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"open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early" It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the effects of covid-lockdow
by lbj 5y ago
"open everything up despite it being relatively clear it was way too early"
It probably wasn't. There have been 2 major studies on the effects of covid-lockdown measures, they show a small increase in total mortality. So we should have done as the Swedes and kept everything open from beginning to end.
- howinteresting 5y agoMortality isn't the only negative outcome.
- bobthechef 5y agoIndeed, and the lockdown and other impositions have introduced numerous ills that don't necessarily register, at least not immediately, as deaths.
- spookthesunset 5y agoWhat about all the negative outcomes from continuing all the restrictions?
- xg15 5y agoStill less severe than long covid, sorry.
- adolph 5y agoPersistence of various symptoms in people who recovered from COVID-19 (collectively called Long COVID) is a major health issue worldwide. It could be due to various mechanisms such as post-intensive care syndrome, post-viral fatigue syndrome, permanent organ damage or others. Proper clinical evaluation will help identify the etiology, and to customize treatment. As the disease is new, it is too early to know the true long-term outlook. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8056514/
- howinteresting 5y agoI think mask mandates and ratcheting up the pressure to get vaccinated is a far better use of the "restriction budget" than full lockdowns on the entire population, yes. Lockdowns on people who aren't yet vaccinated by choice seem pretty great to me.
- spookthesunset 5y agoWhy should a vaccinated person wear a mask? Do vaccines not work? What is the point of getting one if I still have to wear a mask? Naw. Masks need to go away.
- howinteresting 5y agoIt's not binary.
- _djo_ 5y agoBecause all of these things work at population level, not necessarily at an individual level. Masks reduce the amount of aerosols a person emits, thereby reducing the distance and amount of viral particles an infected person can spread in any given situation. As a side benefit some masks protect the wearer to an extent, particularly N95s, but the main purpose is to reduce spread from infected people in the first place. Vaccines, similarly, are not a magic shield that protect you from even getting COVID. Instead, they dramatically reduce your likelihood of getting severely ill and being hospitalised and reduce the duration of disease therefore also reducing transmission. But that only works if enough people are vaccinated that the cumulative effect of that reduced transmission can meaningfully bring down the R0 value. This pandemic has exposed how few people are able to consider issues or questions at a broader community level versus merely how it affects them directly.
- ipaddr 5y agoYour living in delta but the vaccine doesn't help as much in this new variant era. That means lockdowns for all. Still sound great?
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- hogFeast 5y agoAnd lockdowns can cause mortality too. In England, the waiting list for operations (these are procedures that a doctor has determined are required medically, some are elective but England doesn't do many electives because of cost) is expected to hit 12m in a few years...the total adult population in England is 56m. Ignoring the economic turmoil that they cause, ignoring the social turmoil. There are no very good choices. But the high cost of lockdowns should dictate that they only be used when the alternative is extremely large numbers of people dying (at least in the UK, this was probably met at some point last year but hasn't been met for the majority of the Covid period).
- Pyramus 5y agoHow many people is "extremely large" in your opinion? And who? Or to put it another way: Would you be okay to go, while we keep everything open? How about your parent, or grand-parent?
- jseban 5y agoIsn't this exactly what measuring excess mortality is for? But it's not reported anymore since there is none, and media has instead shifted to infection rate. If you were old and had little time left, and had a compromised immune system that made any slight infection possibly lethal, and you had the choice to close down society to lower your risk of infection, would you do it?
- _djo_ 5y agoWhat? There has been significant excess mortality, as summarised here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-... My own country alone has seen nearly 300 000 excess deaths compared to the annual average, with the waves of excess deaths neatly tracking those of known COVID infection waves.
- jseban 5y agoThis is exactly the problem, you're using an absolute number without reference "look big number = scary" and you are simply comparing to an average, which doesn't say anything about whether or not this is an unusual or especially different situation. "The temperature outside is 2 degrees higher than average". Ok what conclusions can you draw from that? Very little. Just because you make a big scary number without reference, doesn't allow you to jump to a conclusion out of fear, it's just manipulative misleading misinterpretation to make it look as scary as possible, to disable people's critical thinking and support a point that actually doesn't have any basis.
- boringg 5y agoYou should add Mortality + mortality in the following year. Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year.
- lbj 5y agoInteresting, I did not know. Have a source?
- user764743 5y agohttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-infection-doubles-chances-of-dying-in-following-year-study https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/01/severe-covid-i...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- JoshuaDavid 5y ago> Studies coming out that people who survived severe covid had over twice the risk of dying within the next year. I'm curious how those studies would disentangle the effect of "COVID damages your health, and severe COVID damages your health more so you're more likely to die in the next year" from the effect of "if you are in worse general health, a COVID infection is more likely to be severe, and also you are more likely to die in the next year". Even if you try to control for factors like age, sex, smoker vs nonsmoker, BMI, etc etc you're likely to miss something. But maybe they did something clever with their control group that serves as a good proxy for "people who would have had severe covid and survived, but didn't get infected". I'm interested to see which study you're referring to.
- boringg 5y agoAgree there are disentangling challenges. However if you think about it logically from a health perspective - if your respiratory system goes under severe stress that will likely exacerbate any respiratory issues that were in your system beforehand. It is surprising that the risk is so great for the following year, but not shocking considering how taxing this disease is on peoples health. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-covid-tied-high-risk-death-mostly-other-causes-within-year https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/12/severe-c...
- Eelongate 5y agoIf the plan is to continue lockdowns until every last hypochondriac stops complaining about 'long covid', then lockdowns will never end. There needs to be a cutoff somewhere.
- airza 5y agoAs far as I know, the latest research says that more than half (!) of people experience fatigue and other symptoms after 6 months. I don’t know if lockdowns are the right solution, but if the modal outcome is chronic fatigue than it seems a little flippant to call someone a hypochondriac.
- arsome 5y agoA vague symptom like "fatigue" is also one of the most commonly reported symptoms of placebos.
- Eelongate 5y agoWhen people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And anecdotally, every last person I personally know that claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a hypochondriac. I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.
- xg15 5y ago> When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. Source?
- leesalminen 5y agohttps://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
- zibzab 5y agoSweden did not keep _everything_ open. We found a sweet spot between "business as usual" and "everybody stays at home". For example, big gatherings and sport events were not allowed. Schools were open only for younger kids.
- jollybean 5y agoAnd by 'Sweet Spot' we mean a materially higher death rate than immediate peers ... The lockdowns were imminently effective. In Canada, when we had big waves, we shut things down, the wave faded, we opened up gradually, if another wave hit we cloistered again and the numbers came down. If you look at 'Our World in Data' graphs you can see any number of 'spikes' for various countries, most of which were handled with lock-downs, which brought numbers down drastically. Here you go [1] In almost every case when there is a spike up, there are serious measures put in place, and the spike comes down. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases https://ourworldindata.org/covid-cases
- annexrichmond 5y agoLockdowns in Canada were ridiculous, particularly in Ontario. People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. My parents couldn't drive to their cabin up north in fear of being ticketed. My mom was telling me a story of her colleague's husband who resented her for going to work because he thought she was going to get him killed. Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear? What if it causes more people to disregard rules later on?
- throw10920 5y ago> People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes. If this is true, it's some pretty impressive science denialism - it's pretty obvious that there's an extremely low chance of transmission outdoors (assuming that you're not, you know, breathing right into someone's face, or next to 20k people in a stadium).
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- santoshalper 5y agoThe Swedes wore their masks and got vaccinated. What worked for them would not necessarily have worked for us.
- rightbyte 5y ago> The Swedes wore their masks No such thing happened. Cumulative death per 100k for Sweden in Covid is about 1500, compared to 1750 for France and 1200 for Germany. And far worse then the neighbouring countries. I would not say anything "worked" but rather that the policies were not worse than other bad policies. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~IND~SWE~FRA~DNK https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
- arthur_sav 5y agoSuch a relief to live in Sweden. No one is pretending to wear masks and we're doing just fine. If i wasn't reading the news i wouldn't even know there was a pandemic. As opposed to the rest of EU where everyone is pretending to wear masks but only as chin diapers.
- 13415 5y agoYou get used to wearing masks very fast and it's no big deal. They can be inconvenient. So what. Independently of the question whether masks are needed or not, it's bizarre and unreasonable that people still get heated about this topic. There are plenty of things worth discussing other than minor inconveniences like wearing masks or washing hands.
- fvdessen 5y agoI personally don't think wearing masks are a minor inconvenience, and never got used to it. I like to see people's faces.
- user-the-name 5y agoSweden had mortality rates nearly 10x those of their neighbours.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throw20211202 5y agoNot really, though: * Sweden: 1,485 * Denmark: 500 * Finland: 244 * Norway: 199 * Iceland (not really a neighbour, being a 1000 miles away, accross an ocean): 102 Some more random cherrypicking: * USA: 2,414 * Italy: 2,221 * Belgium: 2,322 * UK: 2,124 * Russia: 1,901 * Peru: 5,984 Deaths per million capita, as of 2nd december 2021, from[1]. [1] All numbers from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- user-the-name 5y agoPretty sure 1485 is nearly 10x 199.
- ajvs 5y agoYou said "neighbours", when in reality you mean "one neighbouring country".
- user-the-name 5y agoWhat useless nitpicking. How does that affect the actual argument in any way?
- 1cvmask 5y agoSweden has the highest density pockets of all of them. Meanwhile Norway has more fjords than people.
- ch4s3 5y agoThe VAST majority of deaths there are people over 70, and Sweden like the US warehouses old people in cramped retirement homes where the virus can spread rapidly regardless of the public health approach outside. Their deaths fell off precipitously once vaccines got to the old. The lesson here seems to be that nursing homes probably cause some amount of excess mortality, and need special attention during epidemics/pandemics.
- GVIrish 5y agoSweden did worse than the other Scandinavian countries that enacted stricter Covid restrictions, including lockdowns. Sweden had roughly 5-7x as many deaths per capita as its immediate neighbors of Norway and Finland. Germany had less deaths per capita as well: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- jseban 5y agoAnd what is expected deaths per capita? That relative measure is irrelevant unless you compare it to some kind of normal death rate in the past. Are you expecting deaths per capita to drastically drop and be kept much lower from 2020 and forward, compared to the past?
- mythrwy 5y agoI'll be curious to know what these numbers are in 5 years.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomohawk 5y agoWhat is this obsession with limiting comparison of Sweden with "other scandanavian countries"? Is there some sort of special risk factor that only applies to scandanavia? Does COVID know what people look like? Why not compare stats of major metro areas with other similar metro areas in the world?
- mijamo 5y agoBecause the density of the metro areas are similar. Stockholm is not comparable to Paris or London when it comes to density for instance. Culture is also very similar between Scandinavian countries and much different from western Europe, with people much more isolated (which is tough to adjust to for immigrants there actually).
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- xg15 5y agoWhat exactly do those studies compare? How countries without lockdown coped in the same wave? Lockdowns were called because hospitals were at capacity and immediate risk of failing to keep up service - as is currently again the case e.g in Germany. Remember, the first lockdowns in Europe were mandated after hospitals in Italy were forced to conduct triage. (The "who do I have to let die" kind of triage) Why did that not happen in whatever control groups the studies were looking at?
- standardUser 5y agoIf Swedish hospitals exceeded capacity as has happened in other nations (like the US) then there would have been more severe restrictions. The name of the game is and always has been "don't let this very contagious virus collapse our healthcare systems". The "we should have never shut anything down" contingent doesn't seem to understand this.
- oezi 5y agoNo, we should have strived to get everyone vaccinated (by making it mandatory) and then this pandemic would be over in Europe. "Opening up" would have killed more people than it killed in the UK. The people driving this wave, who are getting seriously ill and dying are the unvaccinated.
- ipaddr 5y agoHow would you enforce this mandatory vaccine? Would you go as far as killing the unvaccinated?
- oezi 5y agoLike you enforce anything: by passing a law which makes it mandatory, by introducing a fine and by assigning somebody to monitor it. It is not going to be a crime to be unvaccinated just a lot more inconvenient.