Fascinating. I would have never guessed that North Dakota and South Dakota were so dissimilar. I always figured that the land border between them was more or less arbitrary and that you could for most intents consider them ‘the Dakotas’. What differences are there between the two?
…what part of that study addressed “countries that kept their schools closed?” Can you be specific on which countries you were talking about, and explain, in the context of that study, how exactly they “fucked up?” Were NZ wrong to close their schools during Level 4? Were the UK wrong to close their schools a few weeks ago? Were Sweden wrong to close some schools in November? And we can still say that Sweden fucked up even if we accepted everything you said about schools?
LOL
Hilarious
The issue, which is pretty damn obvious and so you damn well know and are arguing about because you just want to irritate people, is that the Dakotas didn’t have as wildly different approaches to COVID-19 whilst also being extremely similar.
Unlike, you know, Sweden and Norway. I’m guessing you’ve never been to either. I live in one and have been to the other many a time (hell, I spent five years working for a Norwegian company). They are very, very similar. The language is so similar that I spoke Swedish to Norwegians and they spoke Norwegian back. Everything pretty much looks the same. There’s minor differences, mainly that Norway is a bit more expensive and you can buy stronger beer in the supermarkets.
But what it comes down to is that they are culturally and environmentally extremely similar but took wildly different approaches to COVID-19. And lo behold they had wildly different results.
You knew that, so quite why you were dicking around I have no … well I have my suspicions.
I’ve been to both Oslo and Stockholm, and I found Stockholm the more cosmopolitan of the two. Helsinki seemed to me more similar to Stockholm, but I didn’t stay there long. My impression has been that Stockholm is better connected internationally than those other two, meaning it would not surprise me it were more seeded at the time international borders closed.
Having said that, I’m certainly not denying that the cultures are similar. But even at that, it seems hard to find two jurisdictions with more similar demographics than North and South Dakota. If one set is more similar than the other, I sure wouldn’t guess the more similar set is Scandinavia. And that’s what the poster claimed upthread.
I’d say Stockholm, Norway and Finland are all very similar, at least in the cities. Helsinki (been there many times, worked a couple of years for a Finnish company) to me feels like Stockholm but in another language, but the “right” language is always written in smaller letters nearby.
Going out to the countryside is different though. Norway and Sweden seem identical to me whereas there’s a different feel about Finland. Can’t quite put my finger on what it is. Maybe it was less influenced by the Swedish control than Norway was.
And and that was one of the things he was saying. To be honest, I’ve only been in that area a few of times and frankly I’m not even sure where we were. We flew into Sioux City and had to drive a bit, which could make it one of three states. Joys of doing a project based out of Atlanta but for Gateway (of the cow motif PC fame, if you remember them) in the mid west. Man that was a long time ago. But anyway, the point is, I have no idea about how similar North and South Dakota is. I do, however, know that that was only part of what was being discussed, in fact it was only one sentence of it, but it seems to be the only part you wanted to discuss. Which is kind of frustrating, because the meat really was in the latter sections.
I’m not claiming they are incredibly different. I worked with a North Dakotan who informed me of a bunch of differences (mountains, how much agriculture, etc ) but yes, of course they are similar. SO ARE NORWAY AND SWEDEN. Are they as similar as the Dakotas? Honestly, the differences are similar. More petrochemicals produced in one than the other, for instance.
What makes Sweden vs. Norway the better experiment in government response to covid is that despite their similarities they chose strikingly different government responses, which the Dakotas didn’t.
Again, let’s see what gets cited in 5-10 years. My money is on Sweden.
Well apparently some people in Sweden think the death and infection rates aren’t bad enough and if they just try a tiny bit harder they can get them to be even worse.
More fuel for the argument that Sweden knew what it was doing with its schools, this time from the New England Journal of Medicine.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2026670
In mid-March 2020, many countries decided to close schools in an attempt to limit the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus causing coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).1,2 Sweden was one of the few countries that decided to keep preschools (generally caring for children 1 to 6 years of age) and schools (with children 7 to 16 years of age) open. Here, we present data from Sweden on Covid-19 among children 1 to 16 years of age and their teachers. In Sweden, Covid-19 was prevalent in the community during the spring of 2020.3 Social distancing was encouraged in Sweden, but wearing face masks was not.3
The number of deaths from any cause among the 1,951,905 children in Sweden (as of December 31, 2019) who were 1 to 16 years of age was 65 during the pre–Covid-19 period of November 2019 through February 2020 and 69 during 4 months of exposure to Covid-19 (March through June 2020) (see the Supplementary Appendix). From March through June 2020, a total of 15 children with Covid-19 (including those with MIS-C) were admitted to an ICU (0.77 per 100,000 children in this age group) (Table 1), 4 of whom were 1 to 6 years of age (0.54 per 100,000) and 11 of whom were 7 to 16 years of age (0.90 per 100,000). Four of the children had an underlying chronic coexisting condition (cancer in 2, chronic kidney disease in 1, and hematologic disease in 1). No child with Covid-19 died.
Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, we found a low incidence of severe Covid-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Among the 1.95 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had Covid-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.
…you have cited yet another study that looks at the time period between March and June 2020. It compares the time period between March and June 2020 with November 19-February 20 when they could have compared it to the same period (March-June 19) for a more accurate comparison. The study didn’t even look at parents.
Once again this is old data. We know that in November last year Sweden closed some schools in order to help get control of the pandemic. So my question to you once again is was Sweden right to close some schools in November?
Well, what was going on between March and June 2020? Something of great import for them to study, I think it’s fair to say.
My take on the data range for child deaths was that they were comparing the four months before the start of the pandemic with the subsequent four months. Are you suggesting that child deaths are typically cyclical throughout the calendar year? Do you have a cite for that if so?
…this isn’t about the study. This is about your claim that “this is more fuel for the argument.” This is the exact same data that has already discussed over and over and over again in this very thread. It isn’t “more fuel.” Its old fuel.
I haven’t made any suggestions that require a cite.
Are you going to answer my question or not?
Was Sweden right to close some schools in November?
No, this is new data, just recently published (three days ago). If you mean that Sweden was able to keep their schools open without great harm to students or teachers and that that’s been obvious for all to see for almost a year now, fine. But the way the world used to work, before we brought back rain dances and the like, is that we required a certain scientific process before we felt comfortable ruling out alternative explanations for observed phenomena.
…the study is new. The data is old.
New Zealand closed their schools for five weeks without great harm to students and teachers and that has been obvious for almost a year now. So what do you think that suggests?
This data is nothing but a single metric in a sea of metrics.
Sweden has a population of 10 million people. They have had 631 thousand cases of covid and over 12 thousand deaths.
Norway has a population of over 5 million people. They had 68 thousand cases and 607 deaths.
Vietnam has a population of 96 million. They had 2362 cases and 35 deaths.
New Zealand has a population just over 5 million. They had 2273 cases and 26 deaths.
The schools metric is utterly meaningless in the face of the rest of the data. Even if we pretended that these old numbers were somehow relevant the numbers for Sweden are still overwhelmingly disproportionally comparatively bad.
And you still haven’t answered my question.
Was Sweden right to close some schools in November?
I don’t have thoughts about that. Why don’t you start a thread of its own, rather than constantly posting about New Zealand in threads about other places?
Utterly meaningless, eh? Hm. I don’t want to misrepresent your position, so please clarify. What is it, exactly, that is utterly meaningless? We’re talking about the livelihoods of lots of kids and their families, you know. In just about any context I can imagine, those have meaning.
…if you think the comparison is off topic feel free to report it.
But I think the comparison is apt here. We have two countries that did two very different things yet had the very same result. If we are going to talk about “rain dances and the like” and if we are going to talk about scientific processes and “ruling out alternative explanations for observed phenomena” then we shouldn’t be looking at the Swedish data in isolation, wouldn’t you agree?
No we aren’t talking about “the livelihoods of lots of kids and their families.” We are talking about Sweden’s “do nothing approach” and if that approach was a responsible approach for a pandemic. The kids and families in New Zealand (who did close their schools) are doing just fine. The kids and families of the 12,000 people who died of covid in Sweden? Not so much.
There is more to this than a single set of metrics.
And you still haven’t answered my question.
Was Sweden right to close some schools in November?
The study was about harm from COVID to kids attending school in a country that had wide spread of infection. The study included risk comparisons of adults working in schools during the outbreak and adults working in other settings during the outbreak. I’m not seeing the apt comparison to New Zealand, no. Unless the point is that kids in Sweden were about as safe going to school as kids in New Zealand were going to school (or not going to school, as the case may be). But something tells me that’s not the conclusion you are trying to draw.
…the study looked at data from months ago. Why do that now, when they could have looked at more recent data? The study didn’t look at parents, or families. That data would be important, don’t you agree?
Of course the comparison was apt. Two countries, two school systems, two very different approaches, the same result for the specified data set. But we are missing the data for parents and families in Sweden. And that missing data is both important and relevant.
But all of that doesn’t matter because Sweden did eventually close down some of their schools in November. Do you think Sweden were wrong to do that? Should they have kept the schools open? Do you think they should have relied on the data from March and June and ignored the data that said that some schools should close down?
Well, as the study mentions, they tracked ICU admissions through June 30 because school ended around June 10. Then they did longitudinal follow-up till the end of August. As they say:
This means that we had a follow-up of more than 8 weeks of all included children to rule out that anyone of them had died after discharge (none had).
And as you must know, Sweden didn’t experience a whole lot of ICU admissions or deaths due to COVID during the summer.
I’m just not sure I’m following your objections here, unless it’s simply to be contrarian about any suggestion that maybe on the whole Sweden didn’t “fuck [everything] up.” Like, the passage of time does not make what happened during their first wave irrelevant. (And you yourself just got done citing data that came in large part from that time span, as support for the point you wanted to make!)
As for whether data on the families of those schoolchildren would be ‘important’, a couple things. In as much as all (good) data is helpful, then yes, of course you would love to have it. But every study cannot do everything, as I’m sure you know, so I guess I don’t get why you think that’s a valid reason to dismiss the importance of the findings this study did have.
…are you going to answer the question?