Sweden hasn’t been in the news lately. Let’s see if the wicked never-masked never-locked-down Swedes are being punished by the mighty and just CoronaG*d. First, “cases” (adjusted for population size):
Case rate can vary tremendously depending on a country’s love for running PCR machines. Let’s look at ICU hospitalization rate:
Why aren’t the Swedes being punished for their sins?
Remember that the typical Swede lives a fairly urban existence, as noted in Analysis of Sweden versus UK COVID-19 outcomes. So it isn’t that Swedes don’t encounter one another.
Maybe it is the miracle of vaccines? It turns out that vaccination rate is almost the same in Sweden compared to the U.S.:
How about hot weather driving people into air-conditioned shared indoor environments as an explanatory factor? The case rate (above) in the UK is higher than in the US, despite the UK being cooler than the US.
How about the choice to let humans co-evolve with what the Swedish MD/PhDs predicted would be a permanent companion virus, similar to influenza? “Having SARS-CoV-2 once confers much greater immunity than a vaccine” (Science, August 26, 2021):
The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label. The newly released data show people who once had a SARS-CoV-2 infection were much less likely than vaccinated people to get Delta, develop symptoms from it, or become hospitalized with serious COVID-19.
The new analysis relies on the database of Maccabi Healthcare Services, which enrolls about 2.5 million Israelis. The study, led by Tal Patalon and Sivan Gazit at KSM, the system’s research and innovation arm, found in two analyses that people who were vaccinated in January and February were, in June, July, and the first half of August, six to 13 times more likely to get infected than unvaccinated people who were previously infected with the coronavirus. In one analysis, comparing more than 32,000 people in the health system, the risk of developing symptomatic COVID-19 was 27 times higher among the vaccinated, and the risk of hospitalization eight times higher.
Note that the above data contradict #Science as known to American public health experts. There would be no point in ordering the previously infected to get vaccinated before going to work or school if we didn’t know from #Science that vaccines confer much better protection than infection with the actual virus. (Remember that staying home and playing Xbox doesn’t require any vaccination, masking, or other COVID-19-related compliance!)
Readers: What’s your theory as to why Sweden is not suffering a dramatic plague right now?
Separately, how should science-following journalists characterize a country that gave the finger to the coronavirus and ended up with half the death rate of masked-and-shut Maskachusetts (where the urban kids whose lives purportedly matter lost an entire year of education)? It all depends! Part of a screen from Apple News:
(Note that even the Telegraph folks who are apparently willing to consider the advantages of children being able to leave the house and attend school refer to Sweden following W.H.O. pandemic respiratory virus advice from pre-2020 as an “experiment”. It is not the countries that have tried general public mask orders and year-long school shutdowns that are experimenting.)
Thank you for pointing out that according to the press lockdowns are normal and the usual freedoms are an “experiment”.
Let’s see what the actual experiment of locking up adults does:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/07/extra-weight-covid
“An APA Stress in America survey conducted in late February 2021 found 42% of U.S. adults reported undesired weight gain since the start of the pandemic, with an average gain of 29 pounds.”
Compare with the other Nordic countries, such as Norway and Denmark. I don’t pretend to know why Scandinavians are different from us in so many ways, but they seem to be. Maybe that’s why they’re always happier than us… That’s probably the fairest comparison.
From https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2021/04/04/coronascientists-are-the-modern-aristotles/ :
For concreteness (and remember that concrete seeks its natural level underneath highways!), let’s look at the official newspaper of those who #FollowScience. In “‘Life Has to Go On’: How Sweden Has Faced the Virus Without a Lockdown” (New York Times, April 28, 2020), the obvious comparison countries to Sweden were Ireland, Britain, and France. Once additional data are received, and it turns out Britain and France have higher COVID-19-tagged death rates than Sweden while Finland, Norway, and Denmark are outliers, the same scientifically minded folks will assert that Finland, Norway, and Denmark are the only sensible countries to which to compare Sweden and that it would be absurd to use France or Britain as a comparison. We did the same thing domestically. In March 2020, the experts predicted that locked-down Massachusetts would end up with a far lower death rate than Florida (and we should have, since only 14 percent of our population is over 65, compared to 20 percent in Florida). Now that data are available and Florida has suffered only 62 percent of the MA death rate, it is plain to scientists that comparing MA to FL would be nonsensical.
@philg, I just took a look at the NY Times article. All they say about Ireland, Britain and France is this: “Sweden’s death rate of 22 per 100,000 people is the same as that of Ireland, which has earned accolades for its handling of the pandemic, and far better than in Britain or France.”
They don’t really say anything about it being the obvious comparison. They just said Sweden’s death rate was the same as Ireland, which was apparently a low rate.
I can imagine different countries/regions/states having different per capita death rates because of cultural/behavioral/health reasons, so it would make sense to compare apples to apples as best as you can. I’m no expert in this, but with no one else giving reasons for comparing Sweden to any other country, I would probably assume Norway would be the best comparison. My two minutes of “research” shows Norway and Finland have 1/10th the per capita death rate as Sweden, and Denmark has 1/4th the death rate. It’s pretty dramatic.
If you’re genuinely trying to find out if lock-downs and quarantines work, you should at least look at these comparisons. If someone can’t explain a difference of 10x in death rate between Norway and Sweden, then it seems they really aren’t in a position to declare they know that lock-downs don’t work.
@ND: I think there’s a simple explanation of 10x difference in C19 mortality between Finland/Norway and Sweden: your source located after 2 minutes of digging using (presumably) Google is simply lying.
Which is not at all surpising since anyone not living in a cave by now kbows that Big Tech is all-on for promotion of the official propaganda and suppressing independent sources.
@averroes, I was using my go-to source: sweden-and-trump-suck.com. What? Are they not reliable?
In seriousness, I was looking at statista, but if I go to Our World In Data, which is where Phil was getting his graphs, they tell me the same thing. Do you have a source you trust that tells you something different?
ND: Sweden does count COVID-19 deaths differently than other Nordic countries, but the main reasons that it wouldn’t make sense to compare Sweden to other Nordics are (1) the crowded and popular Stockholm metro system (more ridership than in Boston), (2) the large percentage of low-skill migrants that have taken up residence in Sweden and who are much more prone to getting sick and/or dying from COVID-19 (see https://lakartidningen.se/klinik-och-vetenskap-1/artiklar-1/originalstudie/2020/06/stora-skillnader-i-overdodlighet-varen-2020-utifran-fodelseland/ ). Sweden is home to a lot of people whom Norway would have deported.
We see a similar phenomenon when folks in Maskachusetts brag about how great their schools are. It turns out that Texas and Florida schools, despite consuming only a fraction of the $$, do about as well once you adjust for the demographics. MA looks great mostly because the state is unfriendly to the non-white non-native. See https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/upshot/surprise-florida-and-texas-excel-in-math-and-reading-scores.html
Philippe Lemoine makes a a convincing (to me) case that lockdowns did not play a significant role, if any, in controlling the infection spread in all countries that tried the policy and would not have made a significant difference should Sweden have chosen to go this way as well.
For those who are not lazy to read this sort of things, here are some references:
https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/the-case-against-lockdowns/
Discussion of Lemoine’s criticism of the Flaxman et al’ work on purported positive effects of lockdowns at Gelman’s blog:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/07/31/struggling-to-estimate-the-effects-of-policies-on-coronavirus-outcomes/
Finland in particular according to Lemoine is an interesting case because its policy wrt the virus was originally even more relaxed than that of Sweden. He offers a number of hypotheses regarding why the three Nordic countries fared better than Sweden but admits that at shis point we simply do not know the answer.
I’ve read in a few places that Norway did not inflate the number of COVID-19 deaths the way that Sweden (and, as far as I know, every other country) did. That would certainly lead to fewer deaths than Sweden.
I just recently came across an article on the lack of excess deaths in Sweden:
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/sweden-and-covid
That’s a very interesting article. Curious about its findings, I poked around and found this Economist article.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
So Bad Cattitude tells us that Sweden had no excess deaths, but the Economist says they did, and much more than Norway, which actually had negative excess deaths. I haven’t had a chance to look into the discrepancy.
The Econimist in the exemplary voce of the Establishment. Writing obvious nonsense with authoritative airs, that’s their schtick. I stopped reading them about 20 years ago, and I guess they only went deeper down that path since then.
Now, the first thing a real scientist does when comparing numbers from two, ahem, studies is checking the methodology to find out what the numbers actually mean, and then compensating for the methodological difference (if possible). If one actually bothers to do even a cursory adjustments for obvious confounders the differences between countries pretty much disappear below the expected statistical noise.
Regarding the comment of Averros re the Economist — its snide and smug very British tone lets it get away with a lot. It used to be a good source of data with opinions that you could agree or disagree with but is now the usual political doggerel presented in a very self assured authoritative tone. I too dropped it some years ago. It is part of a trend of legacy publications being acquired by the very wealthy to use for their purposes, here the Agnelli family of Italy otherwise known for their ownership of the Ferrari car brand.
You forgot the most important comparison: death rates:
10x more deaths per capita than Norway is pretty telling (I live in Norway). Two points:
I don’t really buy the theory of the dense cities / Stockholm metro system as biggest difference. Oslo has an almost equally dense metro system, and in fact has a larger share of the country’s population than Stockholm. The population-weighed population density is about the same in Sweden and Norway. And are you really insisting on the density when comparing Sweden with Denmark, a country that is much more densely populated and also has many fewer deaths? Blaming the differences on the refugees/migrants also sounds like bullshit. It is true that they have spread and caught COVID-19 more than the regular population, but there is also a very large refugee community in Norway, almost all of them housed in Oslo. In fact, during the pandemic about 50% of hospital admissions in Norway were people from Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq.
People like to say that Sweden was always free, no masks, etc. but that impression doesn’t really tell the truth. There was no state-imposed lockdown, but many private companies and public institutions did close down, including schools and universities for several periods. Many people followed the advice, stayed and home and masked up. In fact, the public advice to COVID-19 in Sweden is still much stricter than in Norway right now. So despite not having a government mandate, Sweden still did have a light lockdown, probably harsher than in some US states.
People in this discussion mention a few times the unexplained difference between Sweden and Norway, when the reason is right in front of their faces: Sweden did not lockdown and Norway did. No matter where your political biases lie, or if you think it is worth it for society, all evidence shows that lockdowns work at reducing COVID-19 transmission. There are many studies showing this: when lockdowns tight, the disease does not spread as quickly. Now, you might say that they are never worth it, and the cost is too great. Perhaps. But the evidence from Sweden is overwhelming: a lot more people (especially old) will die.
Looks like my image link did not work, here it goes:
https://imgur.com/a/mx6J5zP
The problem is that one can construct all sorts of correlations. Finland and Japan have a very low CFR despite a relaxed policy, far lower than Sweden.
They also have very few people with a migration background. Sweden has 25%.
Would people accept the OECD as a non-racist source?
https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/what-is-the-impact-of-the-covid-19-pandemic-on-immigrants-and-their-children-e7cbb7de/
For good measure, let’s confirm the righteousness of the OECD:
https://www.oecd-forum.org/posts/how-the-business-case-for-diversity-and-the-moral-case-are-intertwined
Population-weighted density in Norway is almost the lowest in Europe, according to the chart I cited from the UK Spectactor. See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/image-22.png
Sweden is up with Ireland. Norway is down with Lithuania.
(Not that population-weighted density is determinative. Lithuania has a lower density than Sweden. Lithuania had a mask order and lockdowns. Lithuania has a higher cumulative death rate tagged to COVID-19 than Sweden does. See https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths )
Based on a close reading of these comments and nothing else, I conclude that Norway is doing better than Sweden and neither is easily comparable to the USA (which has results all over the spectrum because of its size and diversity of population demographics and density).
I’ve read in various places that Norway itself has a very unusual approach to dealing with COVID-19: it only counts people as dying of COVID-19 if they actually died of COVID-19. I’m not aware of any other country that did this, so it’s hardly surprising that Norway would be “doing better than Sweden” if you agree that the only thing that matters in the world is the official government statistics on COVID-19 deaths.
Donald: As Ken suggests, your comment is interesting mostly because it shows the American value system. How well a country is doing can be summarized with a single number (COVID-19 death rate). It is not relevant whether children are free to play, get an education, etc. or if adults can leave their houses. There is no cost to having the military deployed in the streets against domestic enemies (unmasked citizens and/or citizens who have wandered beyond their apartments).
(The only exception to this rule is that Sweden is not a better place than all of the countries that are higher up on https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/ ; Sweden is where those who are wicked (unmasked and unshut) suffer terribly. The countries with higher death rates are where those who #FollowScience are mostly spared from what would have been a far worse plague if they’d not masked up and shut down.)
One question is how many people suffered irreparable lung damage but did not die as a result of being infected. A question only time will answer.
Same question may be posted for the people who had been on ventilator.
Anonymous: The ventilator question is fairly easy to answer. Roughly 80 percent of the people who were put on ventilators don’t have any long-term lung damage because they’re dead (was about 88 percent when ventilators for COVID-19 were in vogue; see https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200422/most-covid-19-patients-placed-on-ventilators-died-new-york-study-shows#1 ).
Kurt: How many Swedes suffered lung damage? If we assume that disease severe enough to cause permanent lung damage is proportional to death rate, the Swedes should have about half as many of the walking wounded as Maskachusetts, New York, or New Jersey because the death rate tagged to COVID-19 was about half the death rate in those science-following states. The permanently damaged should be somewhat less frequently met in Sweden than in California, since the cumulative death rate in wicked and wild Sweden is lower than what Californians experienced in their masked and locked down lifestyle.