You cannot know that until after the pandemic is over.
The Swedes are betting that nobody in the world will be spared from COVID and therefore the delta in deaths is temporary. They are front-loading it while attempting to keep the economic impacts as low as possible. They anticipate the rest of the world will be contending with shutdowns, re-openings, shutdowns, re-openings, and when all is said and done, the death rate per capita will be the same the world over.
So far, they the Swedes have bet one way, much of the rest of the world has bet the other way. Time will tell, but it is much too soon to make that judgment today.
They haven't seen any benefit to their economy compared to other nordic countries at all.
Partly because they are export dependant and nobody's buying & partly because enough swedes are staying home (not going to pubs etc.) for the economy to tank but not enough to avoid 10 times as many deaths as their neighbours.
So, yes, time will tell. But for now they are getting the worst of both:
Sweden hasnt any had any hospitals overwhelmed. they're just front loading the deaths that every single other country is going to have but is just delaying.
A vaccine in the next couple years is not unthinkable I'd say.
If you have a look at the current infection rate in a lot of European (and others) countries, even reaching 50% of the population infected would take decades.
So yes, I believe that delaying is not the only possibility.
I've posted elsewhere but my wife (40yo and in great health) has been suffering from a range of issues since her infection over 100 days ago. She cant climb stairs without getting out of breath. Her covid symptoms for the first two weeks was relatively mild. She is in a Slack group with over 7000 others. Predominantly women over 40 or men 2o to 50. All with serious long term issues after getting covid. It is a small number, but not small enough to wave away.
Yep but to be fair that isn’t a younger age group. Broadly speaking under-20s are pretty much unaffected. 20-40 aren’t particularly affected either if in good health and without comorbidities. 40+ can be quite seriously affected and over 65s it’s a double digit risk of death. It’s super non-linear.
It seems speculatively like this is due to age-linked expression of ACE2.
Two young people I know here in Stockholm have had complications: my team lead (who is in his mid-thirties) had an embolism in his lung after covid. He now has to inject blood-thinning medication twice a day. We’ll see how this works out for him.
I would argue a decent metric is human hours. For example, if a safety protocol costs n people x hours in return for saving y lives, then we can strike a balance. In general I'd argue that n * x ~= y * (human life expectancy in hours).
You could apply this to things like airport security and check how the sum of all the time passenger spend in line compares to the lives saved. My guess is especially in the airport example the lines have taken more human life than terrorists.
That isn't really how terrorism works though is it? 'they' want the population to be fearful doing normal things - it isn't just the life lost but the changes in behaviour people have to make.
Similarly if I died of covid now, it isn't just the 40ish years of life ahead I lose, but the impact on my wife, children and wider family. I've seen friends lose 72 yo grandfathers - who could have provided years ahead of fun and good memories with their grandkids.
Any death is unacceptable. This is, of course, unattainable in practice, so I would suggest looking at Eastern European or East Asian societies for a rule of thumb (e.g. Czechia, Slovakia, Greece, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam etc.).
This is not how society works. We could drastically curtail the number of deaths by outlawing cars, alcohol, and social interaction indefinitely, regardless of covid, but we don't. Refusing to understand that tradeoffs are involved is not helpful.
Also leads to undesireable conclusions. If the metric is minimize death, best way to achieve this is kill everyone alive today, or at least sterilize them. Everyone alive today will die someday, guaranteed. If they do not have any kids, there will be consequently be no further deaths. Same outcome for all sentient life. If minimizing suffering is the ultimate meteric, then the optimal solution is elimination of all sentient life.
While not explicitly specified, my comment was referring to deaths caused by the coronavirus. If you read past the first sentence you will also notice that I explicitly said that this is an unattainable standard and I have provided a number of countries that can be taken as reference for what an acceptable death rate might be.
Some deaths are caused not by the coronavirus itself, but by the lockdown. Suicides, as well as consequences of foregone or delayed diagnostic tests and other medical appointments, for example. In the US, where unemployment often means no health insurance, many thousands of lives are lost per percentage point of unemployment. I'm the third world, you've got future deaths due to foregone immunizations. So the goal is not minimizing Covid deaths at all. The goal is minimizing deaths, and it's not at all clear that going into max lockdown mode in fact minimizes the sum total of deaths.
Also, how many elderly people have died due to flatten the curve procedures that sent positive cases back to nursing homes to free up hospital beds for younger patients? An enormous percentage of the US deaths were nursing home occupants. It is precisely the lockdown procedures that have resulted in such high death rates. This is the huge uncovered scandal of the pandemic response.
from an high level/abstract point of view, all deaths (I am now specifically referring to the coronavirus, but this works for deaths in general) should be avoided. This is obviously not possible in practice, hence some deaths have to be accepted. What can be considered acceptable is relative, but it helps to look at the countries that have managed to keep their deaths low and take their numbers as a yardstick for other societies.
I think it was the wording. You said not acceptable and acceptable for the same exact thing. In this last post it was all deaths should be avoided, but that some deaths are acceptable. I think everyone can agree that all deaths _should_ be avoided, and probably those same people would agree that it would be impossible to attain that goal... specifically for Covid.
The inclusion of Vietnam on these lists always surprises me. There is no excess mortality data for Vietnam, nor any data on infections (e.g. from random population sampling). All we have is their self-reported number of cases (i.e. confirmed infections) and deaths (zero!), which come from triumphant news releases from the Communist Party (usually paired with reminders about how great this success will be for their economy in the post-COVID world), repeated with zero critical thought by overseas media.
- Nobody knows if there was some excess mortality here, because there's no monitoring.
- There were thousands of "suspected cases" in the official reports, which remained suspected cases and never progressed to a confirmed case or a confirmed non-case (as they would if they were tested) until they stopped reporting numbers.
- People with confirmed close contact with known cases were told to isolate and were only tested if they showed symptoms (this is also normal practice in many/most Western countries).
- The supposed "large" number of tests carried out in Vietnam represents only 0.2% of the population.
- A significant portion of those tests are of people who had to be tested anyway, rather than community testing (e.g. overseas Vietnamese arriving home; the large number of charter flights that were allowed as exceptions from Korea and other countries, for employees of large firms with factories in Vietnam - e.g. LG - who did not stop during the lockdown).
- The lockdown was largely not enforced, and while streets were much quieter than usual, there were many people outside throughout. Smaller bars and restaurants only closed for a few weeks, and of course nobody wore a mask inside them. Many informal businesses (e.g. street food) never closed.
I think Vietnam's "success" is largely down to some environmental factor (average temperature/humidity, sunlight exposure, the general "outdoor" way most people socialise) keeping the number of infections or the severity of those infections down, and I think the chances that COVID caused exactly zero deaths are almost zero.
> if you fail to self isolate, you go to a gov’t camp
There are a few instances of this, which of course the govt made sure were widely reported. It's very unlikely in general that they would know, though.
> all int’l flight have been stopped; only repatriation flights are happening
This is completely false, as you can verify on any public flight tracker website. The number of flights is greatly reduced, but they never stopped. Also, extra charter flights were put on for (at least) Samsung and LG employees to come from Korea, regularly, even in the middle of the lockdown. The "all international flights stopped" line was repeated many times in the local media, and most people here believe it, despite it being untrue.
> for those foreigners who made it in before the flights stopped, they all went to gov't facilities
Not true at all, I know many people who did not have to.
> if someone tests positive, they will lock down all the people around them for 24hr, disinfect common areas and test
They notify the people around them and tell them to self-isolate. They spray some bleach around. They do not test unless symptoms are shown.
Maybe there is a bit of variation across Vietnam? I’m just sharing what my in-laws observed where they live.
When I say “all international flights” stopped, I mean, you can’t just hoop on the next flight to Vietnam. Yes, there are still repatriation flights happening and flight for certain purposes, but “normal” air travel has stopped, no?
So regardless, would you agree that Vietnam is going far beyond a lot of countries in trying to control the spread?
> Maybe there is a bit of variation across Vietnam? I’m just sharing what my in-laws observed where they live.
Perhaps. My experience was with HCMC and Hanoi.
> When I say “all international flights” stopped, I mean, you can’t just hop on the next flight to Vietnam. Yes, there are still repatriation flights happening and flight for certain purposes, but “normal” air travel has stopped, no?
Actually, there were normal, scheduled flights throughout the lockdown. There are right now, there were last week, and there were every week before that. You can trivially confirm this on a flight-tracking website (one of the ones that goes on the ADS-B data, so you see actual aircraft tracks, rather than just a flight schedule website which may show you flights that didn't actually operate). Visa waiver, visa-on-arrival, e-visa and visa issuance for tourists completely stopped, so in practice a tourist can't board a flight to Vietnam, but a small number of flights have continued running throughout, indicating sufficient demand from people who are able to fly here (Vietnamese citizens, people with residence permits, people who were able to get issued non-tourist visas in their home country, ...)
> So regardless, would you agree that Vietnam is going far beyond a lot of countries in trying to control the spread?
I'd say they're pretty much on par with any of the places that aren't a massive failure. But I also think the question of which country did it better or worse is not very interesting, and mostly a pointless political distraction from useful questions like which control measures have a meaningful effect and which don't.
Agreed that it certainly can feel "fluked" or random which areas are overwhelmed and which recover, but I have to disagree with the idea that Vietnam didn't take it particularly seriously.
I was there in February, for around a month.
As a foreigner, I was regularly receiving SMS updates about covid infections. There was a website which detailed exactly when and where people were testing positive. Hotels and guest houses, if allowed to remain open, were being closed for deep-cleaning.
Buses and trains were stopped and my temperature checked, towns and islands were quarantined where someone tested positive, contact tracing appeared to be in full force and foreigners were requested to register their movements and check in daily(iirc) to a web portal.
Again, this was in mid-February.
Luck and climate seem to be factors, but Vietnam acted when they had a low caseload and handled outbreaks sufficiently well to keep R below 1. It wouldn't be all that surprising to me if there really were no covid deaths there.
