5 ms·

The Swedish Pandemic Approach: Now we know the results

29 points by ptr 4y ago

readonthegoapp 4y ago
posted a new blog post that lied on a 2-year old article. nice.
jadamczyk 4y ago
Looking only at excess mortality is pretty shallow. Being European and knowing the differences in health care systems across countries, the excess mortality chart also reflects the quality of healthcare systems in these countries. It isn’t much surprise to see nordic countries being the best here.
- nchie 4y ago
  The interesting part is mostly comparing the nordic countries against each other. Sweden seemed to be doing much much worse early on due to the chosen strategy, but that no longer seems to be the case.
- brokenkebaby 4y ago
  However, is NL (e.g.) healthcare that much worse compared to SE?
  - gpvos 4y ago
    I don't know enough about Sweden, but while the overall quality of our healthcare is high, its capacity is tailored very tightly to normal situations and we have very little slack for an epidemic like this. So Dutch ICs overflowed while Germany still had space (and a lot of people were in fact transferred there).
- pvaldes 4y ago
  Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries. Three of the four Peaks of high mortality in Spain coincided with holiday season: April 2020 (Holy Week, first big holiday after the first case registered 31-jan), June (Start of the holidays) and August (peak of Summer holidays). After seen how each government reacted in the pandemic, I just assume that everybody lied in the statistics.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries. Why do you feel that tourism is relevant?
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      The probability of being hit by a pandemic originated on a different country is proportional to the number of travelers moving in and out of the country (each one with a small probability of carrying the virus). Put the same amount of people visiting Swedden without any mask and the result would had been very different so "our plan: good and the other's: bad" is just too simplistic. The variable excess deaths in a country depends also of how much people lives there. To have 100000 people killed by Covid is a different situation if your population is 9 millions or 60 millions. If millions of people visit a touristic location you will unavoidably have an increase in the people that died there just by accident. And accidents happen more often when there is alcohol and party involved. If a German died by heart attack while sunbathing in Marseille or another English commit balconing after drinking booze for all day in Valencia; those will be computed in the list of France/Spain deaths or is a +1 in the Germany/UK excess death?. Is unclear here. There was a lot of creative management of the info by everybody in the Covid years. And there are a lot of other factors that must be taken in mind, like healthcare, but the main problem still is a question of trust. We don't have tools to verify if this data is real or not.
sam_goody 4y ago
Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor. On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities that were taken advantage of by others. So from that perspective there are many politicians that are laughing their way to the bank. Lock downs became a political tool early on, and any place that still forces lock downs or masking is because politics. Which makes comparing them to another country an apple-and-oranges comparison.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor. Are they? This reads as petty reasoning of someone who refuses to admit they were wrong even though that data screams in their face, and instead try to grab hold of nonexistent data to justify their personal beliefs. It's like the "COVID vaccines kill more than the disease" crowd, who keep on moving their "the end is near" calendar date to avoid admitting they were simply pathologically wrong. > On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities (...) This reads like a rebranding of the whole "Fauci wants to take over as dictator" conspiracy theory. Anyway, can you point out exactly a single country ever where enforcing lockdowns had a positive impact on public perception and elections? If anything, conspiracy theorists who tried to push anti-science rhetoric failed to capitalize from it, specially as their electorate ended up dying disproportionately. It also didn't helped their cause that politicians who were radically against basic public health measures ended up being caught double- and triple-vaccinating themselves while preaching the opposite. > Lock downs became a political tool early on, (...) Anti-establishment politicians tried to attack basic public health measures to turn them into political battles, primarily because they knew that supporting them was a political liability. Thankfully, they failed, and now all they have left is nitpicking about Sweden while the people most vulnerable to their propaganda are now disproportionately hit by the disease. It saddens me that society learned nothing and these sociopaths still have traction in some circles.
  - 4y ago
slaw 4y ago
> The main reason for this different strategy was that the covid-19 mitigation in Sweden was handled by the expert agency, the Swedish Health Agency. That's the opposite to other countries, where covid-19 mitigation was handled by media and bureaucrats.
- marketerinland 4y ago
  Not quite that simple…
- ihatepython 4y ago
  And Bill Gates, the guy responsible for Windows, a wonderful and highly secure operating system
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- imartin2k 4y ago
  It was media and bureaucrats who handled the Swedish pandemic approach too, by putting the so called "expert agency" on a pedestal, worshiping it, abstaining from any form of critical questioning while branding the few critics that made their voices heard as saboteurs, and taking all of the mostly incorrect statements and claims that the agency spread during the initial waves, at face value. Swedish columnist Viktor Barth-Kron recently described the outcome of Sweden's pandemic approach the following way, which I find quite fitting: "Tegnell (state epidemiologist at that time) and Löfven (prime minister at that time) were wrong about almost everything during the pandemic, but they turned out to be right when it comes to the big picture."
erwald 4y ago
Excess mortality still looks substantially higher in Sweden than in Norway and Denmark (though not Finland) in this OWID data set, I wonder why the difference? - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?tab=chart&country=NOR~FIN~SWE~DNK~EST~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
Symbiote 4y ago
This blog plucks the most positive figure and quote from a more balanced article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-mortality-idUSKBN2BG1R9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe... And this article compares figures from various sources, which aren't all in agreement: https://www.thelocal.dk/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway-2/ https://www.thelocal.dk/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...
- simplotek 4y ago
  It's also worth noting that sources such as this article from The Economist[1] show that Sweden endured waves of excess deaths of up to 6% that neither Norway nor Finland reported, and instead show only residual variations. From the article: > Countries in northern Europe have generally experienced much lower mortality rates throughout the pandemic. Some Nordic nations have experienced almost no excess deaths at all. The exception is Sweden, which imposed some of the continent’s least restrictive social-distancing measures during the first wave. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...
fuckingmorons 4y ago
[dead]
lolc 4y ago
That "result" is a fished statistic, as explained in an article of The Local: https://web.archive.org/web/20230310094110/https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230310094110/https://www.thelo... Looking at the numbers in retrospect we see that the approach taken by Sweden was a good one. Just picking this one statistic out of many possible is dishonest though.
- suddenclarity 4y ago
  It should also be said that there wasn't one approach since it changed from week to week. It began very hands off with no restrictions about travelling to hot zones or even recommendations about face masks but morphed into banning all public gatherings of more than eight people.
ofcourseyoudo 4y ago
Throughout the lockdown Sweden had consistently worse death statistics than Denmark, Norway and Finland, which make the most sense to compare to geographically and culturally. And it's still true Sweden's approach was worse than theirs: > However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.

29 points by ptr 4y ago

posted a new blog post that lied on a 2-year old article. nice.

Looking only at excess mortality is pretty shallow. Being European and knowing the differences in health care systems across countries, the excess mortality chart also reflects the quality of healthcare systems in these countries. It isn’t much surprise to see nordic countries being the best here.

nchie 4y ago
The interesting part is mostly comparing the nordic countries against each other. Sweden seemed to be doing much much worse early on due to the chosen strategy, but that no longer seems to be the case.
brokenkebaby 4y ago
However, is NL (e.g.) healthcare that much worse compared to SE?
- gpvos 4y ago
  I don't know enough about Sweden, but while the overall quality of our healthcare is high, its capacity is tailored very tightly to normal situations and we have very little slack for an epidemic like this. So Dutch ICs overflowed while Germany still had space (and a lot of people were in fact transferred there).
pvaldes 4y ago
Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries. Three of the four Peaks of high mortality in Spain coincided with holiday season: April 2020 (Holy Week, first big holiday after the first case registered 31-jan), June (Start of the holidays) and August (peak of Summer holidays). After seen how each government reacted in the pandemic, I just assume that everybody lied in the statistics.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries. Why do you feel that tourism is relevant?
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    The probability of being hit by a pandemic originated on a different country is proportional to the number of travelers moving in and out of the country (each one with a small probability of carrying the virus). Put the same amount of people visiting Swedden without any mask and the result would had been very different so "our plan: good and the other's: bad" is just too simplistic. The variable excess deaths in a country depends also of how much people lives there. To have 100000 people killed by Covid is a different situation if your population is 9 millions or 60 millions. If millions of people visit a touristic location you will unavoidably have an increase in the people that died there just by accident. And accidents happen more often when there is alcohol and party involved. If a German died by heart attack while sunbathing in Marseille or another English commit balconing after drinking booze for all day in Valencia; those will be computed in the list of France/Spain deaths or is a +1 in the Germany/UK excess death?. Is unclear here. There was a lot of creative management of the info by everybody in the Covid years. And there are a lot of other factors that must be taken in mind, like healthcare, but the main problem still is a question of trust. We don't have tools to verify if this data is real or not.

sam_goody 4y ago

Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor. On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities that were taken advantage of by others. So from that perspective there are many politicians that are laughing their way to the bank. Lock downs became a political tool early on, and any place that still forces lock downs or masking is because politics. Which makes comparing them to another country an apple-and-oranges comparison.

simplotek 4y ago
> Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor. Are they? This reads as petty reasoning of someone who refuses to admit they were wrong even though that data screams in their face, and instead try to grab hold of nonexistent data to justify their personal beliefs. It's like the "COVID vaccines kill more than the disease" crowd, who keep on moving their "the end is near" calendar date to avoid admitting they were simply pathologically wrong. > On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities (...) This reads like a rebranding of the whole "Fauci wants to take over as dictator" conspiracy theory. Anyway, can you point out exactly a single country ever where enforcing lockdowns had a positive impact on public perception and elections? If anything, conspiracy theorists who tried to push anti-science rhetoric failed to capitalize from it, specially as their electorate ended up dying disproportionately. It also didn't helped their cause that politicians who were radically against basic public health measures ended up being caught double- and triple-vaccinating themselves while preaching the opposite. > Lock downs became a political tool early on, (...) Anti-establishment politicians tried to attack basic public health measures to turn them into political battles, primarily because they knew that supporting them was a political liability. Thankfully, they failed, and now all they have left is nitpicking about Sweden while the people most vulnerable to their propaganda are now disproportionately hit by the disease. It saddens me that society learned nothing and these sociopaths still have traction in some circles.
- 4y ago

slaw 4y ago

> The main reason for this different strategy was that the covid-19 mitigation in Sweden was handled by the expert agency, the Swedish Health Agency. That's the opposite to other countries, where covid-19 mitigation was handled by media and bureaucrats.

marketerinland 4y ago
Not quite that simple…
ihatepython 4y ago
And Bill Gates, the guy responsible for Windows, a wonderful and highly secure operating system
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
imartin2k 4y ago
It was media and bureaucrats who handled the Swedish pandemic approach too, by putting the so called "expert agency" on a pedestal, worshiping it, abstaining from any form of critical questioning while branding the few critics that made their voices heard as saboteurs, and taking all of the mostly incorrect statements and claims that the agency spread during the initial waves, at face value. Swedish columnist Viktor Barth-Kron recently described the outcome of Sweden's pandemic approach the following way, which I find quite fitting: "Tegnell (state epidemiologist at that time) and Löfven (prime minister at that time) were wrong about almost everything during the pandemic, but they turned out to be right when it comes to the big picture."

erwald 4y ago

Excess mortality still looks substantially higher in Sweden than in Norway and Denmark (though not Finland) in this OWID data set, I wonder why the difference? - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?tab=chart&country=NOR~FIN~SWE~DNK~EST~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...

Symbiote 4y ago

This blog plucks the most positive figure and quote from a more balanced article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-mortality-idUSKBN2BG1R9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe... And this article compares figures from various sources, which aren't all in agreement: https://www.thelocal.dk/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway-2/ https://www.thelocal.dk/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...

simplotek 4y ago
It's also worth noting that sources such as this article from The Economist[1] show that Sweden endured waves of excess deaths of up to 6% that neither Norway nor Finland reported, and instead show only residual variations. From the article: > Countries in northern Europe have generally experienced much lower mortality rates throughout the pandemic. Some Nordic nations have experienced almost no excess deaths at all. The exception is Sweden, which imposed some of the continent’s least restrictive social-distancing measures during the first wave. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-...

fuckingmorons 4y ago

[dead]

lolc 4y ago

That "result" is a fished statistic, as explained in an article of The Local: https://web.archive.org/web/20230310094110/https://www.thelocal.se/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-lower-pandemic-mortality-than-denmark-and-norway/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230310094110/https://www.thelo... Looking at the numbers in retrospect we see that the approach taken by Sweden was a good one. Just picking this one statistic out of many possible is dishonest though.

suddenclarity 4y ago
It should also be said that there wasn't one approach since it changed from week to week. It began very hands off with no restrictions about travelling to hot zones or even recommendations about face masks but morphed into banning all public gatherings of more than eight people.

ofcourseyoudo 4y ago

Throughout the lockdown Sweden had consistently worse death statistics than Denmark, Norway and Finland, which make the most sense to compare to geographically and culturally. And it's still true Sweden's approach was worse than theirs: > However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.