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Forums - General Discussion - Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion Thread

Trumpstyle on 20 May 2020
vivster said:
donathos said:

Sweden was not and is not trying to "stop their outbreak." They're aiming at protecting themselves against worse future outcomes by controlling the spread of the virus now, which may or may not prove to be a good strategy -- but your analysis will be better if you can at least try to understand their objectives. It won't really be possible fully to evaluate this approach until we know more.

(And please drop the juvenile and needlessly antagonistic "Sweden apologist" rhetoric. Rather than casting absolutely everything as "us versus them" team ball, consider that others may simply want someone to find the best way to deal with this unprecedented-in-the-modern-age problem, regardless of who, where, or "what team" they're supposedly on. I root for Sweden to succeed, because why on earth wouldn't I?)

Please enlighten me as to what their real objective is. It's obviously not killing as few people as possible.

Our virus scientists simply believe that this virus can't be stopped and countries trying to do so is just wasting everybody's time. We shall see if they are right, maybe a few countries can :)



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Amnesia on 20 May 2020
SpokenTruth said:
Amnesia said:

This topic is still active ? There are still that many people who believe today that this virus is a real danger ?

100,000 new cases and over 5,000 deaths per day prove it's a real danger.

Cases mean nothing, and as long as you believe that the death toll is real and not biased, from your point of view it is a real danger.

Not for me who believe that the death toll of these countries is artificially biased :

USA

SPAIN

ITALY

FRANCE

BELGIUM

NETHERLAND

Every other countries of the planet have 4-5 times less death/million. Sweden statistics debunked this covid-19.



donathos on 20 May 2020
vivster said:
donathos said:

Sweden was not and is not trying to "stop their outbreak." They're aiming at protecting themselves against worse future outcomes by controlling the spread of the virus now, which may or may not prove to be a good strategy -- but your analysis will be better if you can at least try to understand their objectives. It won't really be possible fully to evaluate this approach until we know more.

(And please drop the juvenile and needlessly antagonistic "Sweden apologist" rhetoric. Rather than casting absolutely everything as "us versus them" team ball, consider that others may simply want someone to find the best way to deal with this unprecedented-in-the-modern-age problem, regardless of who, where, or "what team" they're supposedly on. I root for Sweden to succeed, because why on earth wouldn't I?)

Please enlighten me as to what their real objective is. It's obviously not killing as few people as possible.

Their objective appears to be killing as few people as possible... in the long run.

Do they have a higher infection rate currently than the would have if they'd locked their country down? Of course. That's the idea: they want the virus to spread through their populace in such a way as to protect them in the long term against possible "second waves," and etc. The higher infection rate right now isn't a bug in the system, it's the design.

It's also not inconsistent with what we were all talking about just a couple of months ago: "flattening the curve." Sweden's approach initially raised alarms because people believed that their health resources would be quickly overwhelmed, running out of ventilators, hospital beds, and so forth. Well, have they? (Does anyone else remember the actual conversations and why we locked down, in the first place?) It seems to me that they've managed the spread so as to "flatten the curve," but did not clamp down so tightly as other places. So the virus spreads somewhat more there, albeit not catastrophically so, which again, is precisely what they intend.

Will that approach work out for Sweden over time? I have no idea. I don't know whether "herd immunity" is possible, or whether people will be reinfected, or whether the disease will come back in the fall, or what it will look like for countries that have maintained lockdowns that then open things back up (especially given populations that may not endure these measures indefinitely, and push back against them), or when an effective vaccine will be available -- if it ever will. If Donald Trump is right and Covid simply disappears in the summer, "like a miracle," then Sweden surely made a bad decision. But I don't tend to bet on Trump.



Mnementh on 20 May 2020
JRPGfan said:
SpokenTruth said:
Guys, did either of you actually read my initial post? Both of you reacted as though I was saying they were doing great long term or overall. I specifically said the rating was only a trending indicator. If the past 3 days has falling number, great rating.

My second post was factual data. What's to argue regarding when we used the same damn reference for it?

Oh, and population density is only a valid measure against nations of equal value. Do you really want to compare the US, Russia and Brazil (very low densities) against Italy, France and Spain (much higher densities) given that the first group still has more cases and/or deaths than the second group? With such lower density, how did it spread enough to become the highest infected nations? (please understand I deliberately phrased that last question in a specific manner to elicit a specific response).

Ignoring the fact that new case rates for Brazil and Russia are indicative of later starting infections.

This isnt off of your trending indicator.
Their debateing because I said Sweden wasnt doing so poorly.

I think Sweden, as crazy as it sounds has handled this outbreak better than the UK has.
Which even to me sounds crazy, because sweden basically didnt do a lockdown.

The thing is: actually the actions aren't that different to other countries. Look at mobility data in comparison to germany (a country with stricter rules):

https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-05-13_SE_Mobility_Report_en.pdf

https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-05-13_DE_Mobility_Report_en.pdf

Sweden has 34% less people in transit stations and 23% less in workplaces, while movement in residential areas increased by 9%. In germany you have 36% less in transit stations and 26% less in the workplace. 11% more in residential areas. That is pretty similar. The biggest difference is, that Swedes hit hard the parks: +48% (compared to +13% in germany). So with all the talk about the different route of Sweden, they actually acted pretty similar.



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JRPGfan on 20 May 2020
Amnesia said:
SpokenTruth said:

100,000 new cases and over 5,000 deaths per day prove it's a real danger.

Cases mean nothing, and as long as you believe that the death toll is real and not biased, from your point of view it is a real danger.

Not for me who believe that the death toll of these countries is artificially biased :

USA , SPAIN , ITALY , FRANCE , BELGIUM , NETHERLAND

Every other countries of the planet have 4-5 times less death/million. Sweden statistics debunked this covid-19.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html

How do you explain the dead bodies then?
Theres excess mortality in just about every country on the planet, right now (higher than reported covid19 deaths).

Do you also not believe in the people that count dead bodies? Are they just makeing up numbers too?
Do you want to go manually count all the dead bodies to make sure they are real? would that even convince you?



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newwil7l on 20 May 2020
Amnesia said:

This topic is still active ? There are still that many people who believe today that this virus is a real danger ?

I agree that the initial hysteria to the virus was a slight overreaction, but it is better to be safe than sorry. Also let's not try to pretend it still isn't a serious issue. The global death toll is up almost everywhere thanks to this, and trying to downplay that is silly.



pastro243 on 20 May 2020

We had 4 thousand cases today, just 30 something deaths, but it will probably get worse in the next few weeks



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Amnesia on 20 May 2020

Thank you for confirming my opinion even more.



Torillian on 20 May 2020
Amnesia said:

Thank you for confirming my opinion even more.

You're going to have to write up why this confirms your opinion, because it super looks like it doesn't. 



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SvennoJ on 20 May 2020
Trumpstyle said:
SvennoJ said:


Anyway, cities are hit harder, low population density areas are hit much less or not at all (Nunavut in Canada). Comparing Sweden to the UK will always be comparing apples to oranges. The population of greater London (8.9 million) isn't that far off the entire population of Sweden. The population density of Greater London is 4,542 people per sq km, Greater Stockholm or Stockholm county (2.2 million) has a population density of 360 people per sq km.


It's hard to find info on population density. But this what I found, population density urban London 6004 citizen/km2 and Stockholm urban density 3970 citizen/km2, this is based on swedish wikipedia.

London

Stockholm

I think both u and vivster are wrong, but I don't know much about population density.

Edit: This what I found english wikipedia, 1million people 4500 citizen/km2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_Municipality

Also I'm not comparing us to any country, but there are several people using population density as an argument, they are likely wrong, based on this post I just made.

Teeqoz said:
SvennoJ said:

The population of greater London (8.9 million) isn't that far off the entire population of Sweden. The population density of Greater London is 4,542 people per sq km, Greater Stockholm or Stockholm county (2.2 million) has a population density of 360 people per sq km.

Population density seems to be the biggest factor for community spread which makes sense. NYC (18.8 million) has a population density of over 10K per sq km. Melbourne (5.2 million), the most populated city in Australia, 453 per sq km. It makes more sense to compare Sweden to Australia than to the UK or USA.

For compar.

You are comparing apples to oranges within an apples to oranges comparison.

The area of Stockholm County (Stockholms län) is 4 times greater than Greater London (6500 sq km vs 1570 sq km). That should be an indication of the two not being comparable. There are huge swathes of forests, lakes and farmland that are a part of Stockholm County. Just throwing "Greater" infront of the city name doesn't have any standardized meaning in terms of city borders and where the cutoff is.

What you should be comparing it to is the Stockholm Urban Area, which has a population of 1.4 million (two thirds of the entire country) and an area of 381 sq km (about 6% of the entire county). Which gives a population density of 3600 per sq km, which, you know, actually makes sense because large urban areas don't have a population density of 360 people per sq km. I'd look into your Melbourne number because it triggers my bullshit alarm immediately as well, but I think this gets the message across.

Thanks, I was wondering why it came out so low, I couldn't find the Stockholm Urban Area I was looking for.

3600 per sq km makes more sense at 1.4 million people. Still you can't compare that to a city of 8.9 million at 4542 people per sq km. Most of those people commute to work plus a whole lot more coming in from outside London. Normally the tube is used by about 5 million people per day vs 1.2 million on the Stockholm metro.

Still proves my point, more people at higher density -> more daily movement/traffic -> much harder to stop the spread of a virus.
And if we're looking at the core of cities, Manhattan at 27K people per sq km is absolutely insane and no wonder NY got in such a mess.

Looking at population density is tricky, the amount of people that move around in and into the city on a daily basis are the ones spreading the virus around.


Back to, Sweden could have eliminated community spread by now if they wanted to. They could have prevented 3000 deaths already and time will tell whether that sacrifice was worth it.