Now that COVID is here permanently

[Agent Sparrow]

It's not that easy to transfer one countries approach to another though without huge caveats and changes to the point it doesn't even look like X country's approach anymore. There's all sorts of cultural, political, geographic, social, etc. factors that make it much more complicated than that.

I remember an excellent article on this comparing Sweden and the UK. Unfortunately a quick search hasn’t found it but the take home message was that a large proportion of Swedish people were willingly doing many the precautions enforced (and often opposed) here, eg social distancing, mask wearing etc.

 

[Red Cat]

You do know there are effectively no restrictions on travel or social gatherings right now yes?

Not officially but of course young people have restricted contact with other young people this holiday to protect grandparents and other more vulnerable family members.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I remember an excellent article on this comparing Sweden and the UK. Unfortunately a quick search hasn’t found it but the take home message was that a large proportion of Swedish people were willingly doing many the precautions enforced (and often opposed) here, eg social distancing, mask wearing etc.

re mask-wearing, that's recently been imposed in Sweden but through most of the pandemic, very few people were wearing them.

I'm not sure I agree that the UK is so different culturally from Sweden in this regard, though. The week before lockdown last March, pubs, restaurants, etc, in London were already empty, people were already working from home. People were already changing their behaviour before the imposition of any rules. And we've seen the same thing in the last few weeks with omicron coming around - as Red Cat says, loads of people voluntarily changing behaviour in anticipation of visiting elderly relatives for Christmas.

 

[cupid_stunt]

"Lockdowns aren’t a public health policy. They signify a failure of public health policy"

I agree with this. In fact, if anything it was being said a lot more at the start of the pandemic than it is said now. I also think he asks a good question wrt Sweden's approach. How much of the heavy lifting of controlling spread is done by relatively 'light', mainly voluntary measures such as those used in Sweden, how much more gain is there to be had from heavier measures, and how does that gain match up to the costs involved (I don't mean money costs)?

Sweden has been all over the news when its cases have been high, and nowhere near the news when its cases have been low - lowest cases and deaths of any country in Europe for large chunks of the last three months, for instance, and doing very well for most of 2021 both in terms of covid deaths and, importantly, excess deaths. This link gives a list of countries' excess deaths over the course of the pandemic. Sweden comes out of it all comparatively rather well, and Sweden still made its share of mistakes, including not protecting people in care homes. So in the sense that this person is advocating something like what Sweden did but without some of the mistakes that Sweden made, certainly it is a view with some real-life substance on its side.

I don't believe you're banging the drum about Sweden, when a comparison between northern European countries and the UK/most of the rest of Europe is nonsense.

If you think Sweden has done well, let's look at their deaths per million compared to their neighbours...

Norway – 238

Finland - 282

Denmark - 562

Sweden - 1,498

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don't believe you're banging the drum about Sweden, when a comparison between northern European countries and the UK/most of the rest of Europe is nonsense.

If you think Sweden has done well, let's look at their deaths per million compared to their neighbours...

Norway – 238

Finland - 282

Denmark - 562

Sweden - 1,498

Excess deaths is the better measure in this instance, imo, and that's just over 1000. But yeah, Sweden has done worse than those neighbours. It's done massively better than its other neighbours across the Baltic Sea, mind you. Got to be careful about cherry-picking data here to suit your purposes.

 

[Agent Sparrow]

re mask-wearing, that's recently been imposed in Sweden but through most of the pandemic, very few people were wearing them.

I'm not sure I agree that the UK is so different culturally from Sweden in this regard, though. The week before lockdown last March, pubs, restaurants, etc, in London were already empty, people were already working from home. People were already changing their behaviour before the imposition of any rules. And we've seen the same thing in the last few weeks with omicron coming around - as Red Cat says, loads of people voluntarily changing behaviour in anticipation of visiting elderly relatives for Christmas.

Maybe not mask wearing then, it was a while ago I read it. But there were multiple differences raised. Whilst it was an opinion piece it was written by someone who had ample lived experience in each country/culture, and as a result appeared to have more weight than a lot of the other analyses I was coming across.

 

[Red Cat]

I don't believe you're banging the drum about Sweden, when a comparison between northern European countries and the UK/most of the rest of Europe is nonsense.

If you think Sweden has done well, let's look at their deaths per million compared to their neighbours...

Norway – 238

Finland - 282

Denmark - 562

Sweden - 1,498

I'm not sure how any comparison is nonsense, that's how we make sense of the world, what's the same, what's different.

 

[elbows]

At the start of the pandemic, the establishments of the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands all had similar ideas and preferences, involving herd immunity as a prize and justification for doing as little as possible.

The Netherlands and the UK couldnt make the numbers add up, not even close, so they were forced to change approach. Sweden relied on various differences and pressed on regardless, at some cost. Especially when comparisons are made to other nordic countries.

The original herd immunity via infection alone approach never recovered, but these days we have the mixed approach involving vaccines. The UK achieved substantial levels of vaccination and got ahead of a lot of countries in terms of the booster rollout. This has enabled them to return far more to their original instincts and preferences, and this Omicron wave will offer more evidence about the extent to which they are able to get away with a lighter touch in the vaccine era. The Delta wave was the first demonstration, one where the UK did get away with much, but it was not a complete success either, especially in terms of how long that wave persisted despite the favourable season and school holidays etc. There were still over 18,000 deaths in the UK within 28 days of a positive test during that Delta period, for example.

These days Sweden is arguably a little more cautious and less confident about the Omicron wave than the UK. For example here is a story from a few weeks back:

The latest restrictions - the second stage of the government's plans - includes a limit of 50 people at private gatherings and the need for a vaccination pass for public events where there are more than 500 people.

Bars and restaurants will only be able to serve seated guests while the public will also have to be seated at larger events - like football matches. Shops will have to limit the number of customers to prevent crowding.

Earlier this month, the government reintroduced some limited measures, such as the use of masks on public transport. It has warned that further measures may be needed if the situation deteriorates.

Sweden hardens COVID curbs amid worries over Omicron

Sweden will urge all employees to work from home if possible and impose tighter rules for social distancing, the government said on Tuesday, as it ratchets up restrictions to fight a surge in new infections and the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.

www.reuters.com

If the UK just about manages to cope using only a lighter touch during this heavily vaccinated era, then I would suggest this tells us something about how badly it would have coped if it had stuck to trying that in the pre-vaccine era.

 

[elbows]

Here is a new article about Sweden from the businesss side of the Guardian. Its fucking stupid in some ways that I wont go on about all that much right now, I wont pick apart every paragraph. But for a start, the UK government have not been forced to take the current approach simply because of political weakness, its the approach they always favoured, and it was only a question of whether they could hope to make the numbers add up.

A wounded PM and ailing economy force England to ‘go Swedish’ on Covid | Larry Elliott

It’s easy to see why the government is reluctant to add to the economic pain with tougher restrictions

www.theguardian.com

This article despite its flaws does manage to point out the following study:

A paper published in the online journal Scientific Reports last year examined what would have happened had Britain followed the Swedish approach. Even assuming the public here would have been as willing to adhere to non-mandatory recommendations as the Swedes (a pretty big assumption) the UK death rate would have at least doubled.

However despite acknowledging that the author is still able to end the article with this sort of shit:

What is clear is that no one country got everything right and all made mistakes, unsurprisingly enough given they weren’t expecting a global pandemic. It is also obvious, as time passes, that governments – be they in London, Edinburgh, Rome or Paris – are only tightening restrictions with reluctance. In a way, that’s a backhanded compliment to the Swedes for perhaps being on to something right from the start.

Bollocks, its not a question of it proving that the Swedes were right from the start, its an inevitable consequence of where all developed countries wanted to get to via the benefits of vaccination, because vaccines have a big effect on the numbers game. And there are still limits, which the UK is apparently more than prepared to test to the max. Such tests are not without economic risk if the balance isnt quite achieved, and thats one of the reasons for slower economic recovery here. Even with a changed ratio of hospitalisations to infections, confidence is understandably dented when many millions of infections are allowed to occur. Even if Omicron doesnt cause a complete catastrophe, one of the challenges of 2022 will be how to make further progress on that front. Stopping mass testing and a big chunk of self-isolation is one possibility, but authorities need to be even more confident about the infections to hospitalisations ratio having permanently fallen to manageable levels before they can really feel confident that they can get away with that step.

 

[elbows]

So beware unintended consequences. If we manage to cope without more formal restrictions this time, then thats in part because of voluntary behavioural changes. And those only happen if a certain attitude towards the severity of the virus is maintained.

So those that want to have a go at people like me for being doom-mongers need to have a good think properly about these matters in the event that the situation with this virus remains delicately balanced for some time to come. If vaccines and treatments alone can really take all the strain of the virus then it doesnt matter what peoples attitudes become. But so far even the UK government has not been confident that this is the case, they had to rely on some heavy mood music and large changes to behaviour, working from home etc. Only once this is clearly no longer necessary is it safe to stop listening to my sort of message.

 

[elbows]

Especially elbows with his relentless guesswork, innuendo and palpable disdain for empirical data, properly cited sources and graphs.

The popularity of my graphs, in terms of how many likes they got, did fall off a cliff quite rapidly at some point in 2021 and this hasnt really changed since. I wasnt sure how much to read into that. It might be a sign that people were getting very tired of the pandemic, it might have been that many more people were sick of my shit. It might have been a consequence of us ending up well into the vaccine era of this pandemic, I dont know.

 

[Agent Sparrow]

The popularity of my graphs, in terms of how many likes they got, did fall off a cliff quite rapidly at some point in 2021 and this hasnt really changed since. I wasnt sure how much to read into that. It might be a sign that people were getting very tired of the pandemic, it might have been that many more people were sick of my shit. It might have been a consequence of us ending up well into the vaccine era of this pandemic, I dont know.

Have you got a graph of that?

 

[elbows]

Have you got a graph of that?

No I havent formally been counting such things . I just reduced the frequency of my graph posting as a result, although I will continue to do them when I think they tell some story that isnt being widely discussed in the press etc.

Positive cases by age group have been especially interesting recently, especially when there was a 'London peaking' narrative going around a tad prematurely. I havent done more of those recently because Christmas has messed with the data a bit. It does seem that things have been changing in London, but the next part of that story will be better told by hospital data. And now attention to case numbers turns to the picture of the country as a whole.

 

[planetgeli]

The popularity of my graphs, in terms of how many likes they got, did fall off a cliff quite rapidly at some point in 2021 and this hasnt really changed since. I wasnt sure how much to read into that. It might be a sign that people were getting very tired of the pandemic, it might have been that many more people were sick of my shit.

It was a), trust me.

 

[NoXion]

I've not been as diligent in following elbows works as I was initially, because I got tired of obsessing over the details. My problem, not his.

Somebody earlier mentioned a 0.01% chance of death as being "effectively zero", and that made me angry, because I'm fairly sure that's equivalent to a 1 in 1000 chance. Which does NOT seem like it would be all that rare to me, but then I never studied statistics. How many thousands of people in that age cohort do we have in this country? Not only that, but death isn't actually the worst outcome of a Covid infection. Lifelong disability sounds worse to me. So you gotta take that kind of thing into account before shooting your mouth off.

 

[cupid_stunt]

Excess deaths is the better measure in this instance, imo, and that's just over 1000. But yeah, Sweden has done worse than those neighbours. It's done massively better than its other neighbours across the Baltic Sea, mind you. Got to be careful about cherry-picking data here to suit your purposes.

I'm not sure how any comparison is nonsense, that's how we make sense of the world, what's the same, what's different.

Well take that to the thread on covid in Sweden, where it's been done to death.

I feel sorry for Yossarian, who started this thread to discuss going forward, which could have made an interesting thread, and it's been totally buggered by certain posters wanting to drag up what has gone on in the past and regurgitate old beef.

 

[existentialist]

I've not been as diligent in following elbows works as I was initially, because I got tired of obsessing over the details. My problem, not his.

Somebody earlier mentioned a 0.01% chance of death as being "effectively zero", and that made me angry, because I'm fairly sure that's equivalent to a 1 in 1000 chance. Which does NOT seem like it would be all that rare to me, but then I never studied statistics. How many thousands of people in that age cohort do we have in this country? Not only that, but death isn't actually the worst outcome of a Covid infection. Lifelong disability sounds worse to me. So you gotta take that kind of thing into account before shooting your mouth off.

1/10,000, but your point stands.

 

[LDC]

I've not been as diligent in following elbows works as I was initially, because I got tired of obsessing over the details. My problem, not his.

Somebody earlier mentioned a 0.01% chance of death as being "effectively zero", and that made me angry, because I'm fairly sure that's equivalent to a 1 in 1000 chance. Which does NOT seem like it would be all that rare to me, but then I never studied statistics. How many thousands of people in that age cohort do we have in this country? Not only that, but death isn't actually the worst outcome of a Covid infection. Lifelong disability sounds worse to me. So you gotta take that kind of thing into account before shooting your mouth off.

My favourite was always the it just 'delays death' one. Erm, good. I'd like my death delayed thank you very much.

 

[Orang Utan]

Well take that to the thread on covid in Sweden, where it's been done to death.

I feel sorry for Yossarian, who started this thread to discuss going forward, which could have made an interesting thread, and it's been totally buggered by certain posters wanting to drag up what has gone on in the past and regurgitate old beef.

Cos there are too many threads on the subject. Others may have missed the Sweden stuff or tldr’ed it like much of the stuff on here.

 

[marshall]

It was a), trust me.

Sometimes there’s just too much to take in, faced with a wall of ‘elbows’ I personally started to skim read.

 

[NoXion]

My favourite was always the it just 'delays death' one. Erm, good. I'd like my death delayed thank you very much.

There's a sculpture on a hospital wall somewhere that I find both moving and inspiring, in which a human figure is holding back the personification of death. I'm on mobile so I can't look it up right now, but it's an image that has stuck with me since I first saw it.

 

[Red Cat]

Well take that to the thread on covid in Sweden, where it's been done to death.

I feel sorry for Yossarian, who started this thread to discuss going forward, which could have made an interesting thread, and it's been totally buggered by certain posters wanting to drag up what has gone on in the past and regurgitate old beef.

oh what could've been

 

[co-op]

I've not been as diligent in following elbows works as I was initially, because I got tired of obsessing over the details. My problem, not his.

Somebody earlier mentioned a 0.01% chance of death as being "effectively zero", and that made me angry, because I'm fairly sure that's equivalent to a 1 in 1000 chance. Which does NOT seem like it would be all that rare to me, but then I never studied statistics. How many thousands of people in that age cohort do we have in this country? Not only that, but death isn't actually the worst outcome of a Covid infection. Lifelong disability sounds worse to me. So you gotta take that kind of thing into account before shooting your mouth off.

It's 1 in 10,000 not 1 in a 1000. And this is the risk after testing positive - many (probably most) won't get to that level of risk and therefore the overall risk for a 19 year old is probably more like 1 in 20,000.

I guess it's all a question of risk perception for me - that's the work that the word "effectively" is doing before the word "zero". It's not actually nil, but how much should a 19 year old worry about it? The percentage chance of dying in a road accident in any given year is about 1 in 20,000. How much should we worry about that? Not much is my answer, and as a society we've priced it into the risk of daily life - why should covid be so different? Yes there are reasons why you could argue that it should but why is it so hard for so many to even open up this kind of discussion? I'm not "shooting my mouth off" - I'm citing some data and drawing some fairly tentative conclusions - is that so awful? What's happened to make everyone so absolutist and emphatic about this? It looks like a manifestation of covid anxiety to me.

 

[cupid_stunt]

Cos there are too many threads on the subject. Others may have missed the Sweden stuff or tldr’ed it like much of the stuff on here.

FFS, just click on the covid forum and all the main threads (UK covid news, Worldwide covid news, covid chat, etc., etc.) are on the first page, or there's a revolutionary new function called 'search', it's all very simple, even a librarian should be able to cope with it.

This thread was supposed about moving forward, not looking back, so I am out of it now.

 

[Orang Utan]

FFS, just click on the covid forum and all the main threads (UK covid news, Worldwide covid news, covid chat, etc., etc.) are on the first page, or there's a revolutionary new function called 'search', it's all very simple, even a librarian should be able to cope with it.

This thread was supposed about moving forward, not looking back, so I am out of it now.

you expect people to search?

 

[Orang Utan]

it's a conversation that's happening over too many threads imo. hence the confusion and frustration. i wish there was a separate forum for the science nerds, and a normal one for normal people who don't get the science and trust the experts to do the analysis themselves.

 

[planetgeli]

I guess it's all a question of risk perception for me - that's the work that the word "effectively" is doing before the word "zero". It's not actually nil, but how much should a 19 year old worry about it? The percentage chance of dying in a road accident in any given year is about 1 in 20,000. How much should we worry about that? Not much is my answer, and as a society we've priced it into the risk of daily life - why should covid be so different?

You just don't seem to get the bit about transmission, that this isn't just about quoting a stat applicable to the death chances of a 19 year old.

And, by extension, about 'community'. Which is ironic for someone calling themselves co-op.

 

[magneze]

it's a conversation that's happening over too many threads imo. hence the confusion and frustration. i wish there was a separate forum for the science nerds, and a normal one for normal people who don't get the science and trust the experts to do the analysis themselves.

There is a separate thread for the science.

 

[Orang Utan]

There is a separate thread for the science.

no there isn't! there's loads of long sciency posts from various posters whose credibility isn't immediately apparent

 

[Sue]

no there isn't! there's loads of long sciency posts from various posters whose credibility isn't immediately apparent

There's 'The nerdy amounts of pandemic detail thread'...