In other news, I went to pick up a package today from the local supermarket. I’ve never seen as many masks. Usually I’ll see one or two, I think in the walk to the supermarket and inside the supermarket about a quarter of everyone I saw was wearing a mask. Still way below what it should be, but a massive improvement.
Do you think that is purely due to the new recommendations or has something else happened?
In my opinion it is a combination of three things:
- Change in recommendations.
- People starting to realise that it has come back in full force.
- Fear over the new variant in the UK. It has been covered quite a lot in the media, including a press conference yesterday that saw all flights from the UK cancelled for 48 hours and a travel ban imposed for a month.
Sorry if this has been posted before, but I found this first wave/second wave chart for Europe pretty interesting.
Bit of a milestone crossed today. With two deaths being added to the figures for December 17th, taking that day’s deaths to 116, that means the peak number of daily deaths in Sweden is now in the second wave and not in the first wave (previously there had been 115 deaths on April 8th and April 15th).
Notable today as well was that the number for November 27th got increased, showing how long the delay in reporting can be.
What’s the general mood there now? Looks like the second-wave deaths are leveling off?
I would not read anything into the daily reported deaths right now (which are actually pretty much at the highest they’ve ever been. If you look at what days the deaths have been reported on you’ll see that they are spread all over the last three weeks or so. As an example, Dec 28th got 15 new deaths added today). That’s how it works here, there’s reported deaths but also the day they died. Most places here update the past to the new correct figure. As I have mentioned on here before, I use Dagens Nyheter’s chart, which shows previously reported deaths in black and the ones added on the current day in red. You can find it towards the bottom of this page:
You’ll also see on that page the Sweden has had eighth highest amount of infections in Europe over the past fourteen days.
Today has also seen the highest amount of people hospitalised due to COVID-19 in Sweden since the Pandemic started.
I’d say the general feeling is of fatigue. Right now the spin is that infections have increased in other areas but at least Stockholm has gone down, but every Stockholmer knows that a lot of people left Stockholm for Christmas.
Regarding fatigue, from a Stockholm perspective December was a very depressing month. Daylight hours go down to about six hours (and at best many of those are a half light) but we had days on end with no direct sunlight, just very overcast. Normally this could be countered by snow, but due to the joys of global warming we don’t get much of that anymore and didn’t see any until the 24th.
It was a very difficult month.
This article is from December 9th. It continued that way.
Why don’t you go ahead and compare the rest of Europe, too? Doesn’t fit your narrative, I suppose.
Because Sweden is much more similar to Denmark, Finland, and Norway than it is to Spain. It’s why it’s also not compared to India or Zimbabwe.
it is much, much, much more similar to Switzerland than it is to Zimbabwe.
I’m not actually going to engage with you anymore on this subject. Your frequent minimization of this pandemic was bad enough, but after you posted that ridiculous cite from that ridiculous doctor, I’m done.
You didn’t need to tell me that, because you haven’t actually engaged me to begin with. I already know everything you’re going to say before you even say it, so it doesn’t matter what evidence is put before you. Me, I think a raw statistic of deaths by month or year is entirely relevant, and in fact is the whole basis of the ‘excess deaths’ concept in the first place, the one that is used to measure strengths of epidemics. That you think such a statistic is garbage tells me everything I need to know.
So I guess you didn’t read my post after you asked me how things were. I guess it is because it didn’t go along with your preconceived narrative.
Let me quote myself:
“You’ll also see on that page the Sweden has had eighth highest amount of infections in Europe over the past fourteen days.”
Note: that is eighth out of about fifty countries.
And I’d prefer Sweden to be like Switzerland right now. They are doing better than us right now.
I’m sorry. What I said was not meant for you. It was meant for the person who posted the comparison of Sweden to Denmark, Finland, and Norway. I suspect the same graph would give a much different impression of Sweden if the rest of Europe were included for context.
Is Switzerland really a whole lot better off at the moment? I’ll have a closer look at the dashboard (though I recognize cases/deaths may not paint the entire picture).
And here we are with yet more evidence to support the claim that every country that closed schools got it wrong, and Sweden got it right.
Of the 1,951,905 children aged 1 to 16 years in Sweden as of Dec 31, 2019, 65 died in the pre-pandemic period of November 2019 to February 2020, compared with 69 in the pandemic period of March through June 2020. None of the deaths were caused by COVID-19.
Fifteen children diagnosed as having COVID-19, including seven with MIS-C, were admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) from March to June 2020 (0.77 per 100,000 children in this age-group). Four children required mechanical ventilation. Four children were 1 to 6 years old (0.54 per 100,000), and 11 were 7 to 16 (0.90 per 100,000). Four of the children had an underlying illness: 2 with cancer, 1 with chronic kidney disease, and 1 with a hematologic disease).
Of the country’s 103,596 preschool teachers and 20 schoolteachers, fewer than 10 were admitted to an ICU by Jun 30, 2020 (an equivalent of 19 per 100,000). Preschool teachers had an age-adjusted relative risk (RR) of 1.10, compared with occupations other than healthcare, while schoolteachers’ RR was 0.43.
In a Karolinska Institute press release, lead author and pediatrician Jonas Ludvigsson, MD, PhD, indicated he was hopeful about the results. “It is very gratifying that serious COVID-19, defined here as needing treatment in an intensive care unit, is so rare among children despite schools being open during the pandemic,” he said.
…nope. The study does not support this. The study says nothing at all about the countries that did close their schools. It only looks at the period between March and June in Sweden. It only looks at the children and doesn’t look at anybody who may have gotten Covid from the children.
And of course there is this.
Well, there’s this:
Six districts reported no secondary infections, two had one case, and three reported multiple cases. Six cases of secondary spread were in preschools, 11 in elementary schools, 6 in middle schools, 5 in high schools, and 4 in K-12 settings. Contact tracing identified another 32 cases that resulted from in-school transmission. No cases of in-school child-to-adult spread were reported.
And this:
Preschool teachers had an age-adjusted relative risk (RR) of 1.10, compared with occupations other than healthcare, while schoolteachers’ RR was 0.43.
So there’s a little bit of that effort.
But yes, I concede that ‘every other country got it wrong’ was a rhetorical rebuttal. Perhaps, you could say, a different way of deciding whether Sweden fucked it all up.
You have to include all these things in a proper analysis, you know. It’s rank amateurism, at best, to look solely at four countries’ death rates and issue blanket appraisals. Rank amateurism at best.