Sweden avoiding lockdown

Some good points there. That shows the importance of cumulative excess deaths over the extended period beginning with the start of the pandemic and extending a few years after. When we do this we find Sweden no worse than their neighbor Nordic countries such as Norway. It will take time to understand why this is the case.

Nearly 10,000 posts. Madness!

I understand. As grateful as we were here for the lack of restrictions, and the privilege of quick accessibility to good vaccines as they became available...I believe the incessant arguing over who was right or wrong in the pandemic forgets that we havn't experienced this in modern times and the lessons we could take from previous pandemics were not huge as society has changed so much since they occurred and governments did their utmost best to minimise deaths, with the resources available coupled with the advice given by the WHO. I know an English chap who worked under Tegnell, whose job prospects based on a degree on tropical diseases from a London university seemed slim until the pandemic made it one of the most sought after qualifications in the world.

Look at England. Why didn't trying the Swedish strategy work for them?

Perhaps not so easy when you have a strained health service, higher population density and movements around jurisdictions. As opposed to Sweden surrounded by countries which did lock down and impose restrictions.

We had a surge of cases here due to Irish people returning from Cheltenham. It can kick off clusters.

Had Ireland not locked down, and UK did, we would have been the origins of those Cheltenham like clusters.

Countries adopted restrictions on long distance movement. If you think of Scandinavia as a region, I think it is certainly plausible that those parts of Sweden which bordered countries which did lock down avoided some such clusters.

Sweden was also part of an international response which saw huge reductions and restrictions on international travel.

The UK tried to adopt a Swedish strategy. Your description of events leaves out the elephant in the room - why did they abandon it? They abandoned in because their hospitals started filling up and they needed to bring down the R factor before the cases got to the stage the NHS couldn't cope.

The Swedish strategy doesn't scale and imo took a free ride on its neighbours and also to a large extent relied upon the strength of its health service and geographic position. As goldengirl has documented, Sweden took actions in 2020 with regard to care which were derelictions of medical responsibility. Had Tengell's predictions of infection rate been correct, the toll of death and long covid would have dwarfed the actual excess in 2020. He was wrong in terms of the severity of the disease (underestimate) and infection rate to herd immunity (overestimate). The consequences of this mistake would have been far worse than the mistake in the precautionary stance adopted elsewhere of overestimating severity.

That is not to say that all actions Ireland (or any other country) took were necessarily optimal either, but I don't think Sweden has any direct lessons for Ireland or other countries.

There may be micro lessons to be learned all across the board wrt 'adaptable health service', or better ways health services could have mitigated risk and provided services during the pandemic -> but so far on the thread I haven't seen any specific examples from Sweden as to risk mitigation.

But this is just it: The excess death rate for Sweden from the start of the pandemic to ~now is the lowest in Europe. (Read the Sunday Times editorial I posted last week in this very thread)

Whereas in stark contrast, Ireland, who locked down very severely during the pandemic, currently has an excess death rate (@ 13.7%) that's running twice as high as at the peak of the pandemic. So you must measure deaths (& well being) both during a pandemic & after to guage a countries' overall success imho.

Also it is total excess deaths that counts , as we know deaths caused from things like missed cancer screenings, complications due to postponing elective surgeries, lack of social contact, physical inactivity etc, etc because of lockdown are just as 'deadly' as dying of covid. (Funny thing that hey!?)

But jeez, why our public health docs got the balance so wrong on that still amazes me tbh.

I mean NPHET had to be forced by the Taoiseach to reduce lockdown measures very reluctantly the first summer when cases were dropping dramatically due to seasonal effects which was disgraceful imho. And NPHET's attitude to using antigen testing & facemasks was just so condescending & incomprehensible as to make you totally question their competence.

P.s. Ireland doing well economically during covid was a fortunate anomaly I suspect, probably mostly down to the high concentration of ICT & Pharmaceutical & Life Science multinational companies based here whose sectors did disproportionately well during the pandemic.

Strawman arguments...

Sweden has a much lower excess death rate from the start of the pandemic to now than Ireland & practically every other European country.

Yes they have a less densely populated country than Ireland & a better health service, but even allowing for these factors their relative performance seems extraordinary.

Imho, The human & health costs of lockdown measures look to have been massively underestimated by regimes like Ireland's. And we will be dealing with the secondary & tertiary effects of lockdown for many years to come unfortunately....

The population density of:

Sweden is 25/ Km2

Ireland 72/ Km2

UK 281/ Km2

Perhaps it is you who should try to think before you type!!

Explain the strawman.

Nope . If you are being so specific about who said what , Astrofool commented on the UK not having the low population density or healthcare system to keep on with the Swedish experiment , not the other way round as you say .

"UK didn't have the lower population density or healthcare system to keep on with the Sweden experiment" .

And to the thread generally ..

Sweden had low excess deaths prior to the pandemic deemed because of their very good healthcare , and subsequently lost a lot of those in older age groups in that first year of Covid 2020 .

Following introduction of stricter restrictions and better care for elderly patients in 2021 their excess deaths reduced and while not going back to their normal excess deaths since , have continued to be lower than other countries, it is believed due to the 'harvesting 'effect of 2020 .

Not exactly a feat to be replicated elsewhere and we did not do too well in this regard either in the first wave in 2020.

However we don't have the excellent healthcare system they have , so sustained pressure during and since the pandemic has meant any other stress or pressure has resulted in increased waiting times , morbidity, and deaths , as has happened with other healthcare systems around the world, eg NHS.

This has been documented in data and research , discussed and linked to earlier in this thread by myself and others , in case anyone accuses me of just expressing an opinion .

If the excess death figures are 'raw' and not adjusted for age and mortality changes since the baseline, then it is a very doubtful basis to form an opinion on. When UK adjusted mortality figures for 2022 for example, there were no actual excess deaths.

There is no basis to state that the cure was worse than the disease, when you have no foundation for what the impact in county X would be without restrictions.

As there it is presumption only that Swedish results would have followed in other countries, had Swedish approach been adopted on a wider basis. England tried to follow something like the Swedish approach, and had to abandon it.

I have said this multiple times but its been a while so I say it again cos the discussion around Sweden shows the same 'symptoms' that I observed all along.

When looking at the arguments made over the last days and weeks I think there is no denying that we are talking about small margins. We are debating whether this or the other stat is aligned or unaligned with some other parameters or whether Sweden can be compared to neighbouring countries only or not or whether Sweden had marginally better or worse outcome then this or the other country. We are debating around small differences.

Which is sort of clouding the debate. And while I'm not saying that the lockdown advocates do this deliberately it is certainly distracting from the big picture, which is only what we should be looking at.

The big picture is that Sweden took a drastically different approach. Some continue arguing that it wasnt all that different and that Sweden had restrictions too but the fact was and is that Swedens approach was different enough so that they needed to be attacked in the media for what they did, that their officials needed to be discredited and different enough we even continue to have our own Sweden thread. This one here.

And for all that it turns out that no disaster ensued, that Sweden was all along right in the middle of the road within the EU with regards to the impact COVID had on the country and now it turns out that a decent case can be made that they are best in class after all.

So whatever small margins still exist in that debate its safe to say that the drastically harsher restrictions on civil liberties and life in general that all the other countries introduced stand in no relation whatsoever to their assumed more favourable outcome. In fact it appears there was no more favourable outcome at all.

You can debate around the edges til the cow comes. The elephant in the rooms remains right there.

Which puts a very harsh light on everything that happened elsewhere. From the way the lockdown approach was chosen to the way it was bulled through as 'without alternative' for over two years to the impact it had on many lives and in fact on how we view our countries and our political systems and media and the way we do discourse from now on. It's been very very bad and now we try to brush it under the carpet.