7 ms·

Sweden 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

by zibzab 5y ago

Sweden 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 ago
And 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 ago
  Lockdowns 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).
    - annexrichmond 5y ago
      https://globalnews.ca/news/7757913/cherry-blossoms-high-park-toronto/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7757913/cherry-blossoms-high-park... > During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering. to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-ski-hill-opening-day-capacity-limits-1.6270384 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-ski-... > Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup could be much worse than in the US.
    - xg15 5y ago
      It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just because those particular places have an increased risk of infection but also to stop people from traveling to and from those places. I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk. I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Nobody has ever dealt with these problems before in living memory there are far too many unknowns, and there are very serious consequences i.e. death, hospitals overflowing, staff shortages, it's a very real emergency. If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers, it's visceral. It's managed chaos at best. Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same time encouraged people to 'get out'. But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but if we can bring a national emergency down to something more bearable, so be it. If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to get outdoors).
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >" People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes" This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns. What was discouraged is big companies having party in the parks. I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking from experience.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    "Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear?" ??? If you look at the data fro Our World in Data you see exponential spikes, implying any group facing them is on the precipice of disaster. The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm. That for a few weeks 'you couldn't go to the park' is relevant, but not hugely material, neither is that they caused a bit of fear. The 'no parks' bit is maybe an excessive feature taken in an emergency context but it's not a big deal. Whatever we want to call them and whatever the mechanism, they were mostly useful.
    - annexrichmond 5y ago
      I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were). And that was my point -- such people may be less inclined to follow certain guidelines in later phases of the pandemic. > The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm. I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't been locked down at all with zero mandates since last June and while it's certainly not rainbows, it's not nearly "untold harm" either. Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?
      - jollybean 5y ago
        "I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were)" 'That you can't visit some parks' is not material in the face of the fact that you 1) cannot go to work 2) cannot gather with people 3) must wear a mask 4) cannot go to restaurants or cinemas 5) numerous other restrictions and especially 6) Must stay at home unless you have a reason to leave. Most of those restrictions are legitimate in the fact of a drastic spike in COVID cases, which makes the 'Don't Go To A Park' a footnote in that context. "The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes" -> "But Florida didn't have Lockdowns" "Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!" Every situation is a bit different, and the data is not perfectly clear, but the evidence points to 'the total social changes due to lockdowns' do actually work, moreover, none of that was known in May 2020. We had no examples but the crisis in China and Europe back then. Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason even if they erred a bit too much on the side of caution here and there. 'That we cold not go to parks' just isn't very relevant. If we have to do another lockdown, we will probably be able to go to the park.
matsemann 5y ago
Sweet spot being 3-5x as many deaths as Norway/Denmark/Finland?
- danans 5y ago
  The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though. 1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse for Sweden than its neighbors.
  - op00to 5y ago
    Why would the rate be higher in higher population countries?
    - danans 5y ago
      That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population - but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden. The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population. The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates
  - ajross 5y ago
    That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure how effectively a nation's health care system treated infections. Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors: https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=highlight-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=Norway%2CFinland%2CDenmark%2CUnited%20States&extraData=&extraDataScale=#countries-normalized https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
kgwgk 5y ago
With "big gatherings" being defined as 50 people.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
A sweet spot, were the elderly first were not properly protected, and then euthanized instead of given at least a treatment effort? Not even C-Pap, just panic-relieve and pain-medication. Not even given a choice, just scratched out of the book by politics. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG It was a reckless betrayal of the elderly population of sweden. I'm all for the freedom of self-euthanization, if a person longs for that and no, this can not be compared with what went down. Which can be best described as a remnant from a horrific pre-worldwar 2 "survival of the fittest" mindset being dragged into the light.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

by zibzab 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

And 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 ago
Lockdowns 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).
  - annexrichmond 5y ago
    https://globalnews.ca/news/7757913/cherry-blossoms-high-park-toronto/ https://globalnews.ca/news/7757913/cherry-blossoms-high-park... > During a news conference at Toronto city hall Wednesday afternoon, Mayor John Tory said the three main concentrations of cherry blossoms at High Park would be fenced off to “discourage” people from gathering. to be fair the park closures might not have been as general as I made it sound in my original comment but there were definitely some degree of closure of parks in addition to general sentiment of people being afraid to even go outside https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-ski-hill-opening-day-capacity-limits-1.6270384 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/horseshoe-resort-ski-... > Ontario ski resorts were closed for seven weeks from Christmas Day 2020 through to February of this year. Ontario was the only jurisdiction in North America to close its slopes, according to the Canadian Ski Council. The province had said the closures were needed out of an abundance of caution and at a time when cases were soaring and vaccines were new.
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    I think it actually took quite a while for outdoor safety to be firmly established. Canada was meanwhile having a very hard time sourcing medical supplies (and eventually also vaccines), meaning there was fear that a real blowup could be much worse than in the US.
  - xg15 5y ago
    It isn't. Closing off certain places isn't done just because those particular places have an increased risk of infection but also to stop people from traveling to and from those places. I live in western Germany. Home office mandates in my country were for a large part to stop people from commuting in crowded trains every day, even if their actual workplace might not have had a high infection risk. I live near a busy shopping street. Back in march 20, there was a blanket order to close everything in that street - cafes, malls, mom&pop shops, etc. The street consequently was deserted for a few months. Later, restrictions got more targeted, with an overall goal to keep untested and unvaccinated persons out. And this may lower the infection risks for individual stores, but I can just observe that the street itself is as busy again as before the pandemic.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Nobody has ever dealt with these problems before in living memory there are far too many unknowns, and there are very serious consequences i.e. death, hospitals overflowing, staff shortages, it's a very real emergency. If part of your job is to sit there and watch the numbers come in, and hear the reports fro the Health Officers, it's visceral. It's managed chaos at best. Personally, the 'no parks' thing was a bit much, and they should have encouraged 'strong distancing' at the same time encouraged people to 'get out'. But lockdowns are ham-fisted and crude in every way but if we can bring a national emergency down to something more bearable, so be it. If COVID strikes again this winter, hopefully we can be more nuanced about it (i.e. probably encourage people to get outdoors).
- FpUser 5y ago
  >" People weren't even allowed to go to parks or hikes" This is total BS. I live in Toronto and I've never seen so many people in parks as I have during COVID lockdowns. What was discouraged is big companies having party in the parks. I cycled every day in various Toronto's parks so speaking from experience.
- jollybean 5y ago
  "Are unreasonably strict lockdowns a good idea? Does it drive unnecessary fear?" ??? If you look at the data fro Our World in Data you see exponential spikes, implying any group facing them is on the precipice of disaster. The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm. That for a few weeks 'you couldn't go to the park' is relevant, but not hugely material, neither is that they caused a bit of fear. The 'no parks' bit is maybe an excessive feature taken in an emergency context but it's not a big deal. Whatever we want to call them and whatever the mechanism, they were mostly useful.
  - annexrichmond 5y ago
    I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were). And that was my point -- such people may be less inclined to follow certain guidelines in later phases of the pandemic. > The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes and prevented untold harm. I don't think that is definitively true. Florida hasn't been locked down at all with zero mandates since last June and while it's certainly not rainbows, it's not nearly "untold harm" either. Did it "kill spikes" or just delay them to some degree?
    - jollybean 5y ago
      "I think it's material if people felt certain rules were invasive (which they were)" 'That you can't visit some parks' is not material in the face of the fact that you 1) cannot go to work 2) cannot gather with people 3) must wear a mask 4) cannot go to restaurants or cinemas 5) numerous other restrictions and especially 6) Must stay at home unless you have a reason to leave. Most of those restrictions are legitimate in the fact of a drastic spike in COVID cases, which makes the 'Don't Go To A Park' a footnote in that context. "The lockdowns decisively killed the spikes" -> "But Florida didn't have Lockdowns" "Hey, I didn't wear a seatbelt, and I have never been hurt in an accident!" Every situation is a bit different, and the data is not perfectly clear, but the evidence points to 'the total social changes due to lockdowns' do actually work, moreover, none of that was known in May 2020. We had no examples but the crisis in China and Europe back then. Given a state of emergency in the early stages of COVID, the close downs were within reason even if they erred a bit too much on the side of caution here and there. 'That we cold not go to parks' just isn't very relevant. If we have to do another lockdown, we will probably be able to go to the park.

matsemann 5y ago

Sweet spot being 3-5x as many deaths as Norway/Denmark/Finland?

danans 5y ago
The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though. 1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse for Sweden than its neighbors.
- op00to 5y ago
  Why would the rate be higher in higher population countries?
  - danans 5y ago
    That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population - but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden. The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population. The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates
- ajross 5y ago
  That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure how effectively a nation's health care system treated infections. Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors: https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=highlight-only&y=both&scale=linear&data=deaths&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=Norway%2CFinland%2CDenmark%2CUnited%20States&extraData=&extraDataScale=#countries-normalized https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

kgwgk 5y ago

With "big gatherings" being defined as 50 people.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

A sweet spot, were the elderly first were not properly protected, and then euthanized instead of given at least a treatment effort? Not even C-Pap, just panic-relieve and pain-medication. Not even given a choice, just scratched out of the book by politics. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2841CG It was a reckless betrayal of the elderly population of sweden. I'm all for the freedom of self-euthanization, if a person longs for that and no, this can not be compared with what went down. Which can be best described as a remnant from a horrific pre-worldwar 2 "survival of the fittest" mindset being dragged into the light.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]