Sweden Age Adjusted Mortality 3rd January 2020 through 18th June 2021: -2.3%
Source: ONS
Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.
That's the exact opposite conclusion the article finds while taking into account more countries and just one.
If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking ....
Like go to the store and buy identical pens but of 100 different colors. Now throw them down the stairs and record which goes the farthest. Now repeat it again. Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest. That pen isn't actually superior, you're just doing garbage analysis.
> I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was
I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.
It was not selected post-hoc, it was selected in 2020.
The result was more death early and less death later, while suffering no learning loss or adverse effects on the children and little loss in quality of life.
Here's an article from 2020 disparaging the high costs [0].
If you find any major news giving an update now that Finland and Norway have caught up in excess death, please share.
Yes- there is a life-year cost to bringing death forward.
But there has now been no excess mortality in Sweden compared to it's neighbors Finland and Norway (and all 3 blow the US and Europe out of the water.)
> If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking
You are not considering how positivism works. If you say lockdowns work you have to prove that in all instances. I just need one (1) counter example to disprove your theory completely.
> Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest.
Cherry-picking. Yeah, that's what focusing on Australia and NZ while ignoring Peru and Sweden is, exactly.
Finding two patients who got better after blood-letting is not enough to prove blood-letting works. Your theory has to fit all the available quality data (so no China or model "data" allowed).
> I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.
Yeah that was the extend of lockdowns. Go tell that to the people that where locked up without visitors in nursing homes for months on end.
Don't ignore the conclusion bullet point and analysis towards the end of the article which stated in multiple ways that lockdowns fail the cost-benefit analysis.
Similar to people exagerrating Australia/NZ as people being locked in their homes for two years, Sweden gets the opposite.
They had some constitutional limit on lockdowns, and a Health official who was a bit overenthusiastic about 'herd immunity' but they also had lots of recommendations and an expectation that people would actually obey them.
> As the outbreak reached Sweden, authorities responded with limited measures, in contrast with lockdowns and legal restrictions introduced in other countries. The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate.
> A Swedish government agency is an independent body with delegated power to pass binding regulations as well as recommendations on how someone can or should act to meet a law or binding regulation within the agency's area of activity (in this case The Swedish Communicable Diseases Act). Although there is not a legal framework for a governmental agency to impose sanctions on someone for going against its recommendations, they are not optional as they work as guidelines on how to act to follow a law or regulation (in this case an obligation to help halting the spread of an infectious disease). The Swedish Constitution prohibits ministerial rule – politicians overruling the advice from its agencies is extremely unusual in Sweden – and mandates that the relevant government body, in this case an expert agency – the Public Health Agency – must initiate all actions to prevent the virus' spread in accordance with Swedish law, rendering state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a central figure in the crisis.
Nor did we have the data to say it WAS necessary, but we sure as hell could predict most of the negative social and economic side effects easily. Causing profound developmental delays in an entire generation of children and lowering lifetime educational attainment for almost every single teenager was worth it though, I guess.
We had data from December 2019 until April 2020 showing that it spread quickly and can kill you.
We also had data that strong action can stop an outbreak (i.e. Aviation flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc). Sure when we took those actions early enough to curtail the outbreak it leads to people thinking the actions were useless (see Y2K debate) but it doesn't actually mean the actions were useless. People only notice when the dam collapses, not when it doesn't.
By March 2020 we had the Diamond Princess Data which established an upper bound of 1% case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID. We already knew then that it's definitely not the Spanish Flu (2.5 - 10% CFR), not Cholera (3%), not Smallpox (3%), not SARS (11%), not even Measles (1%-3%).
Not only did we never do anything like COVID measures for any of the diseases you mentioned but the WHO described the individual NPIs that would later make up the COVID "lockdowns" as "never recommended under any circumstances" in their 2019 flu pandemic recommendations.
What happened with COVID was an unprecedented overreaction by historical standards where we threw overboard everything we knew to try authoritarian gobbledygook on the back of the carefully cultivated FUD around COVID coming out of China.
The absolutely devastating economic and social effects were known, the possible effects of the disease both short and long-term were unknown. So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating? That makes zero sense. And there were alternatives proposed to lockdowns like the Great Barrington Declaration that were not simply not considered, but were actively suppressed and smeared by government officials and their media lackeys.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises, is it underway?”
-NIH director Francis Collins in an email to Anthony Fauci about the Great Barrington Declaration
Great Barrington -> 4th of October. Are you even reading my comments? I am referring to the first lockdowns which took place in April 2020.
"So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating?"
Of course we do in case of a pandemic, since we are dealing with a completely different underlying distribution of effects.
In itself your statement is accurate: we did not have data that is impossible to have.
In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible.
you are making the classic mistake of judging past actions with future knowledge.
Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time. They are also good at reducing social contacts for transmissible disease and the best evidence of this was the almost total lack of a flu season in the northern hemisphere.
While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.
>Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time.
Objection, arguing facts not in evidence.
Edit: in response to the part you added after your original post:
>While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.
The social and economic costs were mostly predictable back before the lockdowns ever happened. People opposed to the lockdowns were practically screaming what the consequences would be. They were ignored with calls of "If it saves one life!" and "You're killing grandma!"
Meanwhile it's come out that several (if not all) countries that imposed lockdowns didn't even attempt to do a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis prior to locking everything down.
how do you square this with the fact that more and more people are calling in sick and many are continuing to die now that much of the western world has given up on pandemic restrictions?
Only if your premise that the labor shortages (and other economic issues) are caused by pandemic deaths is correct, mind you. The overwhelming majority of deaths (around 80%) from the pandemic in all countries was amongst retirement age individuals, most of whom are out of the workforce.
200,000 working age people in the US dying isn't nothing. It could also be explained by disabilities as a result of COVID and people unable to work as a result of that.
it could also be explained by All Cause Mortality being higher in vaccinated populations than unvaccinated (which, by the way, is the proper use of ACM when you compare two populations with a control).
People keep saying this so there is probably something to it. I mean, not even the most optimistic mask studies show a long-term complete protection from all pathogens that can cause colds but okay, let's take it at face value: your wife is protected from colds because she wears N95s.
What this means is that your wife's immune system isn't getting challenged and isn't learning about the ever changing pathogens around it. It's not building immunity to the various strains every winter and it therefore can't get any cross-immunity ie against SARS-COV-2 [1].
All we know about the immune system suggests this is not good in the long term.
If true and I kind of hope it's not for this reason, your wife might be setting herself up for a very serious disease down the line. I hope this is not the case and wish both of you the best of luck.
If conversations about COVID seem impossible it might be because a substantial portions of the population overestimates the danger from COVID by as much as 50x.
My girlfriend sells self-made clothes online. In 2015 I made her a a small Tapestry 5 webapp to manage her orders and, this was the crucial feature, to determine payment status from her copy'n'paste online banking's transactions list.
Today, it has integrations for Paypal, Etsy, Shopify, DHL and HBCI (no more copy and paste, finally) and basically covers the whole order cycle with minimal fuss and gives her a quick way to publish new products which she does a lot as fabrics come in / get sold out.
I guess that's not that useless but of course it simply can not be worth the time I spent on it.
Yet, I don't regret doing it in the least because for me it literally is a labor of love. Plus, I learned a lot doing it and I can go down crazy paths like this one time I made an android app to cut out the background of her product photos. Didn't turn out to be useful in the end but eventually I did use OpenCV via JavaCV for something else in the software.
Currently I am in the process of rewriting it in Kotlin / Multiplatform (JVM+JS) and again, I'm learning a lot and making the software a lot sleeker and more functional. That's not going to be worth it either, I am sure.
Anyway, I wish I had day job were I was in constant contact with users to built them something of tangible utility and value.
When the vaccine came out it was believed that the spike is harmless but later it was shown that the spike protein is enough to cause symptoms similar to the disease COVID. [1]
For a long time people thought that the mRNA, and therefore the spike from the vax, would stay in the muscle tissue and be broken down in a matter of days. This study [2] in Cell found that, actually, the mRNA can get to the lymph nodes and cause spike production for as long as 60 days. Spike protein is also found in the blood of 96% of vaccinees and the concentration is comparable to that of an acute infection.
There is literally no reason or evidence that think that the restrictions had any effect at all let alone a significant one worth the trade offs. If for some reason you are allergic to Sweden you can compare England Winter 2022 with Germany, or Scotland or Wales. Or Germany to Switzerland after Feb, 16th 2022 when they dropped their measures. Or Florida with Cali. It didn't do anything. I am sorry but it's time to learn the truth.
You cannot compare the effects of restrictions on a vaccinated population to the effects on an unvaccinated one.
Restrictions were not introduced to "save" people, in such a way that you could restrict the lockdowns to the more vulnerable elderly population. Such a lockdown would have to be draconian (China-style).
Rather, restrictions were introduced (except for Australia and various countries in Asia which had zero case policy) to curb the growth in the occupation of hospital beds before the hospitals were full. Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions. Reduction of the reproduction rate cannot be achieved with a lockdown only of >60 year old people, since (like vaccination) the effect is inversely proportional to the amount of people not being locked down.
I am not doing that at all. Switzerland for example has similar vax rates to Germany and I'd bet that Flordia is similar to Cali. You can even compare before any vaccinations and it's the same picture.
The reasons given for lockdown were ever shifting. Just very recently German Health Minister Karl Lauterach said we have to keep measures because 200 people a day die of Coronavirus and that's just too many.
> Up until the introduction of vaccines and more contagious variants (Delta/Omicron) there were clear effects on Rt from the introduction and lifting of restrictions.
Where, when, how? Even the very first lockdown in Germany happened when R was already <1. That used to be on the RKIs (our CDC) website.
What I don't understand is that I have to keep coming with facts (and still get censored) and you (the pro-lockdowners) can just keep doing argument by false assertions without showing any data whatsoever.
> The reasons given for lockdown were ever shifting
I agree that communication was awful all over the board and from both sides.
> Where, when, how?
Italy spring 2021. Note that in general I am talking about 2021 data not 2022. I wouldn't even call 2022 restrictions a lockdown, they are really more of a vaccination and mask mandate.
> I agree that communication was awful all over the board
I appreciate the peace offering but you have to understand that, for me, this topic is deeply personal. I am not willing to let it go on "oh let's call it awful and move on". Maybe in the beginning there was an earnest motivation to avoid suffering but the rest of the time, the public was simply deceived if not down right gaslit.
As a general answer: Corona is seasonal depending on latitude and on northern latitude spring is the end of it's season. So no matter what you do, you get a decrease in cases anyway. But if you mean something else, please show me in detail.
The excuse for lack of evidence seems to so often boil down to "that wasn't true lockdown". However, the measures in 2022 followed the same logic as the early lockdowns and were justified with the same grab bag of reasons. For instance, in winter 2021/2022, in Germany, I wasn't allowed to do anything except shopping for essentials because I am not vaccinated. For me, it absolutely was exactly like lockdown: same restrictions, same reasons, same dire predictions what would happen without these measures.
So I want an explanation for why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022, a full one and a half month ahead of Germany and why are cases now dropping like a rock in Germany three weeks after repealing most measures.
> no matter what you do, you get a decrease in cases anyway. But if you mean something else, please show me in detail.
Not entirely, for example US tended to have waves during the summer that Europe didn't have (more AC and less outdoor activity perhaps?). But yeah it seems to be mostly seasonal and definitely it comes and goes in waves of roughly 2 months.
> why cases didn't "explode" in Switzerland when they dropped their measures 16th of Feb 2022,
Obviously the rate of vaccination had a role in the lack of "explosion" (transmission remains but is lower, and there are more mild and asymptomatic cases that aren't traced). However cases did start to grow around 25th of February, inverting the previous trend[1], and the simplest explanation is that measures had some effect.
In fact the share of positive tests in Switzerland is so ridiculously high (50% around mid March) that the cases probably did explode, but were mostly mild or asymptomatic thanks to the vaccine. So again you cannot compare effects of suspending restrictions in 2022 on what would have happened without lockdowns in 2020.
Furthermore, while deaths among 40-60 year olds are pretty low, that's less true for hospitalizations. The impact of uncontrolled spreading before vaccinations would have been worse than a CFR measured in "ideal" conditions where everybody had access to healthcare.
Hundreds of thousands died with a positive PCR test, yes. But then everyone who died had one taken. Certainly, a number of those died because because of this particular infection but the average COVID death was a very old person who had two or more preexisting conditions.
So the real question is: how many have died who would not have died of the flu or RSV or Andenovirus or Beta-coronavirus or any of the other innumerable causes of respiratory infections?
Not to mention, this has nothing to do with people younger than 40 or even younger than 60.
There is data on excess mortality and the answer is, a lot. This is also why the with/from covid debate is pointless. If 100.000 people have died more than they would usually die, then no matter if they died due to covid or their condition was aggravated by it, that's 100.000 more people dying than in a year without covid.
Well except that a lot of countries didn't have any unusual excess mortality in 2020. And anyway how do you separate the deaths caused by the measures from the deaths caused by COVID?
"Bergmann’s case illustrates a shift on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, as doctors rethink when and how to use mechanical ventilators to treat severe sufferers of the disease - and in some cases whether to use them at all. While initially doctors packed intensive care units with intubated patients, now many are exploring other options.
England had 70.000 more deaths than usual in 2020 (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...), how many of those were from care homes? The balance was ~30.000 in mid April, were all of them in care homes? And even if so, how do you justify the remaining 40.000 that died later in the year?
> Killing people with ventilators:
Also April 2020, so the question is the same. How do you justify the excess deaths from the second half of 2020 and 2021?
> except that a lot of countries didn't have any unusual excess mortality in 2020
Which? How did death causes compare in 2019 and 2020?
These are two examples of how measures specifically meant to fight the disease caused a lot of deaths. Care homes also had deaths from loneliness and despair due to banning family visits, another pandemic measure that is still going on today.
“There are still obstacles in place when trying to visit a loved one in a care home and the impact has been and continues to be devastating. The safeguarding issues I am seeing and hearing about are atrocious. Residents left for hours in dirty, wet incontinence pads leading to dangerous pressure ulcers. Malnutrition. Dehydration. End of life medication given to patients without their or their family’s consent. Psychological trauma, post traumatic stress and suicides have resulted because of this. Multiple systems are failing, including Local Authorities and the CQC. It is a complex situation that needs a bold approach by both empowering families and galvanising government action to hold public bodies to account and stop private equity firms placing profit over people.”
The single largest group of people, between 40% and 60% depending on country, to die from coronavirus were from care homes [1],[2] so it stands to reason that measures applying to care homes had an outsized effect on corona virus mortality.
And indeed, Sweden, after admitting it did wrong by the care home residence in Spring 2020 and taking steps to rectify the situation, got their deaths under control which allowed them to end 2020 at (minus) -2.3% age-adjusted relative mortality.
This study uses unadjusted mortality which does not account for an aging population. In particular it doesn't account for Sweden's 2019 negative excess mortality. I look at this report by the UKs Office of National Statistics:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Table "Table 2: Relative cumulative excess mortality ..." is the most interesting. It shows that more than half of these European countries had absolutely nothing exceptional going on mortality wise between 2020 and June 2021. I'm not sure how the Corona narrative (100000k death / month without lockdowns!!) can account for this data. If it's really only the virus we should've seen mass mortality everywhere especially the places with a more "hands off" approach like Sweden. That's just not what happened.
> half of these European countries had absolutely nothing exceptional going on mortality wise between 2020 and June 2021
That's not how I read it. First, all except Norway, Finland, Estonia, Denmark had at least +20% in 2020. Second, it's the peak that the graph plots so you cannot use it to take conclusions over the whole year. All the graph can tell you is how hard the country was hit by the spring 2021 wave compared to 2020.
The way I read it, almost all countries had extra mortality despite lockdowns, and despite a very mild flu year in 2020 and flu being basically not a thing in 2021.
In fact the only countries with negative mortality are either islands or the northern Europe countries which have long been known to be outliers.
Masks seem silly no matter what if you understand how corona spreads or
if you know how after 2 years, in diagrams, you can't see a difference between unmasked/cloth masked/ffp2,N95 masked countries or even counties.
Source: ONS
Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.