Lockdown-Ignoring Sweden Now Has Europe's Highest Per-Capita Death Rate (theguardian.com) 389
Sweden's death rate per million (376) "is far in advance of Norway's (44), Denmark's (96) and Finland's (55) — countries with similar welfare systems and demographics, but which imposed strict lockdowns..." reports the Guardian, "raising concerns that the country's light-touch approach to the coronavirus may not be helping it build up broad immunity."
"According to the scientific online publication Ourworldindata.com, Covid-19 deaths in Sweden were the highest in Europe per capita in a rolling seven-day average between 12 and 19 May. The country's 6.25 deaths per million inhabitants a day was just above the UK's 5.75."
Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Immunity levels in Sweden, which were expected to reach 33% by the start of May have been measured at only 7.3%, suggesting that Sweden's lighter lockdown may continue indefinitely whilst other countries begin to revive their economies. Writing about new Swedish antibody results in the Guardian Jon Henley goes on to report that other European countries like Finland are already considering blocking travel from Sweden which may increase Sweden's long term isolation.
We have discussed before whether Sweden, which locked down earlier than most but with fewer restrictions could be a model for other countries.
As it is, now, the country is looking more like a warning to the rest of the world.
The Guardian concludes that the Swedish government's decision to avoid a strict lockdown "is thought unlikely to spare the Swedish economy. Although retail and entertainment spending has not collapsed quite as dramatically as elsewhere, analysts say the country will probably not reap any long-term economic benefit."
"According to the scientific online publication Ourworldindata.com, Covid-19 deaths in Sweden were the highest in Europe per capita in a rolling seven-day average between 12 and 19 May. The country's 6.25 deaths per million inhabitants a day was just above the UK's 5.75."
Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Immunity levels in Sweden, which were expected to reach 33% by the start of May have been measured at only 7.3%, suggesting that Sweden's lighter lockdown may continue indefinitely whilst other countries begin to revive their economies. Writing about new Swedish antibody results in the Guardian Jon Henley goes on to report that other European countries like Finland are already considering blocking travel from Sweden which may increase Sweden's long term isolation.
We have discussed before whether Sweden, which locked down earlier than most but with fewer restrictions could be a model for other countries.
As it is, now, the country is looking more like a warning to the rest of the world.
The Guardian concludes that the Swedish government's decision to avoid a strict lockdown "is thought unlikely to spare the Swedish economy. Although retail and entertainment spending has not collapsed quite as dramatically as elsewhere, analysts say the country will probably not reap any long-term economic benefit."
herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a highly contagious virus and even in Sweden they've not reached anywhere near what it would take for herd immunity to be effective.
Experiment over, natural immunity is not practical. The way forward is to artificially create people with immunity. Vaccination on a massive scale is likely the fastest way to achieve this, but it's going to take months before we can even start, and perhaps years to complete.
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Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with a herd immunity strategy is that you need to be able to be specific about who you target and who you protect. Sweden has apparently had a lot of trouble doing this. You really want kids getting it, since their mortality rate is only marginally above zero percent. But the rate of infection in the 0-19 cohort in Sweden is lower than the 20-65 cohort. And while infection among the 65+ cohort is lower than the other cohorts, you want it to be vastly lower than other cohorts, and it just hasn't been.
I've had an open mind to Sweden's strategy (most other no-lockdown countries have targeted flattening / eradication rather than herd immunity). It is a plausible strategy with a viable epidemiological backing. But it just doesn't seem to have gone as was intended.
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The problem with a herd immunity strategy is that you need to be able to be specific about who you target and who you protect. Sweden has apparently had a lot of trouble doing this. You really want kids getting it, since their mortality rate is only marginally above zero percent. But the rate of infection in the 0-19 cohort in Sweden is lower than the 20-65 cohort. And while infection among the 65+ cohort is lower than the other cohorts, you want it to be vastly lower than other cohorts, and it just hasn't been.
I've had an open mind to Sweden's strategy (most other no-lockdown countries have targeted flattening / eradication rather than herd immunity). It is a plausible strategy with a viable epidemiological backing. But it just doesn't seem to have gone as was intended.
You only get tested if you're sick enough to require hospitalization, as 0-19 gets significantly less symptoms testing is lower and thus confirmed cases. School and childcare up to the age of 16 has stayed open and as everyone with any symptoms has been asked to stay at home absence has reportedly been as high as 25-50% in some schools/classes. Larger scale testing for anti-bodies is on the map, and early indication is that the test is very reliable so data should be available soonish. Spread among the elde
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"You only get tested if you're sick enough"
I'm referring to serology numbers, not PCR testing.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Informative)
Here's just one of several. [folkhalsomyndigheten.se]
They're calibrated against false positives by pre-covid blood and against false negatives by PCR-confirmed cases.
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Everyone seems to have forgotten what the initial reason for a lockdown was, and that was to "flatten the curve", not cower in our homes until they hopefully come up with a vaccination. What if it mutates like the flu, and there is no vaccination that will work reliably?
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Interesting)
Immune taxi driver will still be a carrier - this does not help immunity of heard (unless you mean he keeps spreading covid)
How exactly does this work?
tldr; this is hopefully old information
Based on current belief right now I don't think it's actually going to happen. In the case of some viruses it's possible for the virus to still be in a body in areas (like the eyes / nerves) where the immune system has limited coverage whilst the rest of the body is immune. Some evidence of this has been seen in covid-19 but the newer studies suggest that people like that don't tend to be infectious and eventually eliminate the virus. The results don't seem 100% clear though and are confused due to all sorts of potential false positive situations (e.g. remnants of viral RNA in people who no longer have any actual viruses) which make it difficult to fully trust anyone's data. Combined with some evidence that people lose immunity (remember we know of no single human who has gone one year beyond coronavirus infection yet) and the risk of mutation this is part of what absolutely pushes me against the herd immunity strategy at this stage, even more than the fairly strong economic arguments.
It's quite possible that we need to partition the world between those countries (Taiwan / Australia / China / most of Europe) that are able to eliminate covid-19 and those that aren't (Bolivia / Brazil / Russia etc.). The number of big countries that I can't be sure where they fit yet (India / USA) is incredibly interesting.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Experiment over, natural immunity is not practical.
That isn't clear. A vaccine may be more than a year away. It implausible that any country can maintain a lockdown that long. When they open, Covid will likely resurge.
Sweden chose to pay up-front with a higher first-wave death count, and avoid some of the economic cost of locking down. Other countries will pay later with a higher second-wave death count, and pay a higher economic price.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Interesting)
Experiment over, natural immunity is not practical.
That isn't clear. A vaccine may be more than a year away. It implausible that any country can maintain a lockdown that long. When they open, Covid will likely resurge.
Sweden chose to pay up-front with a higher first-wave death count, and avoid some of the economic cost of locking down. Other countries will pay later with a higher second-wave death count, and pay a higher economic price.
The point isn't to remain in lockdown until the vaccine is out there. We were always going to open up and people were going to get infected. The point is to not overwhelm the hospitals and hospital supply. By locking down we in theory reduce the number of people who need to go to a hospital to a trickle that trickle is still overwhelming our ability to treat them. We need to be on lockdown for longer until our capacity is once again above our need then we can start opening up slowly because when we do it's going to increase our need again.
That and anything that reduces R below 1.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Early on, the CDC and WHO said the available evidence at the time indicated it spread mostly on surfaces, not through the air. Now that we have more information, they are saying exactly the opposite - the bulk of infections seem to be airborne. What does that have to do with anything? I'm getting there.
We're learning about the virus, how it spreads, and how to reduce the spread. If, on average, each infected person carries it to 1.5 other people, the number of infected people will increase by 50% every few weeks. Pretty soon millions of people are infected. If, after applying protective measures, each spreads it to 0.5 other people on average the number of cases will drop by 50% each round, until approximately nobody is infected.
In early April, it was entirely possible that within a month or so we would find tactics that reduced the rate of sprrad (called R) below 1.0. If say face masks, zinc, and avoiding large crowds in enclosed spaces (movies, concerts) got R below 1.0, we could then re-open normal life except concerts, take zinc and wear masks, and watch covid dissappear.
Hydroxychloroquine prevents malaria. In early April it seemed entirely *possible* that a similar drug would *help* prevent covid, but we didn't know yet. *If* we had found some medication that reduces susceptibility to covid by 60%, that would have given us a type of artificial herd immunity.
The measures taken over the last 6 weeks or so gave us an opportunity to try to find a combination of reasonable measures that would reduce R below 1.0, so that cases would keep dropping rather than keep climbing. As it turned out, we haven't found preventative measures that work as well as we would have hoped.
Re:That and anything that reduces R below 1.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
The measures taken over the last 6 weeks or so gave us an opportunity to try to find a combination of reasonable measures that would reduce R below 1.0, so that cases would keep dropping rather than keep climbing. As it turned out, we haven't found preventative measures that work as well as we would have hoped.
Using the week-over-week new cases in Santa Clara County as a rough approximation of R0, we were well below 1.0 until they started opening things back up at the beginning of May. About twelve days later, it spiked back up over 1.0 and has been increasing almost every day since then. It's currently at about 1.3-ish.
So we had a way to bring this under control. We just collectively weren't willing as a society to keep doing them until the count hit zero. It's unfortunate. One more month at the rate we were going, give or take, and it would have hit zero, at least here.
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California is a great example. The early lockdown helped prevent the virus from spreading wildly and ov
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the point of locking down is to insure hospitals don't get overwhelmed. But if you lock down too much, then hospitals have plenty of excess capacity and you're needlessly stifling your own economy.
It should be more than that. The aim should be to get the infection down to a level where test, track and trace strategies work. Once that happens you can continually eliminate all new infections from your society as has happened in Taiwan, Vietnam. New Zealand, Slovakia, Czechia, Slovenia and South Korea.
If you have to spend a long time in lockdown to do this then the problem is with your government and not with the lockdown per se. They have been failing to build the capabilities they need such as localised test, track and trace and localised lockdown control.
The pure "flatten the curve" strategy doesn't work due to the asymptomatic spread of the disease which means it can easily get out of control unexpectedly. This is the problem with the superspreader events like the bars in South Korea. What might work is a hybrid strategy with enough social distancing, public health and hygiene measures so that R0 stays well below 1 meaning that you gradually eliminate the virus wherever it flares up even if your track and trace program somehow fails. Sweden seems to be an unfortunate warning against this.
Even the Swedish case isn't a total disaster for the rest of the world though. They seem to have had some particularly arrogant virologists in charge who completely failed to take into account WHO warnings about the elderly (Swedish care homes have been acting as death camps) and are acting as if school opening for children is fine (again, totally stupid in the face of asymptomatic spread). By just acting a little more sensibly than Sweden perhaps a semi-lockdown could be found which could get you back into a track and trace situation from a situation where it isn't practical.
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The point isn't to remain in lockdown until the vaccine is out there.
Maybe where you live. Mayor Garcetti - mayor of LA [cbslocal.com] says Los Angeles will NOT really open up until we have a cure. Lots of politicians are saying the same thing. The goalpost of "flattening the curve" has been moved to "have a vaccine".
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Sweden chose to pay up-front with a higher first-wave death count, and avoid some of the economic cost of locking down. Other countries will pay later with a higher second-wave death count, and pay a higher economic price.
The recent trial of remdesivir suggests that it lowers the mortality rate by 80% or so. If that holds, it means that the death toll of second wave will be a lot lower and containable than the current first wave. South Korea and others appear to have corona virus under control without a hard lock-down, so it is possible to keep the economic fallout under control, provided one lives in a country with a sane government.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Informative)
The recent trial of remdesivir suggests that it lowers the mortality rate by 80% or so.
No it does not. It does not such thing. It only decreases the recovery time. There was no appreciable difference in rates of death [nytimes.com] between those being given remdesivir and those of the general population.
“Given high mortality despite the use of remdesivir, it is clear that treatment with an antiviral drug alone is not likely to be sufficient,” they concluded.
Further, the report states [nejm.org]:
Our findings highlight the need to identify Covid-19 cases and start antiviral treatment before the pulmonary disease progresses to require mechanical ventilation.
In other words, once you're on a ventilator, remdesivir is of no help.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Informative)
Sweden isn't even paying a higher cost than many.
Deaths per million: [worldometers.info]
797 Belgium
613 Spain
541 UK
541 Italy
434 France
396 Sweden
Lots of Europe has it worse off.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Insightful)
80% of Sweden's population live in big cities which is reflected in the regional statistics.
Also, you can't compare numbers this way - ask anyone who understands statistics a bit. The methodology and what counts as a COVID-19 "death" is different for every country.
If every country had the same methodology and the infection started to spread at the same time, then perhaps then you could compare the numbers.
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Interesting)
The numbers that I'm giving are actually pretty comparable. Finland, for example has 85% urbanization almost comparible to sweden's 87%. Finland's cases began on 29 January, two days before Sweden's on 31st. Both countries count deaths in care homes, though Sweden's more "relaxed" approach likely means more deaths triggered by covid-19 are missed than in Finland. Norway is again an 80%+ urbanised country; it began having cases a bit later
When you start to look into it (and yes, I have enough education to make statistical comparisons) then seeing that Sweden's numbers are vastly worse than comparable Scandinavian counties is easy and clear. If instead of just choosing random countries, you chose the best examples worldwide, which Sweden as a very rich, well educated country has no excuse for failing to follow, you can see that Sweden's policy is a social disaster and is becoming an economic disaster.
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Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:4, Interesting)
If you do that, there's a large excess in Sweden, but not in Norway or Finland.
Yes, but if you look at the graphs here [nytimes.com] you see that the excess death rate in Sweden is pretty comparable to most other countries. There is a "bump" but it is not larger than most places. The place that really stands out in a bad out is New York City. Also Ecuador, Spain, U.K. etc.
Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, South Africa seem like outliers compared to almost everyone else. Especially Norway seem to have *fewer* deaths than they usually do (perhaps they prevented deaths from the normal flu as well?). There is a graph here [sciencenorway.no] that shows the death rate to clearly deviate from the usual pattern.
I don't think this submission is completely honest. It tries to paint a narrative that Sweden is much worse off *because* of the less strict lockdown. There just doesn't seem to be evidence that Sweden is much worse off. Sure, it is bad but it doesn't seem worse than other places. I really don't get why the 7-day moving average of the death rate would be a good indication of if a particular strategy is working. Maybe in a year or two we can compare the excess death rates of all countries and draw some conclusions but the 7-day moving average seem like a rather odd and irrelevant metric to use for comparisons.
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Sweden is only low density if you ignore the urbanization, +80% of the population live in big cities.
See https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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And if we're going to artificially create people anyway, let's also create cute cat-girls while we're at it.
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We have a highly contagious virus and even in Sweden they've not reached anywhere near what it would take for herd immunity to be effective.
Experiment over, natural immunity is not practical. The way forward is to artificially create people with immunity. Vaccination on a massive scale is likely the fastest way to achieve this, but it's going to take months before we can even start, and perhaps years to complete.
We're all hoping for a vaccine or at least an effective treatment for the severe cases but there are exactly zero vaccines for corona-viruses in humans and worst case we may never have it. Herd immunity isn't going to make the virus go away, one person caused all this and there are animal reservoirs to take into account.
The question is, what are we going to do until there's a vaccine? Everyone agrees on flattening the curve, for some this has led to harsher lock-downs that are not sustainable, Sweden has ch
Re:herd immunity may not be possible (Score:5, Interesting)
they've not reached anywhere near what it would take for herd immunity to be effective.
Herd immunity without a vaccine isn't worth it. This is only one epidemiologist's opinion [sciencealert.com], but here is his conclusion:
With this number, the proportion of people who need to be infected is lower but still high, sitting at around 70 percent of the entire population.
Which brings us to why herd immunity could never be considered a preventative measure.
If 70 percent of your population is infected with a disease, it is by definition not prevention. How can it be? Most of the people in your country are sick! And the hopeful nonsense that you can reach that 70 percent by just infecting young people is simply absurd. If only young people are immune, you'd have clusters of older people with no immunity at all, making it incredibly risky for anyone over a certain age to leave their house lest they get infected, forever.
It's also worth thinking about the repercussions of this disastrous scenario – the best estimates put COVID-19 infection fatality rate at around 0.5-1 percent. If 70 percent of an entire population gets sick, that means that between 0.35-0.7 percent of everyone in a country could die, which is a catastrophic outcome.
. . .
The sad fact is that herd immunity just isn't a solution to our pandemic woes. Yes, it may eventually happen anyway, but hoping that it will save us all is just not realistic. The time to discuss herd immunity is when we have a vaccine developed, and not one second earlier, because at that point we will be able to really stop the epidemic in its tracks.
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G-d in the Bible, Jewish or Christian, is such a constructed concept. And that construction has changed over time as the reigning concept fails to work for the current crowd. So they change it to fit their circumstances. In that sense, there is no actual G-d, just an evolving concept.
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I only said this Halibut is good enough for Jehovah!
Title completely wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Title completely wrong (Score:5, Informative)
If you take the numbers from various sites tracking the cases, deaths, etc. (here's one such site for reference [worldometers.info]) then Sweden is 6th among European countries with at least 1,000 cases (arbitrarily chosen by me just to remove abnormally high death rates due to a country having low total population) behind Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy, and France.
This seems more like a piece of cherry picked data in order to support a point of view than an intelligent analysis of the data to produce valuable insights.
Re:Title completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
It's misleading because as the summary explains it's based on a 7-day window from approximately the previous week. Someone will need to explain why choosing to look at only the data from May 12 to May 19 is significant
When looking at totalised response you have to consider when a virus first hit various countries. When looking at current policy you need to consider that all countries have equal information only in the most recent times. e.g. Sweden had nothing to go on while Italy France and Belgium were getting royally screwed, the vast majority of those deaths happened very early when little was known about the pandemic.
Fast forward 2 months. We know a lot more. We have a lot more science behind us. We have examples of devastation and we have a general set of recommendations. How well does this information help us? Well for that you look at *recent* data, not overall data.
And that recent data shows that when you exclude the countries in Europe which were hit first and hardest and at a time with little information, Sweden is tracking worse than everyone else, right now.
Re:Title completely wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Flattening the curve helps prevent your hospitals from being overwhelmed. But it does not change the area under the curve (total number of people infected). The more you flatten it, the more it extends out in time to maintain the same area. So decreasing the weekly infection rate doesn't really help you once you've gotten it low enough that your hospitals aren't overwhelmed. And it actually hurts you economically as it lengthens the amount of time you need to remain in lockdown until you achieve herd immunity (approx 70% of the population infected). Sweden claims they've still got about 20% hospital capacity free. If accurate, then their higher weekly death rate is due to them allowing a larger percentage of their population to become infected each week, not due to to a higher percentage of the sick dying as is the case when hospitals are overwhelmed.
It's like trying to drive from Los Angeles to New York while using the least amount of fuel. If you drive super-slow, yes the amount of fuel you consume per day will be lower. But is that really reducing the amount of fuel you'll use on the trip? You're simply using less fuel each day because you're traveling less distance per day, needlessly increasing the number of days the trip will take. Since the goal is a fixed distance, time is not really the proper denominator to be using. The proper metric is fuel consumed per distance traveled, or MPG.
In the same way, since the goal here is 70% of the population having been infected, the proper denominator is percentage of population infected. And the proper metric to be using is number of deaths per percentage of population infected. Not deaths per week. You can artificially lower the deaths per week by decreasing your infection rate. But it won't help in the long-term since decreasing your infection rate means you need to remain in lockdown for longer. Just like decreasing fuel consumed per day doesn't help you use less fuel, because you're just increasing the number of days the trip will take.
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Not really misleading. Sweden is the only EU country where the number of active cases has not peaked yet.
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Re: Title completely wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
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Using the cumulative data is less correct because other countries may have been accumulating infections/deaths for a longer time.
Re: Title completely wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
When discussing the effect of recent lock down policy, it's not cherry picking to use recent consistent data to do so. In fact it would be utterly stupid to use overall Covid deaths as they pollute the numbers for countries which did enact a lock down with a lot of pre-lockdown deaths.
Re: Title completely wrong (Score:4, Informative)
The UK is way ahead per capita. We are at 547.
That's probably a low estimate too.
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The UK is way ahead per capita. We are at 547.
That's probably a low estimate too.
Indeed, you too were insanely late to the lockdown game.
Re: Title completely wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Learn to use data properly... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you include their non-lockdown numbers like the overall stats do then they are ahead of Sweden. But since the other countries started enacting good government health policy Sweden has been singled out as the most deadly.
Belgium, France, Italy, and the UK all registered the majority of their deaths before lockdowns were a thing, which is why it's important to look at graphs, events, and dates if you want to make any sane conclusion about something other than "how fucked was 2020".
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Sweden is BY FAR the deadliest country... by, more ore less, 200 people DEAD by million more than Spain.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Yeah. Because, as everyone knows, 385.44 (Sweden) is at least 200 more than 612.71 (Spain).
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countries with similar welfare systems and demographics
Those other countries are, how you say... mixed?
yes exactly
Only accurate if you cherry pick the data. (Score:4, Informative)
And the data isn't worth much either (Score:2)
Cherry picking a bad stretch of seven days for Sweden, they hammer home the anti-Sweden narrative. But on the whole, the per-capita death rate in Sweden is far behind the UK, which did a strict lockdown, as well as Spain, Italy and France.
Furthermore, the number of deaths per capita doesn't really matter much.
What matters is whether the medical care system becomes swamped with the number of cases at any given moment. What matters is unnecessary deaths.
People will get the virus, there's no way around that, it's in the nature of virus transmission. If more people are sick than our social system can handle, then there will be unnecessary deaths. If far fewer people get sick than the social system can handle, then lockdown procedures are more ex
Re:And the data isn't worth much either (Score:4, Insightful)
Even Fauci is against endless lockdowns now
Just shut up about your fucking stupid agenda
Re:Only accurate if you cherry pick the data. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cherry picking a bad stretch of seven days for Sweden, they hammer home the anti-Sweden narrative. But on the whole, the per-capita death rate in Sweden is far behind the UK, which did a strict lockdown, as well as Spain, Italy and France.
Picking the past week is not cherry picking, it's focusing on current policy effects. Spain, Italy, and France's death rate are largely driven by lack of data as they were the first countries hit before a proper policy was established, at the time they went into lockdown the Nordic countries barely had registered a case.
Don't think everything is about cherry picking and narratives. It makes absolute sense to determine how *current* policy is working based on *current* data.
Car analogy (because we need to bring back those to Slashdot): It turns out Ford is only a popular brand of car if you cherry pick the past 100 years. If you go back 2000 years Ford is basically irrelevant.
Re: Only accurate if you cherry pick the data. (Score:2)
I love how you just ignore facts.
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I love how the geniuses here can argue the complete opposite of something.
Its easy to argue the complete opposite of the fake news. Just have to look at the facts.
Sweden is 8th in Europe (Score:4, Informative)
I call bullshit. Sweden is way behind many other countries where strict confinement was enforced.
1. San Marino: 1,238 deaths/1M pop
2. Belgium: 797 deaths/1M pop
3. Andorra: 660 deaths/1M pop
4. Spain: 613 deaths/1M pop. Strictest lock-down and confinement in Europe.
5. UK: 514 deaths/1M pop
6. Italy: 541 deaths/1M pop. First country in Europe and second strictest lock-down and confinement in Europe.
7. France: 434 deaths/1M pop
8. Sweden: 396 deaths/1M pop
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Calling your bullshit. Comparing apples to oranges is of very limited benefit. Hot climates with completely different cultural norms and completely different medical systems, like comparing Spain with Sweden is pointless. There's too little commonality, and there's little benefit to be derived from such comparison.
Which is why you compare countries that are at least tangentially similar. In case of Sweden, it's typically compared to other Nordics (other than Iceland), so Norway, Denmark and Finland. Those a
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Good work not reading the summary. The summary specifically focused on deaths in the most recent full week. If you go down the list of what is wrong with looking at overall statistics: 2 countries you listed are statistical oddities due to their incredibly tiny populations and don't make sense to include, one of those countries has had an epicly horrible response with a very late lockdown run by someone who's hair is as bad as Trump's, and the remainder of those countries in your list were the first to get
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Your ideal case isn't happening, though. The number of deaths in Sweden each week is about as high as the total number of deaths during the whole pandemic in the neighboring countries. With an upper limit of 7% current immunity in Sweden, and a reasonable estimate of 1-year length of that immunity, Sweden can never reach 70% immunity unless they significantly accelerate the rate of infections and deaths. Their outbreak will just drag on, while the neighboring countries are already having days with zero deat
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While you are seeing the same numbers as I do should one also look at the graph of new deaths per day.
You'll find the graphs for Sweden here: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
And, as an example, for the UK here: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
So can one see the graph of daily deaths for the UK having dropped below 50% of it's former peak. Sweden's graph looks similar, but it's a little less clear. I hope it will follow a decline similar to the UK's. Both, the UK and Sweden have peaked, around mid of April
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The top three is somewhat misleading. San Marino and Andorra are micronations (with 33785, resp. 77006 inhabitants). Counting them as countries (rather than cities) is comparing apples and oranges; there are cities in Italy and Spain that were hit much worse, but their numbers get flattened by the averaging over the whole nation.
Belgium is counting every death where the virus was suspected, even if no test is ever done, and most of those deaths occur at home. If a neighbour mentions the deceased was coughin
Not excess death rate though (Score:3, Interesting)
Yet UK/Spain/Italy have seen far more deaths over all.
So if Sweden truly leads in corona deaths, then lockdowns can kill more people than corona. That's perfectly possible of course, but then the headline should be"Sweden managed to save a lot of people from deadly lockdown".
Alternatively the article just uses bad statistics to intentionally lie because it has ideological reasons to be pro lockdown.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs... [euromomo.eu]
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Oh yeah that's right it was politicians who called for the lockdown of the country. I too remember visiting that alternate dimension.
When you're done re-writing history you may want to look at the reality which was that *scientists* said the lockdown was absolutely necessary and that politicians were the ones refusing to lock down until the bodies started piling up in the morgues.
Re:Not excess death rate though (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet UK/Spain/Italy have seen far more deaths over all.
So if Sweden truly leads in corona deaths, then lockdowns can kill more people than corona.
Nope. You're missing the point of the summary. We're discussing the effectiveness of a lockdown. Spain, France, and Italy registered most of their deaths before anyone in the west even considered uttering the word lockdown, and the UK was comically mismanaged refusing to lock down until the country's own leader ended up in hospital.
If anything your data supports the conclusion that has been reached: not locking down has had a horrible effect on death toll, that data is reflected when you trend deaths per week and take into account when the lockdown happened, and it is reflected if you look to just the past week and consider countries which aren't in lockdown (Sweden) vs those who are (the rest of Europe).
Alternatively the article just uses bad statistics to intentionally lie because it has ideological reasons to be pro lockdown.
Or people fail to understand how data analysis works and use the total numbers incorrectly polluting the dataset. Data analysis is not as easy as (what appears to be most of the people here) Slashdot posters think it is.
Title is misleading (Score:2)
From TFA: the country’s death rate per capita was the highest in Europe over the seven days to 19 May.
Which means nothing but Sweden has not peaked yet. So what?
Shitty article and shitty Slashdot title.
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Which means nothing but Sweden has not peaked yet. So what?
Look at the two charts for deaths here https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info] and say that again. Sweden's death rate peaked about April 23 and has been dropping slowly but steadily since then. The case rate remains high, but that can be an artifact of testing methods. If they are using serological tests to look for antigens, for example, they may be including people who have cleared the virus. The case rate curves for real infections go up, then down. Curves that go sideways for weeks prove just one thing: fak
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The opposite. Curves show that most European countries are rapidly descending from their peaks.
Source: https://i.redd.it/z9hce4haaby4... [i.redd.it]
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Which means nothing but Sweden has not peaked yet. So what?
Shitty article and shitty Slashdot title.
That is in the second line of the summary. It's not misleading if you refuse to read it. As for "so what", well when you want to look at the effect of lock down vs no lock down and judge how well recent policy is working then it's best to use recent data and compare on level footing.
Nobody wants a recession (Score:2)
Does support for keeping things open in Sweden have a partisan political (left/right) angle?
Are people interested in changing course, now that it seems like they are getting more deaths without any benefit? Or are people personally invested in bad policies as "our way"?
America's partisan divide on scientific issues is an evergreen click-getter on Slashdot, but what about elsewhere?
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No. In all Nordics, opposition parties and government parties basically united behind "we do what our experts tell us, and differences between us are mostly on minutiae".
It's culturally ingrained in our countries to do so in time of severe crisis.
A good example of just how strong of a unifying driver this is in our cultures is how here in Finland, it's anti-constitutional for government to lock down borders from our own citizens. So what they did instead is strongly insist that borders are to be closed with
Maybe, if you look at a single week... (Score:2, Informative)
Why should a single week be the relevant metric for this?
Belgium's total per-capita death rate for coronavirus is 797 per million. Spain is 613. UK and Italy are tied at 541. France is 434, and then we have Sweden at 396. (I skipped Andorra because it is so small -- total population of 77,000 -- that its statistics are inherently noisy.)
Obviously, averaging 6.25 deaths per million per day for a week is a big deal; it adds almost 44 to the total numbers. But Belgium's worst 7-day average was 28, Spain h
Re:Maybe, if you look at a single week... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone is trying to figure out what to do in the immediate future. For that, peak of a few weeks ago is largely irrelevant. It's the current numbers that matter.
Re:Maybe, if you look at a single week... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why should a single week be the relevant metric for this?
It's not just a single week, it's the most recent full week. Why is it relevant? Because we're talking about the effects of a current policy. You counted the total death rate and in doing so you polluted your data set with a mix of people who died with the policy in place and before the policy was introduced, incidentally that's when most of the deaths occurred in Belgium, Spain and Italy.
If you want to look at total corona virus impact then sure, use the data set. If you want to analyse the impact of the lockdown, then you better compare lockdown vs no-lockdown, and not include data in the no-lockdown group from a time before lockdowns were in place.
Car analogy: When judging how popular Ford is, it's best to keep the analysis to the past 100 years, and not look across the history of the human race.
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Why should a single week be the relevant metric for this?
Because using the most recent week is better for understanding how recent adjustments in policy are affecting the disease.
Although Belgium has the highest death rate averaged across the entire infection, they have implemented a lock down. Using the most recent week's deaths, we see that lock down has reduced the death rate.
In Sweden's case, they have not implemented a lock down. Accordingly, a comparison of death rates over the past week shows that Sweden's death rate now exceeds Belgium's.
By the way, her
Wishy washy politics wreck economics the worst. (Score:4, Insightful)
The fastest way to eradicate COVID-19 is with a super strict lock-down. Food and medicine delivered to homes. It'd only take a couple of weeks of this to massively reduce the numbers of people infected. You can then clean up the small remainder of cases with testing, contact tracing and then only quarantining likely infected people instead of having to quarantine the whole population. Everyone who's outside of their homes should be wearing masks if inside of buildings or near other people.
People who don't want to stop the spread of the virus perplex me, do you want millions of people to die unnecessarily? A large percentage of the population are at risk, most of all, those who are vitamin D deficient and/or those with of heart problems, hypertension or diabetes. Roughly 40% of people in North America and Europe are Vitamin D deficient, people who are vitamin D deficient are 8 times more likely to have a severe version of COVID-19.
The more wishy washy the measures to control the virus the worse then outcome, the longer it will take to deal with it effectively.
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Well, in a hundred years I will almost certainly be dead - but that doesn't mean that I'm ready to die *right now*.
What do we say to the god of death: "not today"
That aside, I don't see any reason to believe humans will be extinct in 50 years. Climate change may cause problems far worse than COVID, but humans will survive. We survived the ice age without any modern technology. That doesn't mean we shouldn't change, but it has to be viewed in perspective.
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You are free to serve your God by killing yourself.
But please leave the rest out of your crazy relationship with your God.
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Re:Wishy washy politics wreck economics the worst. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Such viruses exist in large numbers only in and on human bodies; and they do not disappear because of a lockdown"
Huh? Virus particles degrade over the course of just days (if not less) outside human bodies, and inside humans they cause a disease which results in either cure (the virus is no longer) or death of the host and after some time the viruses in it as well. Put every single person in solitary confinement with some extra isolation precautions than usual (like filtered air) and you will beat this virus.
The worst thing you can do is lockdowns which are sufficient to cause economic problems but insufficient to drive R_0 below unity. Which is what most countries did. Sweden btw did not have lockdowns but they did have effective social distancing. Their results are comparable to some US states which did not have lockdowns. And their economy is still wrecked like everyone else around them.
Anyways, it is unconscionable to me that we are at 100K dead in the USA. We should have put every single person on our soil in solitary confinement in January for a month or better yet two and we would have had nearly no issues after that. So many lives could have been saved if we had just done the right thing.
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I do not know if it is possible but the whole point is that we need to cut all of that interconnected nonsense out of our society. The next pandemic will likely be worse. We need people to be switchable to isolation mode as quickly as possible. We need to hold society shutdown drills. We need to change.
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Do you know what causes vitamin D deficiency? Trapping peopl
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It only took one person to cause this and with animal reservoirs (cats, dogs, ferrets, minks, tigers and lions have all tested positive) I'm not aware of any scientists who believes your method can be successful.
Poorly-worded Headline (Score:2)
Better: Sweden's one-week death rate is currently highest in Europe. It shouldn't be necessary to read the article to extract the key point when it's easy enough to put in in the headline. The siren call of clickbait is hard to resist.
Antibodies don't mean anything (Score:4, Interesting)
We know scientifically a lot about influenza, how it spreads, how it infects and how to deal with it. We know that if you can get influenza antibodies you're effectively immune form infection for a period of time.Very pointedly we don't know the same thing about COVID19. While it's not unreasonable to assume that antibodies might prevent reinfection the science isn't in yet and thus we shouldn't be going against science for an unproven hypothesis.
Highest per capita rate for the most recent week (Score:2)
"The research by Sweden’s public health agency comes as Finland warned it would be risky to welcome Swedish tourists after figures suggested the country’s death rate per capita was the highest in Europe over the seven days to 19 May."
Other countries have a higher overall rate but those countries have a lower rate recently. However even in Sweden the number is coming doiwn.
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Other countries have a higher overall rate
Indeed, those other countries also registered their highest death rate before lock downs were introduced. Which is what the summary is talking about.
Need to wait for the experiment to finish (Score:3)
While Sweden had the highest death rate *that week*, we don't know where the final tallies will be yet. In 2-5 years we will know and be able to figure out what strategies won.
My prediction is that lock-down followed by test/track will result in the lowest deaths (based on S. Korea), and "ignoring" will result in the highest, but we will see.
More idiocy from people who thrive on panicking (Score:3)
Sweden's death rates have never been remarkably high, have been remarkably low seeing that the nation, while in practice observing lockdown in much the same way as other nations, had no government-imposed lockdown.
Its numbers were and are statistically comparable with that of other European nations.
Short term:
https://ourworldindata.org/cor... [ourworldindata.org]
Longer term shows that other European nations have fared way worse, and that was with enforced lockdown, often including criminal charges.
As is stands, Sweden is an example for all European nations.
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Um ... per capita has actually been a crucial concept missing from 99% of reporting on the pandemic (including that fancy web page from Johns Hopkins). It's pointless to compare numbers based on arbitrary groupings with populations spread across multiple orders of magnitude. Obviously more people are going to die in Sweden than San Marino, there are 300 times as many people there. But if 100 per million die in Sweden and 50 die per million in San Marino, you can draw a conclusion about the relative situatio
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If the experts are right, herd immunity is achieved when 70% of the population has gotten the virus and is immune to it. At that point the rate of transmission begins to drop not due to social distancing, but simply because the virus encounters fewer potential hosts (people who haven't yet been exposed to it). But if your
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If a cure/vaccine shows up in 3 months, i bet Sweden will regret it.
If a cure/vaccine (that works without killing more people than it saves) shows up within 3 months, it will be a miracle. Covid-19 is a coronavirus, very similar to some of those that cause the common cold. Researchers have been trying to find a cure/vaccine for that for over a century, with complete lack of the slightest success. A large part of the problem is that such viruses mutate very rapidly; Covid-19 is already believed to have at least 30 strains. https://nypost.com/2020/04/21/... [nypost.com]
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This is a massively ignorant statement. The primary reason why we have problems with common cold vaccine is that there are over 200 known different viruses that cause those same symptoms, which are not just different viruses but belong in entirely different families of viruses. Primary cause is not coronaviruses but rhinoviruses, but this tells you what the problem is. It's not just that it's not the same virus causing the symptoms, it's completely different familes of different viruses, of which there are
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There's already a bovine coronavirus vaccine, the reason we don't have human coronavirus ones yes is that there previously hasn't been a sustained effort to produce them.
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Comparing seasonal flu with no shutdowns to covid19 with shut downs was dumb two months ago. You want to compare it to the flu you have to go back to 1918 when second and third waves ended up killing tens of millions.
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Sweden has lost 376/million in about a month and a half, and they are still going strong.
They're on track to hit 1000/million by August 1 if nothing changes.
When you compare that to the 300/million for Germany's toll during their highest flu season, the two don't seem comparable.