Sweden

Gaggoears said:
You are suggesting we pick the 1 million out we need to shield ?

India has coped ?

Planet rustle is a scary place.

well now how lethal is it for over 80s ? 1% you say.
Well now how lethal is it for the vulnerable ? 1% you say.

India put in restrictions, fancy that.
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Yes India has coped - it's gone from 400,000 cases per day to less than 40,000 in what is effectively a third world country

The virus kills 1% of those it infects - it's a lot higher in over 80s but even then the average age of death is above the national average
 


Rustie Trombone said:
OK - Sweden is 17th in the table of European deaths per capita - the only country that did not lockdown completely and would be much further down that list if they hadn't fucked up with care homes like we did in the early stages

We didn't need to protect 10 to 15m people - Covid kills about 1% of those infected which would be 1 million at most we need to shield in the UK - even India has coped with the delta variant despite the media telling us they were doomed

This is not bubonic - it's covid 19

Do you think we'll ever lockdown again faced with a virus like this?
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Right, so? It also has far, far greater COVID-19 mortality than it's closest neighbours, even if you take out the care home deaths. Let's assume for the sake of argument that 50% of Sweden's deaths are care home deaths, so we just half the number of deaths in Sweden, from 14,651 to 7,326.

Per 100,000 people resident, that's still way higher than Denmark, way higher than Finland and way higher than Norway.

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We did need to protect 10m-15m people because that's the rough estimate of the population that the JCVI highlighted as the most at risk groups. Not only have we got 1.2m people under the age of 70 who were identified as extremely clinically vulnerable, we've got around 5m people in their 70s and a further 3m in their 80s.

You're not looking at 1% infection fatality rate amongst those, you're looking at 3% for those in their 70s, maybe 5% for those in their 80s, maybe 10% for those in their 90s etc.

How on earth do you expect to have society chugging along as normal, or at least with no lockdown, yet somehow expect to keep those most vulnerable people safe? Either care home workers catch COVID-19, and spread it asymptomatically, hospitalising or killing their residents, or those care home workers self-isolate...and would be self-isolating in huge numbers, given that cases would be very high, so who would care for the patients then?

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What you need to understand about COVID-19 and what you seem to either not understand or not want to understand, is that it prevents such a huge risk not because of it's infection fatality rate, but because of its transmissibility and pervasiveness. It spreads rapidly, and from asymptomatic people. It's hard to control, and to be fair, Sweden didn't control it at all, as you can see from this chart below which has the case rate per million, over time, comparing Sweden and it's neighbours, that Sweden lost control of COVID, when others didn't.

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Do I think we'll ever lock down again if faced with a similar threat, e.g. a novel coronavirus that spreads rapidly, from asymptomatic people? Yeah, I think we will, because it's the sensible solution. If it's a different kind of virus, one that spreads mostly or only from those with symptoms, we'll treat it differently, of course.

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Rustie Trombone said:
Yes India has coped - it's gone from 400,000 cases per day to less than 40,000 in what is effectively a third world country

The virus kills 1% of those it infects - it's a lot higher in over 80s but even then the average age of death is above the national average
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You believe India has 'coped'? India's data is not of good quality, not even close.
Rustie Trombone said:
Yes - pretty easy with a virus which is non lethal to 99% of people who get it

At their peak India had 400,000 cases per day which equates to 10,000 cases per day in the UK

India are now at 35,000 cases per day - which would equate to 1,700 cases per day in the UK

Some of the reporting around this pandemic has been something the Nazis would be proud of
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That's rich, accusing people of being propagandists but taking India's data at face value? You've misrepresented data and figures on here before, I suspect numerous times.

You're the ideologue here.
 
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Frijj said:
Right, so? It also has far, far greater COVID-19 mortality than it's closest neighbours, even if you take out the care home deaths. Let's assume for the sake of argument that 50% of Sweden's deaths are care home deaths, so we just half the number of deaths in Sweden, from 14,651 to 7,326.

Per 100,000 people resident, that's still way higher than Denmark, way higher than Finland and way higher than Norway.

-

We did need to protect 10m-15m people because that's the rough estimate of the population that the JCVI highlighted as the most at risk groups. Not only have we got 1.2m people under the age of 70 who were identified as extremely clinically vulnerable, we've got around 5m people in their 70s and a further 3m in their 80s.

You're not looking at 1% infection fatality rate amongst those, you're looking at 3% for those in their 70s, maybe 5% for those in their 80s, maybe 10% for those in their 90s etc.

How on earth do you expect to have society chugging along as normal, or at least with no lockdown, yet somehow expect to keep those most vulnerable people safe? Either care home workers catch COVID-19, and spread it asymptomatically, hospitalising or killing their residents, or those care home workers self-isolate...and would be self-isolating in huge numbers, given that cases would be very high, so who would care for the patients then?

-

What you need to understand about COVID-19 and what you seem to either not understand or not want to understand, is that it prevents such a huge risk not because of it's infection fatality rate, but because of its transmissibility and pervasiveness. It spreads rapidly, and from asymptomatic people. It's hard to control, and to be fair, Sweden didn't control it at all, as you can see from this chart below which has the case rate per million, over time, comparing Sweden and it's neighbours, that Sweden lost control of COVID, when others didn't.

-

Do I think we'll ever lock down again if faced with a similar threat, e.g. a novel coronavirus that spreads rapidly, from asymptomatic people? Yeah, I think we will, because it's the sensible solution. If it's a different kind of virus, one that spreads mostly or only from those with symptoms, we'll treat it differently, of course.

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You believe India has 'coped'? India's data is not of good quality, not even close.


That's rich, accusing people of being propagandists but taking India's data at face value? You've misrepresented data and figures on here before, I suspect numerous times.

You're the ideologue here.
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It's great this place

Posters only want to compare Sweden to their near neighbours but will quite readily compare the UK to Australia or New Zealand

I agree with you in the Indian data but it's all we have - many countries have some very questionable data

I'm confident that if we have another similar pandemic we'll follow a model closer to Sweden rather than China
 
Rustie Trombone said:
It's great this place

Posters only want to compare Sweden to their near neighbours but will quite readily compare the UK to Australia or New Zealand

I agree with you in the Indian data but it's all we have - many countries have some very questionable data

I'm confident that if we have another similar pandemic we'll follow a model closer to Sweden rather than China
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Well we can compare ourselves to France or Germany or Italy if you’d rather?

Just answer this - if we had followed Sweden’s approach, would there have been more people infected, than in the approach we took?

If the answer is yes, please explain how you expect the NHS to have coped under that additional pressure.

If the answer is no, please explain how having looser restrictions wouldn’t lead to more infections.
 
Frijj said:
if we had followed Sweden’s approach, would there have been more people infected, than in the approach we took?
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I can't get my head round the idea that this is the only measure. Again, it's like reducing infections is the only measure. I'm not advocating Sweden's approach but asking a question like this suggests that you don't see any detriment whatsoever in restrictive measures.
 
sambantam82 said:
I can't get my head round the idea that this is the only measure. Again, it's like reducing infections is the only measure. I'm not advocating Sweden's approach but asking a question like this suggests that you don't see any detriment whatsoever in restrictive measures.
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Not at all. I think I keenly understand the detrimental effects of lockdown. I appreciate them all, but without a lockdown we’d have had more infections which would inevitably translate into more hospitalisations and more deaths.

I am not sure how the NHS would have coped, as both an institution that provides healthcare, and as an organisation made up of people.

If we don’t protect the NHS’ most valuable asset, it’s clinical staff, how can we ever expect it to work?

A significant proportion of those clinical staff must be absolutely burnt out by COVID. If the pressure had been more intense, I think it’s likely we’d have seen significant systemic failure across many trusts…but we prevented that, with lockdown.
 
Frijj said:
Not at all. I think I keenly understand the detrimental effects of lockdown. I appreciate them all, but without a lockdown we’d have had more infections which would inevitably translate into more hospitalisations and more deaths.

I am not sure how the NHS would have coped, as both an institution that provides healthcare, and as an organisation made up of people.

If we don’t protect the NHS’ most valuable asset, it’s clinical staff, how can we ever expect it to work?

A significant proportion of those clinical staff must be absolutely burnt out by COVID. If the pressure had been more intense, I think it’s likely we’d have seen significant systemic failure across many trusts…but we prevented that, with lockdown.
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Well I suppose it depends how far away we were from significant systemic failure.
 
Frijj said:
Not at all. I think I keenly understand the detrimental effects of lockdown. I appreciate them all, but without a lockdown we’d have had more infections which would inevitably translate into more hospitalisations and more deaths.

I am not sure how the NHS would have coped, as both an institution that provides healthcare, and as an organisation made up of people.

If we don’t protect the NHS’ most valuable asset, it’s clinical staff, how can we ever expect it to work?

A significant proportion of those clinical staff must be absolutely burnt out by COVID. If the pressure had been more intense, I think it’s likely we’d have seen significant systemic failure across many trusts…but we prevented that, with lockdown.
Click to expand...
As it was during the January peak some individual Trusts were unable to cope particularly in critical care capacity. This was managed by transferring patients in some cases hundreds of miles. My own view is that without lockdown restricting cases the system would have been overwhelmed.
 
Apache Inbound said:
Interesting tweet.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1596815870676041729
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This data doesn't tally with data from other sources, and I can't see any methodology notes on what they've presented. The OECD page they link to, doesn't appear to give information on what the baseline expected deaths for each country were. It is also interesting that they've gone for cumulative excess death percentage, rather than cumulative excess deaths rate per capita, because these will produce different figures.

Other sources, such as The Economist's excess mortality tracker, places Sweden above many other countries for excess mortality. Sweden, according to that chart from James Melville's Daily Sceptic publication, presents Sweden as having the lowest excess deaths, but by The Economist's calculations, excess deaths are higher in Sweden than in Canada, Israel, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and others.

I'm not saying this analysis is wrong, but it is unclear (I've read the accompanying article and Substack page) how they reached the figures they have, what baseline they've used for each country, how they've derived that baseline and why they've gone for excess deaths as a 'cumulative percentage' and not a rate per capita.

There are some aspects of the accompanying Substack page that just make no sense, like the author claiming surprise that there's a correlation between excess deaths and COVID deaths...of course there is, COVID deaths are driving the excess mortality!
 
Frijj said:
Not at all. I think I keenly understand the detrimental effects of lockdown. I appreciate them all, but without a lockdown we’d have had more infections which would inevitably translate into more hospitalisations and more deaths.

I am not sure how the NHS would have coped, as both an institution that provides healthcare, and as an organisation made up of people.

If we don’t protect the NHS’ most valuable asset, it’s clinical staff, how can we ever expect it to work?

A significant proportion of those clinical staff must be absolutely burnt out by COVID. If the pressure had been more intense, I think it’s likely we’d have seen significant systemic failure across many trusts…but we prevented that, with lockdown.
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I agree with everything you've said, but ignorance of something novel should never be used as a stick to beat. We've all experienced a tough learning curve, and literally no government got it right, We have extremes in Peru (harsh lockdown) China (zero Covid) Sweden (no lockdowns) etc, and I expect it will be some time before we can definitely say what universal policy would have suited all.

The competitive rhetoric of the time did not help matters, we are one species and must share all data and hold hands up, for like it or not, nature will win out every time, we just need to work with it.
 

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