COVID-19

Discussions about serious topics, for serious people
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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:07 pm

Though I'm looking forward to the moment Shelly discovers Sweden's lockdown level was more stringent than Denmark, Norway and Finland in the summer of 2020. And yet Sweden's death rate was higher. It'll take him weeks to figure out why.
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sheldrake
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:05 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:03 pm
You are new to all this and think you're dropping fresh pearls of wisdom, when we seen this crap hundreds of times before.
Maybe you should gather together in a huddle and decide whether you think Sweden suffered more than it's neighbours because it didn't lock down, or did better than the UK because it did. Until then, your claims of having already discussed things and come to erudite conclusions as a group will continue to sound implausible.

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden- ... ?r=US&IR=T
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2BG1R9
https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-sweden-co ... a-59353963
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/sweden-covi ... ly-1094682

Sweden's capital during it's tightest restrictions
Image

Now for a serious question I'm curious LPM, what do you think made Spain's mortality rate so much higher than Sweden's?
Last edited by sheldrake on Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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lpm
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:35 pm

You post a photo from 1 July 2021 and claim it's during "Sweden's tightest restrictions", as if photos of outdoor bars are proof of anything.

You are being fundamentally unserious.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:38 pm

And your habit of editing posts after they've been responded to stinks.

For any onlookers who can be arsed, Sheldrake completely changed the tone and content of his post after seeing what I'd written. This forum should go back to the BS no edit rule.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:41 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:35 pm
You post a photo from 1 July 2021 and claim it's during "Sweden's tightest restrictions", as if photos of outdoor bars are proof of anything.

You are being fundamentally unserious.
I'm being completely serious. They are an example of the massive difference between the UK and Swedish experience.

Here's Stockholm in April

Image

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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:54 pm

I'm sorry you lost your father. But it doesn't have anything to do with Sweden. It has a lot to do with the UK locking down far too late in March 2020, running with too high a case rate and leaving the NHS under stress, then boosting cases in Autumn 2020 through Eat Out to Help Out and the incompetent tiers system, then not doing the firebreak lockdown, then trying to "save Christmas", and finally unlocking through 2021 at a slightly too fast pace leading to us exiting restrictions with a high case load and continued pressure on the NHS.

I think you should be looking at Johnson & Co for answers - their dithering cost countless Covid and non-Covid deaths and most of us here are furious with them.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 4:06 pm

lpm wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:54 pm
I'm sorry you lost your father. But it doesn't have anything to do with Sweden.
If you're prepared to have a respectful discussion where we can disagree without abusing each other, then let's continue.

My contention is that the measures employed in the UK were stricter than they needed to be (including a considerable effort to make the population more frightened) and this has two harmful main effects

1) We're starting to normalise quite serious changes in the relationship between the individual, businesses and the state. Erosion of medical confidentiality to access employment etc.. curtailment of freedom in daily life to pressure people into taking pharmaceutical products.. police stopping people for walking alone in the country, pouring dye into lakes to discourage people from visiting beauty spots etc..
(This is my greater concern, because it's still affecting us and has implications for the future)

2) The measures were so severe that they significantly impacted people's ability to access basic medical services. I do not believe in all cases this was because the staff and beds were overwhelmed dealing with actual Covid cases. This had a direct impact on my father as he had (what I belatedly know) to have been symptoms of pretty serious heart disease that could've been detected by a face-to-face examination from his doctor.
I think you should be looking at Johnson & Co for answers - their dithering cost countless Covid and non-Covid deaths and most of us here are furious with them.
I'm often happy to play the token right-winger on this forum, it can be a useful form of devil's advocacy, but I'm not a Johnson fan despite broadly approving of the direction of Brexit under his administration. To the best of my understanding Cummings is the most to blame for the chaos and wild swings into authoritarianism as Covid appeared in the UK. I would've preferred a Swedish/Barrington Resolution approach with much better protection of care homes, and I've been told by people with access to the microworld of parliament that Cummings brow-beat people away from this approach.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 15, 2021 4:10 pm

Moved some more posts to the Pit.

As a reminder of the rules, posts in this subforum should, amongst other things, "Avoid abuse." and also "Be sensitive."
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Re: COVID-19

Post by shpalman » Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:41 pm

sheldrake wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 3:05 pm
lpm wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:03 pm
You are new to all this and think you're dropping fresh pearls of wisdom, when we seen this crap hundreds of times before.
Maybe you should gather together in a huddle and decide whether you think Sweden suffered more than it's neighbours because it didn't lock down, or did better than the UK because it did. Until then, your claims of having already discussed things and come to erudite conclusions as a group will continue to sound implausible.
Sweden doesn't work as an example of a place which didn't lock down but was fine, because it did lock down to some extent, and it wasn't fine as compared to similar countries.

But I agree with you that in the UK there were problems, to some extent caused by the British attitude to authority which in turn is caused by the terrible behaviour of the British when they get some authority.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:47 pm

shpalman wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:41 pm

Sweden doesn't work as an example of a place which didn't lock down but was fine, because it did lock down to some extent, and it wasn't fine as compared to similar countries.
Britain is a similar country, it's just less urbanised and isn't a land neighbour. Sweden didn't impose stay at home orders or bans on more than one household gathering. They didn't order offices, shops and restaurants closed. I think journalists and bad scientists are retrospectively claiming 'Sweden locked down' after a year of saying people were dying because it didn't, precisely because the impact was nowhere near as bad as they expected it to be.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:58 pm

Lockdown, to coin a phrase, isn't Boolean.

It's a matter of degree.

Even restricting the discussion to government-ordered lockdowniness only, restrictions varied in severity between places and within places over time.

So for any sensible discussion to take place, people need to be very clear about which measures they're talking about, where and when, whether they were voluntary, encouraged, obligatory, the severity of the enforcement, etc. Both the UK and Sweden went through all kinds of changes over the last 18 months.

Sheldrake is at a bit of a disadvantage in the conversation, because we genuinely did discuss most of this stuff in a lot of detail at the time. Even the definition and relevance of "urbanisation" isn't clear cut.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 7:05 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 5:58 pm
Lockdown, to coin a phrase, isn't Boolean.

It's a matter of degree.

Even restricting the discussion to government-ordered lockdowniness only, restrictions varied in severity between places and within places over time.

So for any sensible discussion to take place, people need to be very clear about which measures they're talking about, where and when, whether they were voluntary, encouraged, obligatory, the severity of the enforcement, etc. Both the UK and Sweden went through all kinds of changes over the last 18 months.
At which points would you say the restrictions in Sweden, of any type, were more severe than those in the UK ?

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:38 pm

I wouldn't say anything, tbh - I can't remember and don't really care.

But I'd rather people who do care have a productive conversation, which won't happen if you're all talking about different stuff.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 9:58 pm

Well I care, and I think the acknowledgement in western media that 'Sweden wasn't locking down' was pretty widespread right up until journalists needed to pivot the rhetoric as it became apparent that their deaths per million was lower than many states taking more severe measures. I posted examples further up.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:05 pm

I guess what we need, then, is a graph showing {outcome metric(s) of choice} over time, annotated with descriptions of levels of lockdowniness - what was mandatory, and perhaps how much people were ±voluntarily staying at home anyway (I know I didn't exercise 100% of the freedoms I could have at any given moment).

Perhaps some kind of Minard plot.

Then we compare that with other countries' trajectories. Cases will have a lag of about 2 weeks, hospitals a bit longer, deaths a bit longer still (see Scrutable passim for detailed analyses subject to rigorous post-publication review, which is more stringent than many of the preprints cited in the media).

One alternative hypothesis is that people stopped talking about Sweden because things in Sweden changed.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:24 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:05 pm


One alternative hypothesis is that people stopped talking about Sweden because things in Sweden changed.
Their strictest regulations were never like the strictest measures adopted by the UK or other 'strict' western european goverments. Have a look at some of the links I posted above.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:57 pm

But there were also times when UK transmission was much worse than Sweden's, so it could have been a proportionate response.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Sat Oct 16, 2021 7:56 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:57 pm
But there were also times when UK transmission was much worse than Sweden's, so it could have been a proportionate response.
In the waves I'm aware of, cases tended to peak shortly before tighter measures were introduced.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by plodder » Sat Oct 16, 2021 9:19 am

so the deaths caused lockdown? I mean yes, I think they probably were a major factor. :?

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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Sat Oct 16, 2021 9:38 am

plodder wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 9:19 am
so the deaths caused lockdown? I mean yes, I think they probably were a major factor. :?
They also started to reduce before lockdowns were forced on the population, which suggests they may well not have been necessary.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by plodder » Sat Oct 16, 2021 9:48 am

Would that be because by this point, many sensible people were taking precautions at the same time as asking the government to mandate these precautions? I think you need to spell out your logic in a very specific way, because at the moment your issues are very vague and therefore difficult to respond to.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by headshot » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:18 am

Anecdata: My theatre company cancelled its 2020 output on March 13th 2020, two weeks before the first UK lockdown. That's the same day my wife formally requested to work from home too.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by sheldrake » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:29 am

plodder wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 9:48 am
Would that be because by this point, many sensible people were taking precautions at the same time as asking the government to mandate these precautions?
It could indeed be. I am not trying to argue against people washing their hands, or choose to work from home where they can. I am concerned with the stretch of what we accept the state imposing on us, and with some measures which in my view were excessively cautious about one risk whilst opening up others (e.g. w.r.t to medical access, overly cautious with schoolchildren effecting their education and development etc..)

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Re: COVID-19

Post by headshot » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:44 am

Mmm, because it's a well-known fact that children never mix with vulnerable adults when asymptomatically carrying a potentially deadly virus that has killed millions world-wide.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by bob sterman » Sat Oct 16, 2021 11:17 am

headshot wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:18 am
Anecdata: My theatre company cancelled its 2020 output on March 13th 2020, two weeks before the first UK lockdown. That's the same day my wife formally requested to work from home too.
Bigger Anecdata: On March 13th, many UK universities announced plans to stop face-to-face teaching - and then actually stopped face-to-face teaching around March 16/17/18

E.g. UCL, Southampton, Sheffield, Liverpool on the 16th. Newcastle on the 17th, Manchester on the 18th.

And prior to this attendance at lectures had already started to dwindle - following the March 13th announcements.

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