So much fellating of Sweden on social media.

Yea they have high deaths but are in a better position for the second wave is the argument used to deflect the reality of their terrible numbers.

The thing is the second wave could kill magnitudes more than the first in all its neighbours and numerous other countries and they would have still done better in terms of deaths than Sweden in just the first wave.

What is also missed with the Sweden discussion is their community and health care support for sick people. They are better equipped to manage a lot of sick people than we are. Shockingly, those that want to just get everyone sick are not the same people that want to ensure they have health care and sick days if they get sick.

So for example if even in the second wave Norway suffers 6.5 times the deaths per million it will have still suffered less DPM in both waves combinesd than Sweden suffered in the first.

There is not very much being done in terms of research because that will take a kind of study that requires time to play out. There is some pretty strong anecdotal evidence that people who get severe cases that require hospitalization probably have long-term damage, especially if they required a ventilator or dialysis. As far as I can puzzle out, no one knows if the neurological damage associated with symptoms like loss of smell or taste are associated with any permanent damage like they see in lung and kidney symptoms.

People who are already chafing at the restrictions will relax their safety standards even more. The big concern is that incidence of disease follows changes in behavior fairly slowly, so by the time we see an uptick in cases we may have gone too far in loosening.

The thing is that no one really knows how effective behavioral changes are as they partially loosen. Frankly, I think a lot of people have a poor understanding of the relative risk factors. Personally, I'm not so worried about a momentary encounter with someone who isn't wearing a mask in the aisle of a store -- the risk of that encounter is vastly less than sitting in a restaurant 5 feet away for an hour or working in a crowded office building.

I'd say its 50/50 between a resurgence in a month and a long slow decline followed by a huge rebound in the fall.

was it my wife giving him the rimjobs? asking for a friend

The other thing is that a central element of their plan was to protect the old folks by isolating them and just letting the younger people develop immunity, but that failed spectacularly and they've seen big numbers of deaths among their elderly population. We're basically doing large-scale experiments all over the world with life & death consequence.

Howard if you want to play some bitcoin poker for extremely tiny dollars make an account on SWC poker and DM me your username and I'll ship you some chips. I figure I owe you at least 10 for my enjoyment of past Andy pics!

Is there anyway you can see a breakdown of Covid deaths by age? I would
Be interested to see how many young people have died vs old. Found out today that I can expect to go back in the office maybe in fall or later which I find crazy. The economy is so fcked. Not saying people should be allowed to go back etc, I’m all for a super conservative approach however I really see the economy shitting the bed with a lot of businesses closing for good due to this unexpected pandemic.

***politarding deleted***

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/c...ekly/index.htm

Lektor,

In your sidebar, you mention May 8 being a holiday in Europe except Germany and UK, because it's VE (WW II Victory in Europe) day.

I can see why Germany might not want reminders of that, but why not UK?

i assume you had runners in both instances...

I wouldn't hold my breath seeing these pictures:

No masks, no distancing, people queuing outside not because of restrictions on #guests, but because the place is PACKED?

ATM the US has about 1,350,000 confirmed cases with ~80k deaths and ~230k recovered, so about 1 mill known ongoing cases. And then there's maybe another 1/2 mill or more unknown infections ongoing (pre-symptomatic or no symptoms)?

If all those ongoing cases start infecting others with a higher rate, this thing gets a jump start imo. And that R0 increases is just bound to happen in these conditions. Germany for example has about 20k ongoing known cases, so I guess if the current relaxation of measures increase R0 too much you could still counter that. But if you start at such a high volume of ongoing infections and relax the measures to pre-Corona times...

well played sir

May 8th was a holiday here.

Here is a bar in downtown Tempe:

Hey!, that's really nice of you but I'll take a pass since I always found playing micros very boring. But it's still nice of you and Andy is going to get an extra scratch for being a valuable celebrity!

Counterpoint:

I mean in some ways those packed bars is what's supposed to happen right? The youngs all go out and give themselves herd immunity while the olds, vulnerable, and people like me who just really don't want to get this thing stay isolated?

What if anything is known about Swedish immunity levels?

From the playing around with numbers I've done in spreadsheets, it seems to me that unless they are at a very high level of immunity already, then they will also have a bigger second wave, because there is more of the virus around to make a comeback. In other words, if you want a small second wave, the best place to start from is one where hardly anyone has it, so it has more work to do multiplying itself back up.

Germany because they lost, UK because we hadn't won yet. There were still forces fighting the Japanese. Also Jersey and Guernsey were still occupied (they do commemorate the end of the war, but on 9th of May), along with British Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Borneo and bits of Burma.

The real reason though is that British public holidays don't normally commemorate specific historical events, they are just things like "Last Monday in August", which is convenient as a lot of them make 3 and 4-day weekends instead of falling midweek.

Yes this year, but this was in a previous year.

No suzzer, that is not what's supposed to happen.

That plan has been stated plenty of times. Trump has mentioned it.

California went through a brief phase of "over 65 stay inside, everyone else can go out" which only lasted a couple of days. I'm guessing the feedback was pretty negative on that.

I'm guessing some states will have "youngs go crazy, sick/old stay home" as a defacto policy - w/o making it official.

I drove to Dallas on Friday to pick up a vehicle. Dallas is still safer in place, but the suburbs are not. 90%+ of all restaurants are just doing take out only in the surrounding cities. It was like a ghost town. A good friend of mine owns a chain of steakhouses. His numbers in Oklahoma are still way down, but showing life. In our county where we have one active case in a county of 150k, his restaurant did $197 in dine in at lunch yesterday. For every picture you see on the internet of a packed restaurant I can show you 100 that are either closed or doing take out only.

That's always my metric for figuring out what to do.

I'm just saying it's been thrown around.

What's the plan other than herd immunity? Wait for a vaccine?

You're guessing? Ugg nevermind.