It seems like weather is the latest in a long-line of reasons to justify lockdowns that now seem to have been a bad decision.

Sweden is going to be a disaster if they don't lock down.

Georgia/Florida/Texas is going to be a disaster.

If you don't wear masks, it's going to be a disaster.

Sure, people aren't dying, but how about long-haul case?

Wait until the fall.

Now it's wait until winter.

Well, winter effectively starts in three weeks in Sweden. The average temperature in the last two weeks of October is roughly the same as December in New York.

So three weeks of panic "wait until winter" speculation, and then we get to see actual data start coming in.

Man, it's amazing watching the illogic that spews forth once you go down the rabbit hole of T Cell trutherism. Hottakes from you:

1. The lockdowns (in March) were a bad decision
2. Europe is flat (in July) because of herd immunity and not restrictions. I assume you're not still pushing that view now (lol)?
3. Winter is in early October (never mind that flu season doesn't kick off until December). Let's just redefine the seasons to fit with our trutherism
4. If event X doesn't happen in two weeks, it proves me right on my single factor analysis.

What a thread. We had a somewhat smart guy (PairTheBoard) get fully sucked in to a penny stock bio fraud (CYDY) and now we have a self proclaimed scientist going full truther complete with impressive illogic.

Sweden is a disaster, they could have been a Norway, or Finland, or Denmark.

I guess I could try to explain to you how a virus with no inherent immunity within a population would transmit differently than a flu strain with several generations of exposure, but it would be wasting both of our times.

How is Sweden a disaster?

Their economy did much better than the other European countries and only lost 6000 old people in a country where about 90 000 people die per year.

Sweden was completely successful. Many strict lockdown countries had even higher deaths / 100 000.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53...ter%20measures.

Because they would have the same infection vectors as Norway, Denmark and Finland, all countries that directly border Sweden.

Cant believe Im having to do this again.

Sweden DPM 580.

Denmark DPM 111
Finland DPM 62
Norway DPM 49

So Sweden has had over twice the DPM of all those lockdown countries combined. So measured against its Peers who have suffered minimal economic damage, their approach has been a train wreck.

Completely successful is an absurd take.

An Italian death rate despite a small sparsely populated country with little international traffic and heaps of warning is "completely successful"? That's a crazy take.

Sweden is properly compared to their neighbors - Finland and Norway - which have 1/10th the death rate of Sweden.

There's also this myth going around that Sweden's economy didn't get destroyed (it did) and that Swedes are living life normally. In reality the people in Sweden are further below normal activity levels than most countries including Germany. Sweden has wealth and a small homogeneous socially responsible population that was able to self isolate and socially distance effectively - not unlike Japan. That wouldn't work in many other larger countries.

With much less population density than Japan.

Sweden last quarter GDP -8.3%
Denmark -6.9%
Norway -5.1%
Finland -4.5%


So most deaths and high economic damage = complete success.

Well yes. Is that not how the Trump admin is defining success in the USA also? So this is very consistent. Just keep saying it and it will be true.

Sweden currently 10% below average deaths for 2020 vs 2015-19:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...aths-per-week/

Shouldn't the outcome be looked at in terms of excess dealth/QALY lost rather than raw Covid DPM?

Anyone smart care to comment on the graph in post 9405 where cases are adjusted by testing numbers which mostly eliminates the new 'wave'? Tooth?

1/ You need to compare observed deaths vs expected deaths. There are people that calculate and predict this, and it'll be better than looking at past averages.

2/ Important that in 2015-2019 we had 2 exceptionally strong flu seasons, which gave 2020 the Jan-Feb head start with less death.

3/ It does not look like it's even close that Sweden had less death in 2015-2019 vs 2020? Or are you just looking at the most recent week?

It's obviously the cases that cases now are much lower than they were in March (in the US too).

As for your graph, you want to discuss the red bit? Really?

Lol that’s laughable analysis. The people who are unhealthy in the US simply disregarded expert consensus the entire way. They ate way too much of everything and lived sedentary lifestyles. That was never recommended. The fact that expert advice was suboptimal is irrelevant when you aren’t following it.

Your understanding of why trans fats started becoming popular is wrong also. The main driver was cost and it took a lot of population level data to convince governments/businesses that a cheaper, easy to store alternative to that consumers usually can’t taste the difference between was actually bad.

"Millions of dead people in the US" - lol no.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the clowns at the CDC just came out with this gem:

Hard to believe that scientists and communicators with this level of insight, genius and clarity botched the tests and then told people for months not to wear masks.

Most of this thread would disagree. And you sound salty bro. I'm calling out the pure insane bullshit of "millions of dead in the US this winter", which is like your other doomporn for years like hyperinflation. It's just not gonna happen. Not least of which because most of the old population will continue to isolate and will super-isolate if things get bad.
Your analysis here sucks. Firstly, "tiny segment of the population"? 10-30% of many states and cities has had corona. That's not a "tiny segment", that's a substantial amount of immunity. What's more, it's spread organically in the US through the most social/active/connected nodes - health care workers, retail workers, the young and social and mobile. Highly connected nodes were more likely to get infected This amplifies the effect on R.

Thirdly, "order of magnitude"? R0 seems to be between 2-3 in winter in completely virgin populations failing to isolate. A 0.5 drop in R is huge.

I mean, we've seen cases soar and then minor distancing increase (without lockdown) and then they drop. Dense New York has gotten it down from crazy levels and kept R at 1 or below. R can be quite easily affected by behavioral changes now because everything is in place to quickly modify behavior, and the douchebag nodes have already gotten corona.

There's no major evidence of reinfection yet. When there is I'll take is seriously. We have no ideas if mortality rates fluctuate between season. Between increased load and decreased immune system and co-spreader infections (like the flu), I think you make a good point about higher death rates. But it's irrelevant because we already know the death rate from how it progressed through the population in February/March - the peak of the flu season. It's 1%. Why are you suddenly seeing catastrophe and greater than 1% death rates now? Why do you think it will go through the population at anything like the rates it did through a naive, unprepared, virgin population last year?

Yeah, and your doom porn is a hilarious fail (double points for emailing the specific prediction that millions (plural, at least 2 million then) will die in the US). This is the spot for sober heads, not doomclowns:

That's just whacked out analysis at odds with the facts and the math.

This would have happened without lockdowns in a virgin, unprepared population in some cities (you're just plain wrong about small towns and rural areas though). But now after the burn through and preparation, I don't think it's even possible to get this result in the US even if the US doesn't lock down anywhere at all in winter. There's too much immunity in the dense spreader spots and nodes, too much knowledge of how to contain it.

Do you have any idea if that is a large or small number?

40,000 people die in car crashes each year in US. So if Covid kills 400,000 people in a year in the US, is that really that big of a number? It's only 10x what car crashes have been doing for years.

Now imagine how many people are seriously injured in car crashes but don't die each year. It's in the millions. WHY ARE WE STILL DRIVING!?!?!? Why is it not a ****ing pandemic? MILLIONS of people are getting severely hurt with life long disabilities and many dying, but we are focusing on something that has killed 200,000 mostly old and sick people.

The point here is to realize that 200,000 deaths is not that big of a number. Then when you throw in the fact how most of those were old and sick, you start to realize how ****ing stupid all this **** is.

Let me ask you a question. You seem to think the IFR of the virus is going to jump in the winter (I think this is your claim) so let me ask this. What do you think the IFR has been this summer? And what do you think the IFR is going to be this winter? We can have more deaths in the winter because of R naught changes, but you seem to think the virus is going to be X many times more lethal in the winter, which I am not sure is accurate. The reason the IFR dropped in the U.S. this summer probably has to do with this. People 65+ are not being infected at the same rate compared to earlier on in the pandemic. This is not particularly surprising and what you would expect because the older/vulnerable populations were not altering there behavior earlier on in the pandemic comparatively speaking.

There's your problem right there. You're confusing confirmed cases with actual cases. No wonder you think the immunity boost is tiny.

Thankfully we have data from Italy, Spain, France, New York, and so on. Which spread in February which is the coldest of winter. March is when flu infections are their worst. It's peak spread time. We have the data, sir, robustly analyzed across multiple countries. We know what R0 is in winter.

Why do you think the decrease through immunity is "tiny"? 20% of the most active nodes immune in many US cities and suburbs is huge. Queens and Kings are over 30% immune. Visualize a vast node network in your head connecting people with potentially infectious routes in a decentralized manner. Now imagine 20% of the most active nodes being immune (blocked from spread). R plummets from 3 down to well below 2. With the current distancing it gets close to 1. It's a big deal, and is the difference between the explosion that happened in say NY and a slow manageable burn that never overwhelms and doesn't kill many.

I'm not suffering from anything. R has been moved from 2 to below 1 in summer quite easily in many places with no lockdown. R can be 2 in summer. It's at most 3 in winter. There isn't some giant differential here. Not is distancing in winter that different to summer when it comes to inter-node-group spread.

You have this strange idea where R is disastrous in winter. It's not. It's 3.5 at worst, in an environment where no one is immune, no one does any distancing and just acts normally. It's far lower when they don't act normally. It's not some superspreader bug, it's moderately infectious but it's far less infectious than other diseases like measles.

What's more, a good deal of the spread from the first wave was caused by superspreader events - large indoor events with lots of face to face contact and spittling. The Boston conference for example spread it over much of the US. Most of those are shut down now until corona is over, as are bars, indoor dining, etc when things worsen. Lots of people are working from home. The sick are isolating a lot more (no one isolated in the first wave). Public transport is used less and it's masked. R will be way lower than last winter just from behavior. There just isn't the mechanism for last winter's high R any more.
I explained why R matters a lot more than baseline. You and Cuepee both lack the intuitive and specific understanding of math to understand why. I can't do anything about that unfortunately.

Over 10% have already been infected. We saw the results of that.
No, because we know what the death rate is in the worst of winter - it's about 1% if hospitals don't overwhelm. Where are you getting this fanciful 2% to 10% death rate from seasonal changes??
There's no question it will, substantially. Add in substantial immunity and the US is in good shape.
The US response seems to have been the most rational. From a birds eye view:

- Lock down to prevent overwhelming when little about the virus is known and deaths are soaring

- Let people go about their lives once it's under control and monitor it

- As a great side effect of the above, have it burn through the young/active nodes as much as possible to get winter R down, to let people live their lives, and so the economy survives and thrives

Should people cower in their homes for the summer because of a minuscule chance of death if they're not old or ill? Should they not live?

7000 people dead with a country that has 90 000 deaths per year and a population of 11M. Most of the dead were old people on their way out. Statistically irrelevant.

Now its controlled in Sweden with 0-5 deaths per day for months now.

I'm supposed to believe the sky was falling in Sweden when they did absolutely fine in aggregate.

Can we apply the same to the US?

200,000 people (30 x Sweden's 7K) in a population that has 3 million deaths a year (30 x Sweden's 90K)

It's exactly the same statistics as the US for deaths. Is this also "statistically irrelevant", then?

Sweden has 1-3 deaths per day for last 3 months.

USA is still running at 1000 dead per day. If we divide by 30, that means Sweden would be experiencing 33 dead per day on average when it only has 10x less than that.

So no they cannot be compared.

Sweden is disciplined as a population, Americans are not.

Yet your argument is about the death rate and they have the same death rate. Do you take back your argument about the death rate being "statistically irrelevant"? You can't have it both ways.

Sweden has fewer deaths right now but overall, since the pandemic began, they have the same number of deaths for about the same amount of average freedom since March (perhaps the US has a little more freedom right now).

We are judging the their policy response against that of their lockdown geographic peers.

Their is no metric by which you cant describe their choice as a total utter failure in relation to there geographic peers.

Much more death, more economic damage.

Those are the facts.

I am arguing Sweden lost 6000 people within a span of 5 months between March - July, with a population of 11M.

Since late July the number of deaths by Corona has been 1-3 on average.

Sweden actually has/had it under control. Talking about Sweden in sky is falling / disaster language is total hyperbole.


If USA could have only lost 200,000 people and have number of dead running at less than 100 per day for the last 4 months I would call it "under control". But it's not.

USA is running at 1000 dead per day, 10x the rate of what is happening with Sweden comparatively after the economy opened up.