4 ms·

A study investigating the causes of the discrepancy: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-07169-7 https://bmchealthservres.bi

A study investigating the causes of the discrepancy: https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-021-07169-7 https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/... > An early response to Covid-19, including borders’ controls and a strong test and trace capacity, could improve epidemiological surveillance and minimize excess mortality, with stringent and lengthy lockdowns not providing a significant benefit.

nradov 4y ago
Some of those claims are a bit silly, at least for the USA, since we have never had secure border controls. And actually securing the border was never a realistic proposition during the early phase of the pandemic. And the part about a strong test and trace capability is obviously nonsense. That didn't work in any of the countries that tried, except previous perhaps in China where the government is able to exercise a level of totalitarian control worse than any virus. It's disappointing that this kind of unrealistic garbage makes it though peer review.
xeyownt 4y ago
The paper doesn't investigate the causes of the discrepancy, but only the causes of the excess mortality, ie. why are there so many deaths due to Covid, not why there are so many more deaths than those actually reported. As for the cited part of the conclusion, this is silly in practice. Obviously not letting in any infectious case would be much better, but when that happens, which always does in practice, the stringent lockdowns are only solution left until you get everyone vaccinated. So it's like comparing apple to orange.
- wang_li 4y ago
  Stringent lock downs are not the only solution. Sweden had an extremely light touch with very few restrictions, were heavily shit on for their “mishandling” of Covid, but as of now they have the lowest cumulative excess deaths percentage of all the OECD during the Covid era.
  - welterde 4y ago
    Do you have a source for the claim of lowest cumulative excess deaths percentage of all of the OECD? Because as far as I can tell [1] there are a couple countries, such as Japan or New Zealand that have done quite a bit better. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
    - wang_li 4y ago
      This article among many others that can be found online: https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/08/sweden-wins-country-that-refused-lockdown-and-kept-schools-open-has-lowest-pandemic-cumulative-excess-mortality-in-the-world/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/08/sweden-wins-country-that... Data comes from: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676 https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676
      - welterde 4y ago
        Quite a large difference in excess deaths compared to the other study with New Zealand being especially striking (+6588 from the OECD study vs -440 in the economist one). The analysis code and description for the study I linked to can be found here [1], which is always nice to see. And browsing through different scientific studies on excess deaths I see negative values for NZ much more often than positive values (see for example [2]), so I am thinking that the OECD study is more of an outlier here (see [3] for a meta-analysis). [1] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track... [2] https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336.pdf https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336.pdf [3] https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/vaccines/vaccines-10-01702/article_deploy/vaccines-10-01702-v2.pdf?version=1665646646 https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/vaccines/vaccines-10-01702...
        ghaff 4y ago
        The striking thing about The Economist list is that, while you can point to various data points and come up with a rationale why one might be low or another might be high (e.g. NZ is a small island nation that pretty much closed its borders). overall there really isn't much of a pattern. What is it about the Balkans that puts them towards the top of the list? Why did Lithuania fare significantly worse than Estonia? And while Sweden did a bit worse than Norway and Denmark, it did better than Finland in terms of excess deaths percentage.

nradov 4y ago

Some of those claims are a bit silly, at least for the USA, since we have never had secure border controls. And actually securing the border was never a realistic proposition during the early phase of the pandemic. And the part about a strong test and trace capability is obviously nonsense. That didn't work in any of the countries that tried, except previous perhaps in China where the government is able to exercise a level of totalitarian control worse than any virus. It's disappointing that this kind of unrealistic garbage makes it though peer review.

xeyownt 4y ago

The paper doesn't investigate the causes of the discrepancy, but only the causes of the excess mortality, ie. why are there so many deaths due to Covid, not why there are so many more deaths than those actually reported. As for the cited part of the conclusion, this is silly in practice. Obviously not letting in any infectious case would be much better, but when that happens, which always does in practice, the stringent lockdowns are only solution left until you get everyone vaccinated. So it's like comparing apple to orange.

wang_li 4y ago
Stringent lock downs are not the only solution. Sweden had an extremely light touch with very few restrictions, were heavily shit on for their “mishandling” of Covid, but as of now they have the lowest cumulative excess deaths percentage of all the OECD during the Covid era.
- welterde 4y ago
  Do you have a source for the claim of lowest cumulative excess deaths percentage of all of the OECD? Because as far as I can tell [1] there are a couple countries, such as Japan or New Zealand that have done quite a bit better. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
  - wang_li 4y ago
    This article among many others that can be found online: https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/08/sweden-wins-country-that-refused-lockdown-and-kept-schools-open-has-lowest-pandemic-cumulative-excess-mortality-in-the-world/ https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/08/sweden-wins-country-that... Data comes from: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676 https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676
    - welterde 4y ago
      Quite a large difference in excess deaths compared to the other study with New Zealand being especially striking (+6588 from the OECD study vs -440 in the economist one). The analysis code and description for the study I linked to can be found here [1], which is always nice to see. And browsing through different scientific studies on excess deaths I see negative values for NZ much more often than positive values (see for example [2]), so I am thinking that the OECD study is more of an outlier here (see [3] for a meta-analysis). [1] https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-tracker https://github.com/TheEconomist/covid-19-excess-deaths-track... [2] https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336.pdf https://elifesciences.org/articles/69336.pdf [3] https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/vaccines/vaccines-10-01702/article_deploy/vaccines-10-01702-v2.pdf?version=1665646646 https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/vaccines/vaccines-10-01702...
      - ghaff 4y ago
        The striking thing about The Economist list is that, while you can point to various data points and come up with a rationale why one might be low or another might be high (e.g. NZ is a small island nation that pretty much closed its borders). overall there really isn't much of a pattern. What is it about the Balkans that puts them towards the top of the list? Why did Lithuania fare significantly worse than Estonia? And while Sweden did a bit worse than Norway and Denmark, it did better than Finland in terms of excess deaths percentage.