Sweden and coronavirus

[Agent Sparrow]

Many of those other "non covid" effects either won't show up in excess deaths (eg things that reduce quality of life without actually killing you) or may only show up in excess deaths a couple of years down the line (eg late diagnosis of cancers).

I’m not sure why people are still making the “the treatment of other health conditions suffered because of lockdown” argument. They did, but they also suffered, very significantly, because of all the sick people with COVID in hospitals. And had there been more sick people in hospitals or even in the community, as would have happened with fewer restrictions, that situation would have been worse.

Cancer services kept going pretty well in the circumstances. And admittedly I work in paediatrics but even when it all had to go virtual we were still working really hard to do as much of our normal assessment and treatment as usual, even to the degree of getting cough and sputum samples in the hospital car park.

 

[teuchter]

I’m not sure why people are still making the “the treatment of other health conditions suffered because of lockdown” argument.

For the record, I am not making that argument.

I was pointing out the limitations in using the past couple of years' excess deaths data as a way of judging different countries' relative success in dealing with the pandemic.

No doubt, health service capacity will have been a significant factor in how well different countries coped. It could be that you can find a pair of countries that currently look like they've coped similarly well, looking at excess deaths numbers. But 2 or 5 years down the line, things may look different, because one of them will have experienced a greater level of knock on effects. And it could well be the case that this will be explained by one of them having had better capacity to start with, and therefore having had to defer treatments less. And that wouldn't provide an anti lockdown argument, it would provide a pro increased healthcare capacity argument.

 

[platinumsage]

I’m not sure why people are still making the “the treatment of other health conditions suffered because of lockdown” argument. They did, but they also suffered, very significantly, because of all the sick people with COVID in hospitals. And had there been more sick people in hospitals or even in the community, as would have happened with fewer restrictions, that situation would have been worse.

Cancer services kept going pretty well in the circumstances. And admittedly I work in paediatrics but even when it all had to go virtual we were still working really hard to do as much of our normal assessment and treatment as usual, even to the degree of getting cough and sputum samples in the hospital car park.

Because this thread is about Sweden, and the research paper posted upthread criticizing Sweden's COVID policies didn't look at whether treatment of other conditions "suffered, very significantly, because of all the sick people with COVID in hospitals", or in fact look at other conditions at all.

It would be useful to compare Sweden and e.g. the UK on non-COVID outcomes, but I haven't seen any research doing that yet.

 

[Riklet]

I believe it was previously mentioned on this thread how high exposure to swine flu H1N1 in Sweden in 2009 led to good natural protection and better outcomes for Covid-19 patients, considering the wild decisions they made. It almost certainly would have been a lot worse in other countries. This may just be a case of the Swedish government getting lucky.

This is one reason why it's hard to make direct comparisons with the UK imo.

 

[elbows]

high exposure to swine flu H1N1 in Sweden in 2009 led to good natural protection and better outcomes for Covid-19 patients

I dont know what you are talking about with that.