ORAggieFan said:

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cone said:

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California isn't on the same continent?

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Can I not compare different areas? I think most would agree CA has some great weather and it's currently by far the worst off state over the last month. I think regions and seasons contribute more than weather.

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Absolutely right (on your first part). And parts of California are hitting peak ILI/flu season, while being treated the same way by Newsome as Sacramento/LA/San Fran (aka the center of the universe). It's all as counter-productive as when NYC massively cut down the subway frequencies in the first two months of the pandemic.

But to your second point, while regions/seasons are good long term barometers (like mediterranean climate regions vs. tropical vs. arctic etc.), it's actual weather in any given year that impacts/creates conditions for spread/contagions (as pertains to ILI). Ultimately none of us expect Miami to have the exact same flu season as Minneapolis, though, yet that's not really the same case in a place like...the entire state of New Hampshire.

There are also many other factors like population density, demographics, etc. (including how many people cohabitate per square foot), prior cross section immunity, and yes some (notably asian) races/regions seem to have more immunity from Covid19.

https://fatemperor.wetransfer.com/downloads/d99e7a59e05f88737a10d1d31defa50620210101121220/b27737

Still doing pretty well.

"In Sweden, I'm able to go to a bar (table service), go to the shops if I want to (not encouraged). My children haven't missed a day of school during pandemic. Football/dance training still on for children. Most of us can work from home. We've suffered but no worse than others."

So, only slightly more restrictions than Kingwood/Houston.

Sweden vs. 'the lockdown' keeps looking better and better analytically.

I believe this is more significant, statistically and in terms of 'real world meaning' than a lot of the other debates this board has had.

Don't tell the some people here, but Sweden was the winner.

JJMt said:

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Yet Sweden does not compare all that favorably to the other Nordic countries in terms of deaths/1 million population.

Sweden - 1,265
Norway - 114
Denmark - 407
Finland - 134

It's even 50% higher than Germany - 842

Numbers from worldometers.

And shouldn't Japan (62), Hong Kong (26) and Singapore (5 !) be our models, not Sweden?

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Fake news.

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To be sure, though, Sweden is not exactly comparable to the other Nordic countries. For one thing, it has a higher share of people who have immigrated from outside northern Europe, and many of those immigrants have jobs and living arrangements that make them more vulnerable to infection. Similarly, comparisons of excess all-cause mortality (a rate that is better able to capture the actual death toll attributable to the pandemic) show that in October 2020 the Swedish rate was marginally lower than in France, 30 percent lower than in the United States, only half as high as in Spainbut 2.5 times higher than in Finland and five times higher than in Germany.

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Look at the real data and excess deaths despite their huge muslim immigrant population vs. Finland etc. Further, show us where lockdowns and masks were shown to work? Hint: Finland and Norway were actually even less restrictive than Sweden, so you might not try to use them as demonstrative proof.

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Critics of Sweden's policy point out that although Sweden has experienced fewer deaths than many European nations, it has suffered more than its Nordic neighbors, Finland and Norway.

This is true, but it needs to be contextualized.

Norway and Finland have some of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the world, with 54 deaths per one million citizens and 66 per million respectively. This is well below the median in Europe (240 per million) and Sweden's rate (605 per million).

What these critics fail to realize is that both Finland and Norway have had less restrictive policies than Sweden for the bulk of the pandemicnot more lockdowns.

Norway's lockdown stringency has been less than 40 since early June, and fell all the way to 28.7 in September and October. Finland's lockdown stringency followed a similar pattern, floating around the mid to low 30s for most of the second half of the year, before creeping back up to 41 around Halloween.

When people compare Sweden unfavorably to Finland and Norway to dismiss its laissez-faire policy, they are drawing the opposite conclusion from what the data point really reveals. Yes, Finland and Norway have lower deaths than Swedenbut they have actually been more laissez-faire than their neighbor for the majority of the pandemic.

Since June, Finland and Norway have had less restrictive government policies than Sweden, and both nations have endured the coronavirus remarkably well. They have been among the freest nations in the world since early June, and COVID-19 deaths have been miniscule.

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The east asian nations you listed are not apt comparators, as wuhan flu didn't really strike many asian countries similarly due to immunity in their populations/repeated infections from different coronaviruses over many years.

You can look it up and everything. HTH!

It is. The lockdowns, as with the 'any cloth face covering' mandates/social constructs, have proven utterly useless statistically, yet economically devastating (to mention nothing of the impact on children/suicides).

In a rational world, those who had advocated militantly in their favor would now be groveling and apologizing for their irrational/emotional pleas.

nortex97 said:

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It is. The lockdowns, as with the 'any cloth face covering' mandates/social constructs, have proven utterly useless statistically, yet economically devastating (to mention nothing of the impact on children/suicides) .

In a rational world, those who had advocated militantly in their favor would now be groveling and apologizing for their irrational/emotional pleas.

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I'm surprised more isn't being said about teenage suicide in 2020.

Age 0 to 24 comprise 31.4% of the US population. That's 102 million.

Deaths in this demographic are up from 106.4 to 131.7 / million from 2019 to 2020. That's an additional 25800 deaths in the ages 0 to 24, or 1.5 millions years lost. Covid deaths are only responsible for 1.5% of those deaths.

All to save people who are beyond the average life expectancy in the US of 78 years.

https://www.aier.org/article/more-covid-suicides-than-covid-deaths-in-kids/

Sweden Saw Lower Mortality Rate Than Most of Europe in 2020, Despite No Lockdown

New data from Europe suggest Sweden's laissez-faire approach to the pandemic was far from catastrophic.

https://fee.org/articles/sweden-saw-lower-mortality-rate-than-most-of-europe-in-2020-despite-no-lockdown/

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Few people in 2020 came under more heat than Anders Tegnell, Sweden's top epidemiologist.

But the man who forged Sweden's laissez-faire approach to COVID-19 early in the pandemic says new international data reveal a hard truth about government lockdowns.

"I think people will probably think very carefully about these total shutdowns, how good they really were," Tegnell told Reuters in a recent interview. "They may have had an effect in the short term, but when you look at it throughout the pandemic, you become more and more doubtful."

Tegnell was referring to data published by Reuters that show Sweden, which shunned the strict lockdowns embraced by most nations around the world, experienced a smaller increase in its mortality rate than most European countries in 2020.

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Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.

Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden. 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.

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(More) Vindication

For nearly a year, Sweden was at the forefront of the debate over how governments should respond to the coronavirus.

Reports last April showed that despite widespread criticism for not embracing a full government lockdown, COVID-19 had reached what Tegnell described as a "plateau" in Sweden.

"If Tegnell's characterization turns out to be true, it will be quite a vindication for Sweden, which has been widely denounced for bucking the trend among governments of imposing draconian 'shelter-at-home' decrees that have crippled the world economy and thrown millions out of work," Bloomberg reported.

Months later, data showed that Sweden had successfully "flattened the curve" in contrast to many other global hot spots.

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The Dark Side of Lockdowns

Pandemics are awful and COVID-19 is a nasty virus. (I had it recently myself, and it was no picnic. I was severely sick for days.) But lawmakers around the world made two severe miscalculations when they decided to discard fundamental liberties and embrace lockdowns.

First, they concluded that they could contain a virus through central planning. They failedas numerous academic studies show.

Second, policymakers forgot the basic reality of tradeoffs, something economist and political scientist James Harrigan recognized early in the pandemic.

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In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don't want to hear about tradeoffs. This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, "if it saves just one life." New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invoked the mantra to defend his closure policies. The mantra has echoed across the country from county councils to mayors to school boards to police to clergy as justification for closures, curfews, and enforced social distancing.
Rational people understand this isn't how the world works. Regardless of whether we acknowledge them, tradeoffs exist.

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America did not. For example, the US saw mental health hit a 20-year low last year. The CDC reports surging depression in young people. There have been spikes in suicide, drug overodoses,
Globally, we've seen similar trends. Child suicide is surging around the world, physicians recently told the Associated Press.

"This is an international epidemic, and we are not recognizing it," said Dr. David Greenhorn, who works in the emergency unit at England's Bradford Royal Infirmary. "In an 8-year-old's life, a year is a really, really, really long time. They are fed up. They can't see an end to it."

This is heart-wrenching. It's also maddening because top US public health acknowledged early in the pandemic that extended lockdowns could cause "irreparable damage."

"We can't stay locked down for such a considerable period of time that you might do irreparable damage and have unintended consequences, including consequences for health," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease expert, told CNBC last year.

Fauci was right. Unfortunately, unlike Tegnell, he didn't have the courage of his convictions. And Americans paid the price.

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They didn't overwhelm their healthcare system and they let their people have more freedom of choice than most countries.

To me, that's exactly what I want, so I personally wouldn't call that poorly. People lost site of things, and it became a virtuous competition to see who would have the best covid numbers so we could determine who "won".

amercer said:

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/swedens-pandemic-experiment

Good update on where things stand. TLDR: Sweden did poorly, but they weren't the worst and no one really understands why.

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There may also be factors that we're not yet aware of. "We've just got to be humble about what we know and what we don't know. And we still don't know a lot," Howard Forman, a professor of public-health and management at Yale, told me. Protections that seemed important may turn out, after long-term study, to have been less effective than we thought. "If you, one day, come to me and say that masks only reduce spread by fifteen per cent or even ten per cent, I'd be like, O.K., well, that's within range. It's not a total shock. And, by the way, I would still say it was worth wearing the masks." Huevelin added, of the virus's first wave, "I remember we were given all these reasons why Germany kind of dodged the bullet: they had great hospitals, they had an excess of I.C.U. hospitals, they had redundancies in their hospital system." But, now, Germany is doing no better than its neighbors, and it's not clear why. Almost exactly a year from the pandemic's start, Tegnell said that he believes people should still hold off on judging his policies. "The pandemic is not over," he said. "Any kind of final review on what's been good and what's been bad still awaits us."

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Fauci said the same thing. We don't know why. Yet countries continue with strict NPIs even though there's no conclusive evidence they work, or how effective they are.

I don't understand how you can justify removing freedoms and quality of life with the hope that restrictive measures work, knowing there is damaged being caused, and knowing there's unknown risk involved due to long-term consequences. All this for something with a 99.4% survivability rate.

At the end of this all, I really hope real research happens around what factors actually help. While this virus has acted like every other virus in history, I do think for the most part we mitigated a worse impact than had we done nothing.

The research should be interesting over the next decade.

The mitigation efforts have harmed billions, including the most vulnerable (3rd world populations starving, kids, and the elderly).

Sweden has done pretty darn well avoiding much of these efforts, statistically;

Sure seems like it.

Source of data: https://t.co/kVoyCqZnoU

— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) June 3, 2021

Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right

Interesting article/analysis.



https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/how_sweden_triumphed_over_covid.html

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How Sweden Triumphed over COVID
By William Sullivan


Earlier this year, Sweden's top health official, Johan Carlson, felt obligated to tell the world how wrong everyone else was. "Some believed that it was possible to eliminate disease transmission by shutting down society," he said. "We did not believe that and we have been proven right."

Is he right? The three-day moving average for COVID deaths in Sweden is frequently zero these days and hasn't been in double digits since May. Sweden has seen a lower mortality rate than most of Europe in 2020. That wasn't the prediction. Sweden never mandated masks, nor did its citizens adopt masking in any significant way. Sweden never shut down schools for its youngest pupils, nor restaurants or retail stores. All of the supposed "experts" said that such a non-interventionist response would lead to Sweden becoming a tragic cautionary tale for the rest of us.

Coerced lockdowns and masks must be the only viable solutions, progressives told us for over a year, because their "experts" like Anthony Fauci said that was what "the science" demanded.

And yet, there proudly stands Sweden, openly mocking the leftists' most sacred orthodoxy of the moment.

But Sweden's relative success isn't limited to its medical outcomes. Not only did Sweden avoid the ravages of the virus in terms of death rates, but its citizens are unquestionably happier and more readily poised for the future. According to a new Pew Research poll, 86 percent of Swedes say the current economic situation is good, which dwarfs the assessments of Brits (44 percent), Canadians (49 percent), or the French (26 percent). Sweden's citizens are most likely, among a host of world nations, to say that their government did a "good job" in handling the 2020 pandemic. Sweden's 86 percent positive outlook on the economy is nearly reversed in America, with 71 percent saying that the current economic outlook is bad.

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A good article about Sweden's success.

LINK

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sweden did very little to try to stop covid. they did not lock down, they did not wear masks, they closed few businesses, they left most schools open, undistanced, in person, and unmaksed.

many have endlessly screamed that "well look at the covid deaths! it was a disaster!" but here's the thing: it wasn't.

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Exactly. While NPI's largely were/are ineffective ("2 weeks to flatten the curve!") Sweden's stats have shown, for some time, that covid was not worth the economic/freedom costs the NPI's have and continue to inflict on the world;

Gotta share this one again - I cannot believe the absurdity of "two weeks to flatten the curve" - and now nearly two YEARS in: https://t.co/aoDXNeh0m2

— Ivor Cummins (@FatEmperor) November 10, 2021

BREAKING: Denmark's prime minister says COVID-19 no longer "socially critical," all restrictions to be lifted on Tuesday

— BNO Newsroom (@BNODesk) January 26, 2022