
austhrow743 5y ago
The 1450 per million figure the article cites as the cost of covid to Sweden actually makes them look worse than your own data. It's not an article about the cost of covid though, its about the benefits of not fighting it as hard as other countries. It's very light on that, not much of an attempt to quantify and compare to the cost, but still props to it for even acknowledging that those benefits exist and count for something. The best write up I've seen so far on the topic is this [0] which concludes: > So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me. > Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh. [0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
m4rtink 5y ago
When you want to see how bad it can get, see the Czech Republic in the top ten. We are land locked, quite high density and with a lot of neighbors with a lot of regular cross border traffic. There were lockdowns though arguably too late, chaotic and often ignored. End result ? 30000+ dead. Well, at least it looks like the ammount of people who got infected was quite massive as with only 50% vaccination rate right now things are not going back to hell so far, with hardly any precautions still in place.
IdontRememberIt 5y ago
This argument does not make sense. 1) +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area. (https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/environment/land-use/localities-and-urban-areas/pong/statistical-news/localities-and-urban-areas-2018/ https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... ) 2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image) 3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures. As many have said, one of the major factor was how the elderly in home facilities had been protected and the state of the medical infrastructure (rate of intense care beds per capita to handle the peaks for exemple). In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I’ve seen accusations in the US that people were being counted as Covid deaths that died “woth” Covid, and would have even without it - I have no idea if these accusations are true, just that probably-nonsense leads me to the question: Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?
  - nl 5y ago
    Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years). By that comparison Sweden has done very badly compared to its peers. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?time=earliest..2021-08-01&country=SWE~NOR~FIN~DNK https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... As this very article says: However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach. The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
    - 5y ago
bnralt 5y ago
It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies, and the best test for those policies is to compare like with like (e.g. other Nordic countries). When people compare US numbers to other countries, I feel that's from more of a "what did the US do wrong" angle, and those comparisons could surface differences that could be learned from.
  - eCa 5y ago
    > Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without left/right tinted glasses.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      That is interesting. I would point out though that the truth does not always fit between the 'left' and 'right' views. The migration of the Overton window, capture of major media, and increased acceptance of social media censorship sailed away from truth some time ago.
nickthemagicman 5y ago
Stockholm has the population density of San Diego or Phoenix.
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  Stockholm has over four times the density of Phoenix.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    Thanks! My bad. I guess the point stands even stronger than before.
tamiral 5y ago
Where is the chart stat from ?
lettergram 5y ago
I’m looking at those numbers and the worst was Peru - 0.5% excess deaths. Am I the only one whos just thinking none of this matters? The reality is Sweden is doing an amazing job if there’s no lockdowns. Those lockdowns led to a massive increase in suicides[1], economic damage[2], inflation[3], massive increase in drug abuse[4], lost years in education[5]. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this virus would cause more harm. Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths (almost exclusively from people near end of life). What’s the damage in years of education lost, the drug abuse, homelessness, inflation pricing out homes for those who can work... long-term I expect Sweden will see lower deaths than any of the countries that locked down. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm [2] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/ [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi [4] https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4846 https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID... [5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-report-reveals-100-000-pupils-failed-return-education-time.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-repor...
- microtherion 5y ago
  Your reference [1] does not talk about suicide, but suicide attempts, and to the extent it correlates with "lockdowns", it seems to directly contradict your claim: > Among adolescents aged 12–17 years, the number of weekly ED visits for suspected suicide attempts DECREASED DURING SPRING 2020 compared with that during 2019 [...] mean weekly number of ED visits for suspected suicide attempts were 22.3% HIGHER DURING SUMMER 2020 and 39.1% HIGHER DURING WINTER 2021 than during the corresponding periods in 2019 (Emphasis mine). So, during three phases of the COVID-19 epidemic, suicide attempts decreased during one, increased during two. The US was in nationwide lockdown during only one of these phases, which happens to be exactly the one where suicide attempts DECREASED. Source [2] talks about (indisputable) damage to the US economy, which you attribute to the (half assed) US lockdowns. But this is begging the question whether it was the lockdown rather than the epidemic which did the damage, and in fact, Sweden had a WORSE economic outcome than its neighbors. > Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-will-smell-taste-come-back-5-covid-19-questions-answered.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil... And even athletes in top physical condition can suffer debilitating consequences for indeterminate periods of time: https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31936050/lewis-hamilton-suspects-long-covid-dizzy-symptoms-hungarian-gp https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31936050/lewis-hamilton-s...
nl 5y ago
To add to this, the linked article itself says: However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach. The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
akira2501 5y ago
> and it looks bad Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. This also fails to acknowledge that there might be a worthwhile set of cost:benefit ratios to compare your single data point against. > but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done. People accuse the COVID situation of being political and dividing people. I think one of the major lines of division is in the expectations that one has about their daily life in a given society, and how few some people have about their own. Each to their own, but the failure to acknowledge the validity of the opposing point of view, even in a polite tone, is a troubling development.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. I don't know about the US or Spain but the lockdown measures in the UK were halfhearted. Somehow we managed to have the worst of both worlds, the biggest economic hit in the OECD and the worst health outcomes.
nivenkos 5y ago
Sweden's neighbours have far less international travel, immigration, and urban population.
astrophysics 5y ago
A huge challenge in Norway, was that all our retired ethnic Pakistani people panicked and booked flights from Pakistan to Norway. They didn't trust that Pakistani hospitals would handle the pandemic. Sweden probably has a lot more foreign residents with swedish citizenship than Norway? Even though we have relatively few immigrants, at times, more than 50% of all the covid-infected belonged to these groups. https://www.p4.no/nyheter/over-halvparten-av-innlagte-er-innvandrere/artikkel/818564/ https://www.p4.no/nyheter/over-halvparten-av-innlagte-er-inn...
- sandos 5y ago
  I firmly believe that to be part of the answer, our "CDC" also said as much in 2020. Lots of clusters of infection popping up in parts of the population that lives very tightly and in large family groups, and those are predominantly immigrants and their kids. Im not sure how it looks in the third wave though. That and the care homes for elders were a big problem early on, but lately it seems to be a more general spread which is probably even harder to stem. I have not yet seen anyone try correlate socio-eoconomic status and/or overcrowding to infection in a nice way?
  - sandos 5y ago
    Actually it turns out our "CDC", folkhälsomyndigheten has a report on just these factors: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4ec4c25a0a59aac7aca14f0/utrikesfodda-och-covid-19.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4... Mostly in swedish.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
I think only looking at number of deaths from covid is a huge mistake. What about the quality of life of all of those who survived? A lockdown is no small thing. It's forcing millions of people into forced isolation, which has hard to forsee consequences for mental health and social development, means destroying innumerable small businesses, and with it, people's livelihoods, closing schools, with devastating effects to education [1], etc. Also worth noting that the initial projections for covid deaths in Sweden vastly over-estimated the pandemic's eventual lethality: https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-actual-covid-19-results-compared-to-what-modelers-predicted-in-april/ https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-actual-covid-19-results-co... [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis/charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal/30-to-40-percent-of-minority-and-low-income-students-werent-learning-during-lockdowns https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...

Closi 5y ago

Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below: * Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years. * If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost. If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct. If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.

michaelmrose 5y ago
Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater. I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  On the other hand, you have to consider people who were single and dating. They had a way worse last 18 months than those in a committed, cohabitating relationship.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    The larger point is that its impossible to objectively value other people's lives and any reasoning based on doing so is faulty.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I agree with that as precisely stated, but one can reasonably make subjective judgements (and indeed our politicians are doing so at the moment). If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!” It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.
    - Closi 5y ago
      Unless we make a judgement-call on value how can we balance taking away peoples freedoms over extending other peoples lives? Consider the following questions: * Would you accept 70 million people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years? * Would you accept 500 people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years? * Would you accept 5,000 people staying inside for a year to extend 10 peoples life by 10 years? * Would you stay inside for an hour to save another persons life by a year? * Would you stay inside for a year to save another person life by 1 year? These are the real questions that we have to answer, and they will absolutely (and unfortunately) need people to face into the question of the value of life. My personal answer to these questions is (in sequence) No, No, No, Yes, No. A reasonable person could answer completely different - there is no absolute right answer in any of these! We can pretend that the answer to these questions is impossible - but these are the real decisions that policy makers need to make. How much is someone's freedom worth compared to the life of a stranger?
gizmo385 5y ago
That comparison of life hours isn't valid though. There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. And that's not to mention the potential overwhelming of the healthcare system, resulting in many other lives being lost or severely impacted. People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.
- matvore 5y ago
  Imperfect comparison but still valid. All lives are eventually lost causing some grief. (If I may summarize what you've said) Saying that a large number of coincident deaths causes a collective grief that wouldn't have happened otherwise is rather subjective. I have felt nothing of the sort. I don't think it's enough of a concern to justify such an overreach of government power. Quantifying the value of life as a number is icky but necessary if you're making decisions of this scale.
- mikem170 5y ago
  > There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death. > People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation. I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns. These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing? [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-coronavirus-deaths-in-sweden-by-age-groups/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...

gpsx 5y ago

Your comment about counterfactuals reminds of a saying, or what I would call a more accurate version of a common saying - "Hindsight is 50/50". (Note, that doesn't make hindsight necessarily wrong, just difficult to have confidence in.)

ismaildonmez 5y ago
"Hindsight is 20/20" because perfect eyesight is 20/20: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/what-does-20-20-vision-mean https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/what-does-20-...
- Hamuko 5y ago
  20/20 is actually just normal vision, not perfect eyesight.
  - irrational 5y ago
    What is perfect vision? I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see. Would perfect vision being able to see everything in the electromagnetic spectrum? How big would one eyes need to be?
    - schoen 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Expression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Expression > Some birds of prey, such as hawks, are believed to have an acuity of around 20/2; in this respect, their vision is much better than human eyesight. The scale of how good vision can be keeps going and going indefinitely (presumably until you get into physical limitations to resolution related to wavelengths). While 20/20 is considered normal and not in need of correction, it doesn't mean it's the best vision observed among human beings, or the best that's physically possible (for human beings or other animals).
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      > What is perfect vision? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#Powers,_abilities,_and_weaknesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#Powers,_abilities,_an... > I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see. No, of course not. Try looking at Saturn at night. Then try looking through a telescope. Odds are you'll see it better with the aid.

jchook 5y ago

Notice the article doesn't mention countries where proper lockdown worked very well and took only around 100 days.

jmnicolas 5y ago
It's not like there are no adverse consequences to lockdowns : Tragedy: 1 MILLION more Brits have become alcoholics since Covid lockdowns began https://notthebee.com/article/nearly-1-million-more-brits-addicted-to-alcohol-since-covid-lockdowns-began- https://notthebee.com/article/nearly-1-million-more-brits-ad...
- duskwuff 5y ago
  Do you have any direct source for that statistic? The article that you've linked to is the Babylon Bee -- a site best known for their satire and fake articles -- lifting some infographics from an (uncited) article in the Daily Mail. Neither of these sources inspires confidence.
  - jmnicolas 5y ago
    Sorry I saw this circulate a few days ago and linked the first thing I found on DDG. I have no reason to think it's fake news.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      > I have no reason to think it's fake news. Very sound logic (/s)! With this sort of reasoning people invaded the Capitol on January 6th, because they were certain their country was about to be taken over by a Chinese-backed coup. Guess what, they also think what they heard was legitimate, and they think their reasoning work(ed) perfectly fine.
    - belltaco 5y ago
      Everything in Babylon Bee is 100% satire and fake. It's used as a fake news source by people wanting to spread misinformation.

yodsanklai 5y ago

Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland, even though they are neighbors. Also, being low population density is irrelevant (you could have a huge country with everybody crammed in a city, actually Stockholm is much denser than Oslo for instance). Also, even within a single country, fatality rates vary greatly. I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.

dijit 5y ago
> Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland Pedantic “every country is a different country” aside; Norway and Finland are absolutely fine comparatives. The population density (in the populated areas), culture and genetic make-up of these countries is so similar that they may as well be considered the same country socioeconomically. Hell, they used to even _be_ the same country (the union of Kalmar). I’ve lived in Finland and currently live in Sweden. As a British person I see more similarities than differences. (Language of Finland vs the Scandinavian languages not withstanding)
- yodsanklai 5y ago
  Your perception of a country doesn't make a scientific evidence on why Norway of Finland could be taken as reference point to assess Sweden strategy regarding Covid.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    You're the one asserting they're not comparable here, so please trot out some factors where Sweden is measurably different from its neighbors then.
    - yodsanklai 5y ago
      The pandemics is extremely complex. Fatality rates have looked very different in seemingly similar countries, and even within different areas of a single country. Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong. I do suspect Sweden would have had less fatality had they implemented a lockdown. Would it then be comparable to Norway? I wouldn't bet may life on it. France has almost twice as many covid death as Germany even though they implemented a much stricter lockdown. It seems some people hate Sweden for choosing their way to deal with the pandemics. Could have they done better otherwise? maybe, but overall, no cataclysm happened there, they did ok in terms of fatality compared to rest of Europe, and much better for the other metrics, as stated in the article.

Gwypaas 5y ago

Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? It is a completely irrelevant metric, lets include the Canadian arctic when calculating the density of Toronto and the effects of Covid, makes a whole lot of sense! A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density. "Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at which the average citizen lives. It is calculated by taking weighted average of the density of all parcels of land that make up a city, with each parcel weighted by its population" [0] By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741. [1] Concluding that Denmark did amazingly well given the cards they were dealt and Sweden is at the average of Europe due to very a urbanised population compared to the size of the country. [0]: https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-luisa-udp-pwd-ref2016 https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-luisa-udp-pwd-ref2... [1]: https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/LUISA/SecondaryOutput_Indicators/Europe/REF-2016/UDP/PWD/ https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/LUISA/Secon...

yyyk 5y ago
>Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? Because the effective Swedish population density is very low? The effective density is affected by household size, and about 40% of Swedes live alone without children[0]. Sweden had the biggest Corona infection vector neutered and still did horribly. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/526013/sweden-number-of-households-by-type/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/526013/sweden-number-of-...
mistrial9 5y ago
I suggest the measure density is a single value based on housing units and not the right measure to care about in itself. Instead look at public and private hygiene, isolation practices and incident response profiles, per hundred thousand or so.. not hectares per hundred thousand.
kybernetikos 5y ago
Sure, there're a lot of factors that can affect how disease spreads, like demographics, genetics, climate, health system, sociability, temperature, cafe culture, saunas, wfh incidence, international travel, travel links, tourism... I'm quite happy to accept that 'population density' is inadequate - I mention it only in passing in my comment, the point I'm making is that Sweden is not a country you would expect to perform at the european average, and given that, the most natural thing to do is to compare a country with its neighbors. Neighboring countries usually share many factors, and on top of that, they have a direct transmission effect too. Sweden did much worse than its neighbors. The explanation for that is either in the ways that Sweden is different from its neighbors, or in the difference in public policy. I certainly don't know which to blame, but I don't want to hear any more lionization of the Swedish approach that doesn't solidly get to grips with that question.

danjac 5y ago

The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios. On an average day you'll notice multiple anti-remote working articles parroted by Cabinet ministers. Why should they care how businesses conduct their business, especially if it's more convenient and can lead to a happier and more efficient workforce? Follow the money. It used to be - many years ago - a stodgy and conservative yet reputable newspaper (they fired Boris Johnson for lying, now he moonlights as a columnist). As with other newspapers (e.g. WSJ) it went off the deep end a long time ago.

corney91 5y ago
It was The Times that fired Boris Johnson for lying, The Telegraph hired him after that. They have gone off the deep end though. Some good coverage of The Telegraph's fall in standards is Peter Oborne's resignation letter: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-resigned-from-telegraph/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...
- hkt 5y ago
  It continues to astonish me how far the telegraph (and conservatism generally) has left people like Oborne behind. Really quite something to behold, and pretty deeply alarming.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Is there anyplace a conservative can find real news anymore?
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      Anywhere reputable. For example, I read the guardian pretty much everyday, and various other papers, even though although culturally I am a proper grauniad-reader type, politically I am not - but by virtue of actually reading the articles text you can actually (believe it or not?) determine both the facts and the flavour separately.

anigbrowl 5y ago

The Telegraph leans strongly conservative just as the Guardian leans strongly left. This seems like a very slanted article; it buries the mortality impact of CVOID until near the end. I seriously doubt that Norway would prefer to swap its ~10x lower death rate for Sweden's GDP numbers. Further: In a paper published last week in science journal Nature, Dr Bhatt, together with the UK's former government advisor Neil Ferguson and other researchers, estimated that if the UK had adopted Sweden’s policies, its death rate would have been between two and four times higher. "What Sweden did was a pandemic response that involved large numbers of interventions, a considerable amount of reliance on population behaviour and population adherence, and a reliance on the intricacies of what makes Swedish culture Swedish culture,” Dr Bhatt said. "If the UK had adopted what Sweden did, I have no doubt in my mind that it would have had an absolute disaster." ¯\(°_o)/¯ Notably, the Telegraph is not calling for people int he UK to be more like Swedes.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though? They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding. If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x. And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in Norway and 10 people died in Sweden, I don't think we'd be debating much. Even in Sweden, they did not have as many deaths as most other countries, and a lot of them were very early on.
- Jedd 5y ago
  > Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes ... If the data in the graph shared by kybernetikos is correct, the claim that 'it's all because of elder deaths in early 2020' seems to be misguided, given the 2021-01 peak, and the steady first-place position throughout the last ~18 months. https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

eckesicle 5y ago

In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that. Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times. The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart). It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat? I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms. In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.

yyyk 5y ago
>The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. It's called the 'dry tinder' hypothesis, and it isn't born out when researchers look at the data, e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34213362/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34213362/
- eckesicle 5y ago
  Thanks!
user-the-name 5y ago
> In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same. Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.

tpmx 5y ago

Swede here: It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this. I see two main failures: 1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up. 2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is where most deaths happened. Norway in particular handled this so much better. And of course we should compare ourselves to e.g. Denmark/Norway/Finland. I think the root cause of all this is that Sweden has not been involved in a war in a very long time, unlike our neighbors. We're pretty good when things are stable, but apparently awful when things are dynamic/shit is going down. Of course I have very specific opinions on what "actually" went wrong and why, but that would be too detailed to be useful here and also way too partisan.

Moru 5y ago
The biggest problem with the discussions on most subject is that everyone cherrypicks their data or just don't have whole picture. And this picture is a realy big one. For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?
zibzab 5y ago
I think you are forgetting two important facts that counter your arguments: 1. A significant number of Swedes were in Lombardy (northern Italy) at the time the European outbreak started there. Furthermore Sweden has at least two major companies with presence around Wuhan. So by the time government noticed the issue it was too late. 2. Elderly care employees in Sweden are basically gig workers, resulting in a huge rotation in care givers and further spreading of the virus. The Social Democrats (and the Left party V) have often been opposed to this. Two more things to consider: 1. This difference between Sweden and its neighbours is also clearly visible in the flu pattern over the year. It is simply due to different living and travelling conditions. 2. The municipalities are somewhat independent of the central government. Some with the highest death numbers among the elders where controlled by the opposition (e.g. Stockholm). So while the government could have done a MUCH better job, your comment is already fairly partisan by cherry picking or ignoring facts.

austhrow743 5y ago

The 1450 per million figure the article cites as the cost of covid to Sweden actually makes them look worse than your own data. It's not an article about the cost of covid though, its about the benefits of not fighting it as hard as other countries. It's very light on that, not much of an attempt to quantify and compare to the cost, but still props to it for even acknowledging that those benefits exist and count for something. The best write up I've seen so far on the topic is this [0] which concludes: > So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me. > Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh. [0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness-much-more https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

m4rtink 5y ago

When you want to see how bad it can get, see the Czech Republic in the top ten. We are land locked, quite high density and with a lot of neighbors with a lot of regular cross border traffic. There were lockdowns though arguably too late, chaotic and often ignored. End result ? 30000+ dead. Well, at least it looks like the ammount of people who got infected was quite massive as with only 50% vaccination rate right now things are not going back to hell so far, with hardly any precautions still in place.

IdontRememberIt 5y ago

This argument does not make sense. 1) +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area. (https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/environment/land-use/localities-and-urban-areas/pong/statistical-news/localities-and-urban-areas-2018/ https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... ) 2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image) 3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures. As many have said, one of the major factor was how the elderly in home facilities had been protected and the state of the medical infrastructure (rate of intense care beds per capita to handle the peaks for exemple). In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I’ve seen accusations in the US that people were being counted as Covid deaths that died “woth” Covid, and would have even without it - I have no idea if these accusations are true, just that probably-nonsense leads me to the question: Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?
- nl 5y ago
  Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years). By that comparison Sweden has done very badly compared to its peers. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?time=earliest..2021-08-01&country=SWE~NOR~FIN~DNK https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... As this very article says: However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach. The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.
  - 5y ago

bnralt 5y ago

It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.

tablespoon 5y ago
> It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies, and the best test for those policies is to compare like with like (e.g. other Nordic countries). When people compare US numbers to other countries, I feel that's from more of a "what did the US do wrong" angle, and those comparisons could surface differences that could be learned from.
- eCa 5y ago
  > Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without left/right tinted glasses.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    That is interesting. I would point out though that the truth does not always fit between the 'left' and 'right' views. The migration of the Overton window, capture of major media, and increased acceptance of social media censorship sailed away from truth some time ago.

nickthemagicman 5y ago

Stockholm has the population density of San Diego or Phoenix.

SeanLuke 5y ago
Stockholm has over four times the density of Phoenix.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  Thanks! My bad. I guess the point stands even stronger than before.

tamiral 5y ago

Where is the chart stat from ?

lettergram 5y ago

I’m looking at those numbers and the worst was Peru - 0.5% excess deaths. Am I the only one whos just thinking none of this matters? The reality is Sweden is doing an amazing job if there’s no lockdowns. Those lockdowns led to a massive increase in suicides[1], economic damage[2], inflation[3], massive increase in drug abuse[4], lost years in education[5]. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this virus would cause more harm. Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths (almost exclusively from people near end of life). What’s the damage in years of education lost, the drug abuse, homelessness, inflation pricing out homes for those who can work... long-term I expect Sweden will see lower deaths than any of the countries that locked down. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm [2] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/ [3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi [4] https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4846 https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID... [5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-report-reveals-100-000-pupils-failed-return-education-time.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-repor...

microtherion 5y ago
Your reference [1] does not talk about suicide, but suicide attempts, and to the extent it correlates with "lockdowns", it seems to directly contradict your claim: > Among adolescents aged 12–17 years, the number of weekly ED visits for suspected suicide attempts DECREASED DURING SPRING 2020 compared with that during 2019 [...] mean weekly number of ED visits for suspected suicide attempts were 22.3% HIGHER DURING SUMMER 2020 and 39.1% HIGHER DURING WINTER 2021 than during the corresponding periods in 2019 (Emphasis mine). So, during three phases of the COVID-19 epidemic, suicide attempts decreased during one, increased during two. The US was in nationwide lockdown during only one of these phases, which happens to be exactly the one where suicide attempts DECREASED. Source [2] talks about (indisputable) damage to the US economy, which you attribute to the (half assed) US lockdowns. But this is begging the question whether it was the lockdown rather than the epidemic which did the damage, and in fact, Sweden had a WORSE economic outcome than its neighbors. > Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-will-smell-taste-come-back-5-covid-19-questions-answered.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil... And even athletes in top physical condition can suffer debilitating consequences for indeterminate periods of time: https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31936050/lewis-hamilton-suspects-long-covid-dizzy-symptoms-hungarian-gp https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31936050/lewis-hamilton-s...

nl 5y ago

To add to this, the linked article itself says: However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach. The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.

akira2501 5y ago

> and it looks bad Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. This also fails to acknowledge that there might be a worthwhile set of cost:benefit ratios to compare your single data point against. > but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done. People accuse the COVID situation of being political and dividing people. I think one of the major lines of division is in the expectations that one has about their daily life in a given society, and how few some people have about their own. Each to their own, but the failure to acknowledge the validity of the opposing point of view, even in a polite tone, is a troubling development.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. I don't know about the US or Spain but the lockdown measures in the UK were halfhearted. Somehow we managed to have the worst of both worlds, the biggest economic hit in the OECD and the worst health outcomes.

nivenkos 5y ago

Sweden's neighbours have far less international travel, immigration, and urban population.

astrophysics 5y ago

A huge challenge in Norway, was that all our retired ethnic Pakistani people panicked and booked flights from Pakistan to Norway. They didn't trust that Pakistani hospitals would handle the pandemic. Sweden probably has a lot more foreign residents with swedish citizenship than Norway? Even though we have relatively few immigrants, at times, more than 50% of all the covid-infected belonged to these groups. https://www.p4.no/nyheter/over-halvparten-av-innlagte-er-innvandrere/artikkel/818564/ https://www.p4.no/nyheter/over-halvparten-av-innlagte-er-inn...

sandos 5y ago
I firmly believe that to be part of the answer, our "CDC" also said as much in 2020. Lots of clusters of infection popping up in parts of the population that lives very tightly and in large family groups, and those are predominantly immigrants and their kids. Im not sure how it looks in the third wave though. That and the care homes for elders were a big problem early on, but lately it seems to be a more general spread which is probably even harder to stem. I have not yet seen anyone try correlate socio-eoconomic status and/or overcrowding to infection in a nice way?
- sandos 5y ago
  Actually it turns out our "CDC", folkhälsomyndigheten has a report on just these factors: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4ec4c25a0a59aac7aca14f0/utrikesfodda-och-covid-19.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4... Mostly in swedish.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

I think only looking at number of deaths from covid is a huge mistake. What about the quality of life of all of those who survived? A lockdown is no small thing. It's forcing millions of people into forced isolation, which has hard to forsee consequences for mental health and social development, means destroying innumerable small businesses, and with it, people's livelihoods, closing schools, with devastating effects to education [1], etc. Also worth noting that the initial projections for covid deaths in Sweden vastly over-estimated the pandemic's eventual lethality: https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-actual-covid-19-results-compared-to-what-modelers-predicted-in-april/ https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-actual-covid-19-results-co... [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leading-through-the-crisis/charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal/30-to-40-percent-of-minority-and-low-income-students-werent-learning-during-lockdowns https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...