Coronavirus: When should we be concerned?

[Cap]

It is all a giant conspiracy that convinced doctors around the globe to let people die, force people to wear masks and stay away from each other, for the purpose of... I am not sure. Who does this help?

We hate freedom and get off on making people do things they don’t want to do. Conservatives don’t want to wear masks, and that’s all the reason we need to gin up a pandemic to make them wear masks.

[In2ition]

It is all a giant conspiracy that convinced doctors around the globe to let people die, force people to wear masks and stay away from each other, for the purpose of... I am not sure. Who does this help?

We hate freedom and get off on making people do things they don’t want to do. Conservatives don’t want to wear masks, and that’s all the reason we need to gin up a pandemic to make them wear masks.

Idk if it's a giant conspiracy, that would seem to be a little silly. It's also a great strawman argument. The rest of the world does follow the lead of the US though. Why is it that it doesn't seem to be a big deal to Sweden and they are living life like normal?

[Indy]

Over 5% of Swedes that got it, died. That is one of the worst mortality rates in the world. That is over twice the mortality rate in the US, meaning nearly half a million Americans would already be dead from it.

But yeah, they 'saved' their economy... It only cost double the mortality rate for their citizens.

[Split T]

I think it would be worth seeing if there is anything to learn from Sweden, but they didn’t exactly have no problems. They’re doing great now, but they had a sky high per capita infection and death rate early on. I also think it’s hard to make a comparison between a country with 10 million people to One with 300+ million. But by all means, if we can learn from them, let’s learn from them.

[In2ition]

Over 5% of Swedes that got it, died. That is one of the worst mortality rates in the world. That is over twice the mortality rate in the US, meaning nearly half a million Americans would already be dead from it.

But yeah, they 'saved' their economy... It only cost double the mortality rate for their citizens.

I have no idea where you are getting that number from.

[In2ition]

Ok, I found a site that has the numbers. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

I work with a number of developers from Bolivia, and they've been locked down heavily since March. They are only allowed to go to the grocery store 2 days a week. Other than that, nada. Their death rate is 6.1%
Italy is 7.1%
Ecuador 7.8%
Mexico 10.0%
Yemen 29.1%

[Indy]

Ok, I found a site that has the numbers. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

I work with a number of developers from Bolivia, and they've been locked down heavily since March. They are only allowed to go to the grocery store 2 days a week. Other than that, nada. Their death rate is 6.1%
Italy is 7.1%
Ecuador 7.8%
Mexico 10.0%
Yemen 29.1%

Hmm, which of these things is not like the other when looking at availability and quality of healthcare?
Bolivia
Ecuador
Yemen
Sweden

And Italy is the poster child across Europe for what not to do early on, right when half of Europe is heading to the Alps for skiing.

[In2ition]

Ok, I found a site that has the numbers. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

I work with a number of developers from Bolivia, and they've been locked down heavily since March. They are only allowed to go to the grocery store 2 days a week. Other than that, nada. Their death rate is 6.1%
Italy is 7.1%
Ecuador 7.8%
Mexico 10.0%
Yemen 29.1%

Hmm, which of these things is not like the other when looking at availability and quality of healthcare?
Bolivia
Ecuador
Yemen
Sweden

And Italy is the poster child across Europe for what not to do early on, right when half of Europe is heading to the Alps for skiing.

I believe that Bolivia has universal health care. https://www.pressenza.com/2019/05/boliv ... d-says-un/
I found this on Ecuador. https://internationalliving.com/countri ... or/health/

[Nodack]

Thanks for the posts In2ition. That is the kind of debating I like. I appreciate the effort.

One thing we can all agree on is that we are divided. We all want the best for our family/friends/country/world. We just don’t agree on things. The right is trying to make Covid out to be as small a deal as possible and the left is trying to make it into as big as deal as possible. There is no official way to handle this. There is no one way right way. We are torn between doing too much and doing nothing at all about it. We are certainly not united as a country on anything right now because of partisan politics and I am as partisan as the next guy.

Trump has to go first. Covid or not. He is a cancer to our world.

Type “Sweden Covid cases” into Google and you will see they started small ramped up and then fell down... and now have just ramped back up to their peak in June. 6000 deaths.

[In2ition]

Thanks for the posts In2ition. That is the kind of debating I like. I appreciate the effort.

One thing we can all agree on is that we are divided. We all want the best for our family/friends/country/world. We just don’t agree on things. The right is trying to make Covid out to be as small a deal as possible and the left is trying to make it into as big as deal as possible. There is no official way to handle this. There is no one way right way. We are torn between doing too much and doing nothing at all about it. We are certainly not united as a country on anything right now because of partisan politics and I am as partisan as the next guy.

Trump has to go first. Covid or not. He is a cancer to our world.

Type “Sweden Covid cases” into Google and you will see they started small ramped up and then fell down... and now have just ramped back up to their peak in June. 6000 deaths.

I'm trying my best to not use tactics that are dishonest, aggressive or defensive, because I really like you guys and it's not personal. I'm really looking for the truth only, and I'm pretty skeptical of the prevailing thoughts that are being pushed. Tbh, I don't think the powers that be are giving us the whole story and instead a bit of a story that's quite slanted to their worldview. I've talked to too many people from around the world and in every different profession, and I can tell you there are a lot of skeptical people out there, including many in the medical field. Most just don't have the guts to speak out, in fear that they will be shunned.

Once again, I don't want to make this political, but I've heard from people all around the world that feel like this is only going to get worse if Trump loses and it will screw everyone. Not everyone around the world has your POV.

[Nodack]

And not everyone has your POV. If Trump loses and the Dems take the House and Senate it will probably get worse for Republicans. Trump won and the Republicans won the House and Senate in 2016 and it was much worse for Dems.

[In2ition]

And not everyone has your POV. If Trump loses and the Dems take the House and Senate it will probably get worse for Republicans. Trump won and the Republicans won the House and Senate in 2016 and it was much worse for Dems.

I'm sorry, I thought that was understood, haha. I'm kind of on an island here, trying to engage the crowd.

[Flagrant Fowl]

This is an informative piece as it relates to Sweden.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10 ... e-backlash

A small part relevant to the US.

In the population as a whole, the impact of Sweden’s approach is unmistakable. More than 94,000 people have so far been diagnosed with COVID-19, and at least 5895 have died. The country has seen roughly 590 deaths per million—on par with 591 per million in the United States and 600 in Italy, but many times the 50 per million in Norway, 108 in Denmark, and 113 in Germany.

[Indy]

This is an informative piece as it relates to Sweden.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10 ... e-backlash

A small part relevant to the US.

In the population as a whole, the impact of Sweden’s approach is unmistakable. More than 94,000 people have so far been diagnosed with COVID-19, and at least 5895 have died. The country has seen roughly 590 deaths per million—on par with 591 per million in the United States and 600 in Italy, but many times the 50 per million in Norway, 108 in Denmark, and 113 in Germany.

Generally 2 countries everyone else tries to avoid copying during this pandemic. Over 10x as many people/million died in Sweden than Norway. That is crazy.

[Indy]

Thanks for the posts In2ition. That is the kind of debating I like. I appreciate the effort.

One thing we can all agree on is that we are divided. We all want the best for our family/friends/country/world. We just don’t agree on things. The right is trying to make Covid out to be as small a deal as possible and the left is trying to make it into as big as deal as possible. There is no official way to handle this. There is no one way right way. We are torn between doing too much and doing nothing at all about it. We are certainly not united as a country on anything right now because of partisan politics and I am as partisan as the next guy.

Trump has to go first. Covid or not. He is a cancer to our world.

Type “Sweden Covid cases” into Google and you will see they started small ramped up and then fell down... and now have just ramped back up to their peak in June. 6000 deaths.

I'm trying my best to not use tactics that are dishonest, aggressive or defensive, because I really like you guys and it's not personal. I'm really looking for the truth only, and I'm pretty skeptical of the prevailing thoughts that are being pushed. Tbh, I don't think the powers that be are giving us the whole story and instead a bit of a story that's quite slanted to their worldview. I've talked to too many people from around the world and in every different profession, and I can tell you there are a lot of skeptical people out there, including many in the medical field. Most just don't have the guts to speak out, in fear that they will be shunned.

Once again, I don't want to make this political, but I've heard from people all around the world that feel like this is only going to get worse if Trump loses and it will screw everyone. Not everyone around the world has your POV.

Who is saying the pandemic will get worse if Trump gets re-elected beside Q?

[In2ition]

Thanks for the posts In2ition. That is the kind of debating I like. I appreciate the effort.

One thing we can all agree on is that we are divided. We all want the best for our family/friends/country/world. We just don’t agree on things. The right is trying to make Covid out to be as small a deal as possible and the left is trying to make it into as big as deal as possible. There is no official way to handle this. There is no one way right way. We are torn between doing too much and doing nothing at all about it. We are certainly not united as a country on anything right now because of partisan politics and I am as partisan as the next guy.

Trump has to go first. Covid or not. He is a cancer to our world.

Type “Sweden Covid cases” into Google and you will see they started small ramped up and then fell down... and now have just ramped back up to their peak in June. 6000 deaths.

I'm trying my best to not use tactics that are dishonest, aggressive or defensive, because I really like you guys and it's not personal. I'm really looking for the truth only, and I'm pretty skeptical of the prevailing thoughts that are being pushed. Tbh, I don't think the powers that be are giving us the whole story and instead a bit of a story that's quite slanted to their worldview. I've talked to too many people from around the world and in every different profession, and I can tell you there are a lot of skeptical people out there, including many in the medical field. Most just don't have the guts to speak out, in fear that they will be shunned.

Once again, I don't want to make this political, but I've heard from people all around the world that feel like this is only going to get worse if Trump loses and it will screw everyone. Not everyone around the world has your POV.

Who is saying the pandemic will get worse if Trump gets re-elected beside Q?

I haven't heard that the pandemic would get worse if Trump gets re-elected.

[In2ition]

This is an informative piece as it relates to Sweden.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10 ... e-backlash

A small part relevant to the US.

In the population as a whole, the impact of Sweden’s approach is unmistakable. More than 94,000 people have so far been diagnosed with COVID-19, and at least 5895 have died. The country has seen roughly 590 deaths per million—on par with 591 per million in the United States and 600 in Italy, but many times the 50 per million in Norway, 108 in Denmark, and 113 in Germany.

Generally 2 countries everyone else tries to avoid copying during this pandemic. Over 10x as many people/million died in Sweden than Norway. That is crazy.

That is interesting. I do wonder what it would be like if the US did nothing other than protect the most vulnerable.

[3rdside]

Wapo article:

We saved our economy in Sweden. But too many people died.

Spoiler: show/hide

Other countries shouldn’t rush to emulate our pandemic strategy

By Lars Calmfors
Lars Calmfors is professor emeritus in International Economics at Stockholm University

When the coronavirus pandemic gained momentum in the spring, Sweden chose a less restrictive containment strategy than most other countries did, including its Nordic neighbors. Some medical experts and economists, in and out of Sweden, have criticized its policy for being too lenient. Others, from Elon Musk to National Review columnists, have hailed it as a role model for allegedly keeping the economy open, staving off the consequences of a harsher lockdown. President Trump’s medical adviser Scott Atlas has advocated that the United States adopt the Swedish approach to the pandemic.

Sweden’s strategy indeed likely helped the economy — but this came at too high a cost, in terms of lives lost. Taking a similar approach in the United States would, in all probability, be even more costly, because unlike Sweden and other European countries, the United States does not have a centralized, publicly funded health-care system with universal coverage.

Observers outside of Sweden have often misunderstood its handling of the pandemic. It is true that the government never imposed a formal lockdown and that day-care centers and elementary schools remained open. But the Public Health Agency has strongly recommended social distancing, working from home and avoiding unnecessary travel, among other precautions; compliance was high. The agency instructed people above 70 years of age to avoid socializing with others, and visits to old-age homes were banned. The government prohibited public gatherings of more than 50 people. The Swedish summer holidays, when many people leave the cities and towns for their summer houses in the countryside, may have worked as an informal lockdown, slowing the spread of the virus.

Even for observers within Sweden, it has been difficult to ascertain the rationale behind its pandemic strategy. Throughout, the Swedish Public Health Agency remained reticent about the motives behind its policy approach. Officials did not explain how they weighed economic considerations and wider public health concerns, and whether they drew up policies with an objective of achieving herd immunity or based on a worry that rigorous restrictions would be unsustainable.

Trump wants to try for herd immunity. Without a vaccine, it could kill millions.

It might be most accurate to characterize the Swedish “strategy” as one that began with misjudgments of the risk of large-scale spread and the extent of asymptomatic contagion. The health agency did not try to dissuade families from going skiing in the Alps during the winter holidays in late February, though reports regarding an outbreak in northern Italy soon surfaced.

A recommendation to avoid unnecessary travel to that region did not come until March 6. When travelers from the skiing resorts returned, they were not quarantined. In media interviews, representatives of the health agency even criticized employers who, on their own initiative, quarantined personnel returning from hot spots. The other Nordic countries imposed limits on public gatherings of five to 10 people in mid-March, but Sweden did not introduce its much higher limit until the end of the month. Even as infections surged in April and May, test-and-trace-programs were not boosted, on the grounds that they would not be effective in a situation with large virus spread. These programs began to be substantially expanded only in the late spring. Very recently, in mid-September, the Public Health Agency recommended, for the first time, that people should quarantine themselves if someone in their household is infected.

What has been the economic effect? Like other countries, Sweden has been hit hard economically. During the first six months of 2020, the gross domestic product fell by 8.5 percent. Unemployment is projected to rise to almost 10 percent in the beginning of next year.

The drop in GDP is considerably smaller than in southern European countries and the United Kingdom, and one to three percentage points smaller than in Denmark, Germany and the United States. The GDP fall, however, is larger than in Finland and Norway. It’s difficult to meaningfully evaluate the impact of different coronavirus strategies using this metric, because of the differences between the countries’ economic structures.

For example, Sweden depends less on tourism, an industry hit particularly hard by the pandemic, than do Italy and Spain. Still, the lenient Swedish approach to the pandemic, involving fewer formal restrictions, likely did dampen the economic impact of the pandemic.

But the death toll here has been much higher than in our Nordic neighbors. As of Tuesday, the cumulative number of deaths from coronavirus infections per million people was 52 in Norway, 64 in Finland, and 118 in Denmark, according to Johns Hopkins University. In Sweden it was 581 — not that far below the United States with 673.

Comparisons of infection rates are less reliable because of differences in the testing volume, but here, too, Sweden stands out, relative to its neighbors. Registered cases in Sweden are slightly above 106,300, compared with around 13,800 in Finland and 16,600 in Norway — each with about half the population of Sweden.
Widespread testing might not work in America. We love our ‘freedom’ too much.

Have the economic gains from the Swedish strategy been worth the cost? The following are crude back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Assume that the differential Swedish approach dampens the GDP fall this year by 1 percentage point. This represents a gain of approximately $5.6 billion. Also suppose that the approach has caused 5,000 extra deaths — a reasonable guess from comparisons with other Nordic countries. How could one estimate that loss of life in economic terms? The value of a statistical life, used by the Swedish Transport Administration in its cost-benefit analyses of investment in traffic security, is approximately $4.6 million. Using this number, the economic cost of lost lives would be as high as $22.9 billion — clearly outweighing the benefits from the smaller GDP fall. One might argue that the value of lost lives should be set much lower, as the vast majority of deaths have been among elderly people, with fewer years left to enjoy life: 89 percent of the dead in Sweden have been above 70 years of age, and 67 percent above 80. One reaches the break-even point in my calculation if one lowers the value of an average life lost to $1.12 million. For the Swedish approach to be “profitable,” the average life lost must be valued lower than that.


A more complete analysis should consider other factors as well: future health consequences for covid-19 patients, the crowding out of other medical treatments during the pandemic, and the benefits of maintaining a more normal life and keeping more people attached to the labor market.

But even a simple calculation, looking only at lives lost, suggests that the costs of the so-called Swedish “strategy” were too high. One thing Sweden may perhaps have done right was to keep day-care centers and elementary schools open. Closing them would have prevented many parents from working, at great cost to their economic output and their livelihoods, and to pupils’ opportunities to learn.

There appears to be no evidence that these institutions played an important role in spreading the virus in Sweden: An early study found that day-care personnel and teachers were not at higher risk of infection compared with the labor force in general. There is clearly a need, however, for more research into the potential role of schools in viral spread, in Sweden and elsewhere.

The jury is still out on how well Sweden copes with the pandemic in the longer run: Case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths fell to low levels in August and early September but are now rising again. Based on the numbers so far, however, it appears that Sweden’s failure to adopt a more cautious approach in the early phase of the pandemic caused an unnecessarily large number of deaths, most of them among the elderly. In my view, one would have to attach an unreasonably low value to their lives to conclude that the economic gains outweighed the human losses.

In summary:

- Swedish economy outperformed UK and many European countries’
- Swedish economy performed worse than it’s neighbours Norway and Finland
- Sweden had equivalent deaths to UK and many European countries
- Sweden had many more deaths than Norway and Finland

[specialsauce]

Alright all the legal and medical experts, tear this apart.

I’m no longer interested in debunking these idiots who have no training and really no business speaking on Covid compared to any other non-believer who wants to live irresponsibly the way they see fit, others be damned. Realize these losers have no legitimate credentials. No medical directors of emergency departments, chiefs of staff, etc. Not a leader of the frontlines amongst them, just a clown show.

I’m simply rooting for Nov 3rd to bring about change and to get all these people to shut the fuck up and fall in line knowing their furor has fallen. That’s all.

This election is not political to me. It’s personal. I am not pro-Biden, simply anti-asshole who has made my life the last 8 months incredibly more challenging than it needed to be.

I’ll have to pay more in taxes. Democrats are puppets of attorneys which means any chance of tort reform is likely gone for at least 4 more years. I worry Biden will sell into slashing physician reimbursement as a means of lowering healthcare costs (a drop in a bucket while insurance companies and healthcare conglomerates make billions). I don’t care. I just need this buffoon out.

[In2ition]

Alright all the legal and medical experts, tear this apart.

I’m no longer interested in debunking these idiots who have no training and really no business speaking on Covid compared to any other non-believer who wants to live irresponsibly the way they see fit, others be damned. Realize these losers have no legitimate credentials. No medical directors of emergency departments, chiefs of staff, etc. Not a leader of the frontlines amongst them, just a clown show.

I’m simply rooting for Nov 3rd to bring about change and to get all these people to shut the fuck up and fall in line knowing their furor has fallen. That’s all.

This election is not political to me. It’s personal. I am not pro-Biden, simply anti-asshole who has made my life the last 8 months incredibly more challenging than it needed to be.

I’ll have to pay more in taxes. Democrats are puppets of attorneys which means any chance of tort reform is likely gone for at least 4 more years. I worry Biden will sell into slashing physician reimbursement as a means of lowering healthcare costs (a drop in a bucket while insurance companies and healthcare conglomerates make billions). I don’t care. I just need this buffoon out.

Idk how the election will go. Most indicators say Biden, but there have been a few leaning Trump recently. I can understand your frustration. I wish something could be done about tort reform when it comes to suing doctors, insurance company charges and pharmaceutical prices.

On a side note(this wasn't in the video btw), is it possible that masks could cause a spike in bacterial pneumonia cases?