Sweden's Coronavirus Approach

[geomancer]

Things are not going well in Sweden: the death rate per 1 million people is 453, 10 times that of neighboring Norway (45) where more stringent lockdown policies were established.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Some seller's remorse here

https://www.livescience.com/results-...response.html:

Fortune: Sweden chose a looser lockdown. The scientist behind the strategy now says the death toll is too high

The research group Ourworldindata.org now estimates that Sweden has the eighth highest number of coronavirus-related deaths per capita, Reuters reported.

The grillings will continue until morale improves:

https://fortune.com/2020/06/10/sweden-coronavirus-briefings-scandal/

Half the deaths in Sweden are in senior care facilities

[Jude Iam]

not perfect, no:

“If we were to encounter the same illness with the same knowledge that we have today, I think our response would land somewhere in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done,” Anders Tegnell said in an interview with Swedish Radio.

fully HALF the deaths were seniors in facilities - that could've been tightened up no doubt - get the old people locked down. anyway, that kinda cuts the figure way down, in my way of thinking.

so what would you like to take you away?
optimum to die in your sleep, but - presuming you believe you've gonna die - exactly how do you wanna go? heart attack's better than cancer, right? stroke? diabetes? iatrogenic? something relatively fast rather than the slow grind of poverty and all the suffering that brings.
covid's a bummer cause you might be stuck on a ventilator, which kills you, and you're kept from anyone who'd be hanging out with you, if you wanted company on your way out... but here, choose your exit:

Number of deaths for leading causes of U.S. death:

• Heart disease: 647,457
• Cancer: 599,108
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
• Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
• Diabetes: 83,564
• Influenza and Pneumonia: 55,672
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 50,633
• Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173

Source: Deaths: Final Data for 2017, table B pdf icon[PDF – 2 MB]

$29,000+ per Covid 19 patient for each hospital - check it yourself.

no doubt this'll initiating a half dozen replies to this. i'm tired of replying, wearied from this forum's convo;
for the supposedly most awake and progressive part of the states, amazingly conservative.

live/die in the mystery, jude

Things are not going well in Sweden: the death rate per 1 million people is 453, 10 times that of neighboring Norway (45) where more stringent lockdown policies were established. ...

[ecojaf]

This (potentially) is about how we live the rest of our lives.

In six months or so, while we certainly won't have a distribution ready vaccine, scientists will likely have a very good idea whether they can produce a vaccine (whether this will be like polio or HIV).

If we learn that we're not likely to get a vaccine for covid, then I see the points of a lot of the "well, we gotta live with this somehow and I don't want to live the way you think I should" crowd and we'll have to negotiate that, the way we haphazardly adapted to a world with HIV.

But, if a vaccine is going to be available by next summer, can we really not all sacrifice one summer of freedom in our lives to prevent or mitigate a potentially horrific fall/winter this year, and then just get the vaccine and get on with our lives?

The numbers regarding annual causes of death are completely irrelevant since covid has only been here a few months and in many, many places it has eclipsed these other causes of death over that time frame.

And it's not just about dying, it is about how we live. Covid is causing devastating lingering effects in many of the young people that it can't kill, and somehow those numbers don't make it into the debate.

And, again, unlike these other causes of death, covid might be something we can vaccinate against and be done with in the coming year, and it won't take that long for scientists to get a good sense of the likelihood of a vaccine.

But for those wanting a more public health oriented approach, debating those that feel the opposite is not really productive (neither side in ANY debate in America listens to anything the other side says anymore; when I post things I tend to be a little indirect and will say one little thing that somebody "on my side" disagrees with and it's guaranteed that somebody on my side of the issue will ONLY see that sentence and feel a need to respond vigorously to it, seemingly without seeing any of the other stuff I wrote that indicates we're on the same side, so I don't just say this about the "other side").

If you want our responses to public health crises and other such crises to be more "rational" (from "our" perspective), then, in my view, it comes down to voting for actual progressives that won't go along with the past decades consistent right-ward march in terms of less progressive tax codes, shifting budgets from education, science, etc. to incarceration, police, military. A lot of democrats in "liberal" areas in safe seats have held their seats for decades during this decay and it's time to give younger, more progressive leadership a chance. All us folks my age and older are just dug into our worldviews and talking past the same people we've been talking past for decades.

[podfish]

covid's a bummer cause you might be stuck on a ventilator, which kills you, and you're kept from anyone who'd be hanging out with you, if you wanted company on your way out... but here, choose your exit:

Number of deaths for leading causes of U.S. death:

• Heart disease: 647,457
• Cancer: 599,108......

$29,000+ per Covid 19 patient for each hospital - check it yourself.

there's an idea that seems to me to be related to yours: the idea that people have more fear of dying in a plane crash than they do in a car crash. Is concern over the threat of covid higher than that over heart disease for the same reason? Well, of course there is some of that. However, the real wild card is the aspect of contagion. Sure, we don't shut down society to limit heart disease or auto crashes the way we've done for covid -- but if you don't think we all pay a tremendous amount to mitigate their risks, just ask auto manufacturers about the costs of mandatory safety equipment. And we don't know that the estimates of millions of deaths if there were no mitigation efforts are wrong.


And your throw-away line about 'surprisingly conservative' is a bit odd. Should a true free-thinker be the kind of person who rides their Harley in flip-flops, a t-shirt and with hair flying as they lane-split through Big Sur? People's politics have little correlation with their other activities. For example, aren't people concerned over the health of the planet the most fundamentally conservative of all?

Finally, the money reference? the way money is allocated, especially involving universal needs like health care and housing, never makes any sense. It's easy to single out but always has more heat than light

[Barry]

Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.

By Peter S. Goodman
Published July 7, 2020
Updated July 8, 2020

Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.

This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.

“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”

The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson — previously hospitalized with Covid-19 — reopened pubs and restaurants last weekend in a bid to restore normal economic life.

Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that governments must balance saving lives against the imperative to spare jobs, with the extra health risks of rolling back social distancing potentially justified by a resulting boost to prosperity. But Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.

Continues here

[sharingwisdom]

Sweden turns on WHO for saying it had suffered 'very significant resurgence' of Covid-19
Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has hit back at the World Health Organization after it included Sweden in a group of countries facing "a very significance resurgence" of coronavirus infections.
Dr. Tegnell, who has in recent months become one of the world's most high profile and divisive epidemiologists, said: "That is, unfortunately, a total misinterpretation of the data."
https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-accuses-misinterpreting-data-saying-111933752.html

Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale

Continues here

[rossmen]

The nyt certainly has a point of view. Love the comparison to norway. Because sweden chose a different path than other first world nations, with initially superior results, now its the target of neoliberal propaganda. Time will tell. Our fatality rate isnt that much lower than swedens, yet our curves are way more scary! And it isn't because of the president. The whole corona blame game is stupid. That's the lesson of this virus. And sweden has refused to play!

[garywalker]

It certainly is at least partly due to the President because of his minimizing the threat and being a terrible role model by not wearing a mask as well as failing to lead a consistent national effort and encouraging premature re-opening.

The nyt certainly has a point of view. Love the comparison to norway. Because sweden chose a different path than other first world nations, with initially superior results, now its the target of neoliberal propaganda. Time will tell. Our fatality rate isnt that much lower than swedens, yet our curves are way more scary! And it isn't because of the president. The whole corona blame game is stupid. That's the lesson of this virus. And sweden has refused to play!