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Why No One Wants to Talk About Sweden
- malchow 4y agohttps://archive.ph/IuL3p https://archive.ph/IuL3p
- infamouscow 4y agoThe history books will not be kind to those that supported lockdowns, nor should they be.
- brodouevencode 4y agoNow that history persists in just about as raw, unadulterated of a form as possible (archived print, video, audio) I would like to see pointed, in-depth analysis of those times in history that were truly inflection points - what did we get right and what did we get wrong? Pull directly from the opinion pieces and headlines from X number of years ago and look at it from a critical eye. People have such short term memory that it would be beneficial to revisit these things.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoAs well, I would like to see a comparison between a nation's media consumption, and their use of masks and lockdowns. There's a meme going around of why the Amish did not suffer as badly from COVID-19, and the punchline is that they don't have television.
- JohnDeHope 4y agoThere was one meme that struck me as perfectly captioned. A circa 60s image of a person's arms throwing a TV out an upper story window, with the tag line "first step to fight coronavirus".
- 1270018080 4y ago
- jokethrowaway 4y agoAll lockdowns are a violation of our freedom. Just because you're punching me instead of shooting me, it doesn't mean you're not assaulting me.
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 4y agoI'm assuming you are talking about the US... which freedoms were violated?
- nradov 4y agoThe freedom of peaceable assembly, as mentioned in the 1st Amendment.
- PpEY4fu85hkQpn 4y agoHow was this violated?
- antisinguIarity 4y agoWhich part of the US do you live in, where you had a wonderfully short 2 week lockdown?
- infamouscow 4y ago> I honestly have to chuckle at the delusional victim complex people have to give themselves as some kind of validation for their beliefs. Okay, jackass. If you're going to say something so incendiary, I'm going to assume your feelings apply consistently across all issues. Things like racism, sexism, transgender rights, climate, and others that don't immediately come to mind. After all, if you're so cavalier in dismissing the pain of other humans on one problem, it stands to reason you're as cold regarding other problems. At the very least, this makes you insensitive. On the other end, you're unwelcome here and you should fuck off.
- AnEro 4y agoYou should look at what we did for the spanish flu before you get all high and mighty about your history take
- Bombthecat 4y agoYou mean what people did? They kept doing parties in empty houses.
- antisinguIarity 4y agoOur response to Covid will be recorded as one of the largest outbreaks of mass hysteria in history.
- tablespoon 4y ago> The history books will not be kind to those that supported lockdowns, nor should they be. The history books won't be kind to the people who resisted them either. IMHO, if this era has any particular significance at all, it will be a story of a crack up before a long term, shambolic decline. The future belongs to the societies that can come together. If this were the 40s, the lock-down resisters would be agitating against rationing instead of mending and making do and collecting stuff for scrap metal drives.
- jgrahamc 4y agoI flew from Portugal to Sweden during 2020 and it was a very strange feeling. Masks on the plane all the way to Stockholm and then... nothing. Swedes were going about their business as usual.
- sharemywin 4y agoSweden should be compared to other Nordic countries with similar demographics etc. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/12/what-have-norway-finland-and-denmark-got-right-on-covid-19 https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/12/what-have-norway-...
- jokethrowaway 4y agoIf we judge from a years of life saving perspective, Sweden picked the correct tradeoff: a few more deaths (mostly elderly) and no infringements on the freedom of the rest of the population. We still haven't fully paid the cost of the lockdowns, from an economic and mental health point of view.
- eesmith 4y ago> and no infringements on the freedom of the rest of the population. Here are some of the restrictions in Sweden, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden : ] The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate. ... From early 2021 amidst a surge in cases, new legislation was passed limiting visitors to venues, enacting international travel restrictions, banning nursing home visits and closing secondary schools and universities. ... Vaccine passports and other measures were introduced in December 2021. ] Alcohol sales were banned after 10pm, gatherings were limited to a maximum of eight people and some schools switched to online learning in response ] a requirement for vaccine passports for gatherings of over 500 people were introduced in December 2021 Don't know where you live, but in the US, these are considered infringements of freedom.
- AggroVanGogh 4y agoAside: the page design of the original link and this New Statesman one are almost enough to prevent me from reading the articles at all; constant skipping when trying to scroll backwards, or incessant pop-ups and insertions. Banning digital advertising feels like more of an obvious public good every day.
- AnEro 4y agoObviously just looking at numbers without context of differences between Sweden and other countries it looks bad... There's other really well written articles from PHDs about how their model literally would only work in Sweden. The author is only bestseller of a book based on their experience not a perspective from someone trying to approach it like an academic as far as I can tell.
- AIorNot 4y agoWell regarding the Western response to COVID and “lockdowns” - Tell this story to doctors and nurses in wards where young people died gasping for breath (so many I personally know of) - of course we needed to lockdown Insane that a contagious disease directly killed over 50,000 young people (under age 50) in the usa alone and we are still debating if our lockdown response was disproportionate? It’s simple - people were dying who should not normally be were and the medical community was overwhelmed - we needed to lockdown untill a we knew that an effective vaccine worked or the effective transmission rate declined, or the virus mutated into a safer variant Wars and terrorism killed far less and the impact was far greater as well https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- antisinguIarity 4y agoYou personally know many young people who died, gasping for breath? I'm so sorry. However - you can't argue that "we need to lockdown to stop Covid until it mutates". In fact, until recently, the argument I was commonly presented with was "we NEED to vaccinate everyone and keep restrictions so it DOESN'T mutate into a deadlier version!" Saying that, hard to imagine a deadlier version than the horrible monstrosity that stalked our deserted streets in early 2020.
- thawaya3113 4y agoOmicron and Delta were both more deadly and more contagious than the early 2020 versions of COVID, so you don’t need to imagine. It was only the prevalence of vaccinations that prevented things from getting much worse. As far as the unvaccinated were concerned, the impact was devastating.
- antisinguIarity 4y ago>Omicron and Delta were both more deadly Just goes to show the difference in public messaging. Where I live, all the headlines said that Omicron and Delta were less deadly (but more contagious). Then again, Delta arrived here just as the vaccination campaign was starting, so where were not many column inches left to discuss the new variant. >so you don’t need to imagine. I sure do. I have yet to meet anyone who's had more than flu-like symptoms with any strain of Covid, and I doubt my experience is particularly unique.
- bjornsing 4y agoThis Johan Anderberg is a complete crank. He spent much of the pandemic with state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and his predecessor Johan Giesecke, who gave him access so that he could write a book. It’s some kind of weird bromance between the three of them. Fact is that Johan Giesecke was completely wrong about almost every epidemiologically important property of SARS-CoV-2. I documented his delusions here already in April 2020: http://www.openias.org/swedens-covid19-strategy http://www.openias.org/swedens-covid19-strategy
- rurban 4y agoYou are equally wrong on your rant. The 90% asymptotic figure was long established, and still is true.
- bjornsing 4y agoBullshit. “By analyzing over 350 studies, we estimate that the percentage of infections that never developed clinical symptoms, and thus were truly asymptomatic, was 35.1% (95% CI: 30.7 to 39.9%).” (1) Anders Tegnell claimed on 2020-03-26 that 95-97% “will hardly notice their decease” (2). 1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109229118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109229118 2. https://twitter.com/karimjebari/status/1243623795253968902?s=21&t=j29sv3z0z-p4h7lW6h9T4w https://twitter.com/karimjebari/status/1243623795253968902?s...
- cutler 4y agoNo mention of the article's subject matter - Sweden - until paragraph 6. Sorry, you lost me.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoI doesn't seem to be true that "No one wants to talk about Sweden". There's been a fair amount of talk recently on the topic, e.g. Scathing evaluation of Sweden's COVID response reveals 'failures' to control the virus https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scathing-evaluation-swedens-covid-response-reveals-failures-control/story?id=83644832 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scathing-evaluation-swedens-co... "Sweden's record is disastrous" https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-covid-policy-was-a-disaster https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-cov... "Study details COVID's toll on essential workers, health workers in Sweden" https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/04/study-details-covids-toll-essential-workers-health-workers https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/04/study-de... "Sweden’s Deadly COVID Failure" https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/06/Sweden-Deadly-COVID-Failure/ https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/06/Sweden-Deadly-COVID-F... Dispute the conclusions all you want .. but they are talking.
- hitovst 4y agoPeople must learn that everything is a pretense. It might also be something else, but everything will be used as a pretense.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- powerslacker 4y ago> In the US, the average guess in mid-July was that 9% of the population had died. We need some studies on how bad the average American is at guesswork. 9% is an incredibly bad guess.
- bilirubin 4y ago
- karmakaze 4y agoIt's easy to say things in retrospect after a risky gamble ended up being not as bad as feared. Sweden's neighbours fared better. I'm glad for how things we're handled in Canada, except that I wish we'd locked down sooner and harder at the start of subsequent waves. I also welcome many of the changes that were accelerated, notably working from home and elimination or simplification of many fees and services. Having hand sanitizer everywhere is also great for cold/flu seasons too.
- ohiovr 4y agoIn the 1980s we were told that if you were in a group that you are unable to question the authority of, you were in a cult.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y agoHow times change, in an information-rich environment. In the 2020s, if someone tells you to disbelieve every expert all the time, because "what to they know?" then that's cult-like behaviour.
- dzhiurgis 4y agoConflating unable with incapable
- thawaya3113 4y agoSweden’s death toll is at least twice as much as all it’s comparable neighbors and it’s economy was the worst performing of the lot. There is no point comparing Sweden to “at least 56 countries that did worse” because Sweden is a highly advanced society with excellent healthcare infrastructure (poor healthcare infrastructure is very strongly correlated with worse outcomes). Sweden’s entire original approach (which they changed, btw, after which their death rate plummeted) was based on a single fallacy. That asymptomatic people did not spread COVID. Unfortunately, since Tegnell refused to initially believe this, which led to a lot of deaths, he doubled down until the evidence for asymptomatic spread became too strong to ignore, at which point Sweden also did change their approach, and incorporated lockdowns, etc into the mix of tools that they used. Of course, by that point our understanding of COVID was much better, testing was far more prevalent and widespread, efc. So lockdowns we’re not really necessary outside of rare circumstances.