In the Coronavirus Fight in Scandinavia, Sweden Stands Apart

jem said:
I am correct the record because some losers from Canada a claiming victory after I ceased posting anywhere on this site. I was on vacation at a beach house... twice. But... I will set the final record here.

1. Sweden was the model...
Look a the graphs below...after a tough first round... like many of the major countries and states which did not protect and isolate the high risk...
Sweden was the model... their results without a lockdown are very similar to many countries with multiple lockdowns

Here is the proof... using the fear mongers preferred data.

See those graphs... Sweden was the model.



https://ourworldindata.org/explorer...L~CAN~FRA~GRC~GBR~USA&Metric=Confirmed+deaths

anticipated counter argument...

yes.. their neighbors... only shutdown for a few weeks... and they locked the borders...
They may have had the best model... locking the borders was important as I said many times. Countries were also fortunate who were not hit hard at first... like Sweden and Spain and Belgium and Italy and CA and NY and much of the North East.
The real analysis of the best models begins after that first wave.




b. herd immunity is real. we have see examples of that in many areas which did not lock have to lock down a second or third wave. it does seem the variants do require some to get immunity again.. . you have antibody immunity and t cell immunity and some may not even register and infection ever.

c. there is T cell immunity for the morons that keep denying it for a year. That is in part how the mRNA vaccines work you morons... I have posted multiple studies addressing that fact.

d. as of now there is still zero outdoor spread from a statistical standpoint. Morons blaming crowds were just that. We told you that a year before fauci pretty much admitted it. As I said it would make more sense to wear helmets against satellites falling out of the sky. (because that is real.)

e. A recent NIH study admitted that for every one person who test positive there were 4 to 5 others who had antibodies in their study of the spring of 2020. You dumb fearful fuckers were always using the wrong ratios to make arguments. Now imagine all the people who did not even test positive for antibodies but had immunity.... Could be many hundreds of times higher... we will not know.

g. so far it looks like those who test positive are less likely to get re-infected than those who got the vaccine. Per multiple studies including the Cleveland clinic study. The CDC also found something similar in Feb.

h. non vaccinated uninfected may be variants factories but there may be very few of us... and our variants may be less deadly in the long run.
(We will never know who many of us actually had Covid and may not be variant factories for now.)

But.. .the dangerous variants may arrise out of those vaccinated but who still get infected.

you fools need to stay home... and not get infected to this is over...
And wear your useless loose fitting masks too.
(just kidding sort of)

g.
so in short we the non fearful... who have critical thinking skills were correct on just about everything except that Sweden did suffer a second wave... (probably due to the variants.)

you fearful losers followed fauci's lies...as if he were truthful (his emails showed he knew he was misrepresent many things... yet if you were healthy you lost a year of your life to fear. ..


Summary...
I hope you follow the real data .. and have learned to not trust govt officials who lie and lie and lie.


We should have isolated the high risk...
a. for their own good and ,
b. because they were most of the super spreaders....

We should have allowed the healthy to live... as they would hot have challenged the hospitals too seriously7...

I am done posting here... as jem. Maybe I will be back... have a good summer.



P.S. If you have your shots and are really concerned about dangerous variants and being a variant factory... stay at home. Let the healthy live and get natural herd immunity.
More...
TREMENDOUSLY ACCURATE POSTING!
 
jem never left.

The question is now...what user name did he create while he pretended to be in exile from the forum ???

To be fair, Here4money is now known as Cuddles although he really doesn't care that others know that. The good thing...he didn't create a new user name...he had Baron "change" his user name. :D

jem-returned-from-exile.png


In the mean time...Sweden vaccinations and strict restrictions has worked. They're doing much better now, they have removed (lifted) the strict restrictions and they're being more realistic in getting more of their citizens vaccinated especially the vulnerable population (e.g. migrant workers, ethnic communities, elderly and healthy people that do not know they have an underlying medical condition)...

Probably because they're spooked like the rest of the world by the Covid Delta Variant.

In addition, the Health Public Agency of Sweden has publicly acknowledge that the vaccinations and strict restrictions has worked. :D

wrbtrader
 
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gwb-trading said:
'Lockdown' states like California did better economically than 'looser' states like Florida, new COVID data shows
https://www.aol.com/news/lockdown-states-california-did-better-153025114.html

Like seemingly everything else in America, the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked its fair share of bitter, polarizing debates: over masks, over distancing, over vaccines.

Lockdowns are no exception. One assumption many Americans seem to make is that the more a government limits gatherings, mandates masks, restricts business activity and advises residents to stay at home, the more economic damage it will do.

Among the loudest of these voices is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who raised his national profile by allowing bars and restaurants to operate at full indoor capacity during America’s horrific holiday surge, then effectively banned mask mandates once Florida started to recover — all in the name of supporting business.

“She’s a lockdown lobbyist,” DeSantis recently said in reference to Democrat Nikki Fried, one of his 2022 gubernatorial opponents. Speaking at a New Smyrna Beach restaurant, DeSantis said Fried “would have had this business shuttered for the whole year. They would be out of business if Fried were governor.”

Yet for much of the past year, some experts have quietly advanced a counterargument: that economic activity is mainly affected by the rising and falling severity of the pandemic itself — not the relative strictness of the measures implemented to mitigate it. In fact, these experts argued, nonpharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs — a set of 20 government responses such as business closures, mask mandates and stay-at-home advisories that Oxford University rates according to stringency — can have an economic upside. The more the virus seems to be under control, the more eager people will be to participate in the economy.

Last week, this argument got a boost with the publication of a new report by economists at the University of California, Los Angeles. According to the latest quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast, not only did big states with more stringent COVID measures end 2020 with fewer infections per capita, they also tended to post better economic growth numbers last year than states with fewer restrictions.

In other words, California’s economy actually fared better than Florida’s.

Yahoo News: Is it now fair to say that so-called lockdown states performed better economically than so-called looser states during the 2020 pandemic?

Jerry Nickelsburg: That is correct. We generally view economic performance through the lens of gross domestic product. On average, GDP declined in 2020, and it declined everywhere. But those declines were smaller in states with more stringent nonpharmaceutical interventions than states with less stringent NPIs.

That’s the opposite of the conventional wisdom. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is telling voters, in effect, “I saved the economy by opening bars and banning masks.” What made you suspect that the prevailing narrative — this idea that there’s a trade-off between public health and the health of the economy — might be wrong?

It was something that we started to see in Scandinavia. It's something we saw in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic as well. It seemed to be more than just a fluke.

When you say “something,” what do you mean?

The evidence suggested that policies that are good for people’s health during a pandemic — like NPIs — are not necessarily bad for the economy. There might even be a positive correlation. But early on, we did not have any 2020 pandemic data to answer that question. So it was open for debate.

But now we have that data.

Now we do.

Yahoo News spoke with economist Jerry Nickelsburg, the director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, to find out more.

Walk us through what it says.

The states that were considered for this analysis are basically the states that produce most of the U.S. GDP — states with a population of 5 million or greater. We found two things. First, California had more stringent interventions and a lower infection rate than either Texas or Florida, two states to which it’s often compared. Yet California also performed better with respect to GDP than either Texas or Florida. Second, the same pattern showed up across all big states: On average, the ones with more stringent interventions had both better health outcomes and better economic outcomes.

How do we know this has anything to do with COVID restrictions? Couldn’t it just be a coincidence — that some state economies were better suited to weather this particular storm, regardless of how stringent their interventions were?

To be sure, states have different economic compositions. But that’s one reason we didn’t include small states like North Dakota. Even though it had very poor health outcomes, North Dakota can do very well in terms of GDP when oil prices go up, because of the dominance of petroleum production in the value of goods and services produced there.

In contrast, large states typically have more diverse economies. And when you line them up according to their interventionist policies, you find that states that intervened more heavily tended to have fewer COVID cases per capita and smaller declines in GDP.

There were two outliers: New York and Michigan. Both had stringent NPIs but lost a lot of ground in terms of GDP. Why?

Michigan was all about supply chain interruption in the automobile industry. This had nothing to do with interventions. Factories were forced to close for part of the year.

What about New York? In the report you write, “Perhaps the economic performance [there] has more to do with remote work than the pandemic per se.”

We don’t know the answer. It may be that because of “work from home,” many New York employees were working from New Jersey or Connecticut or even Florida, and spending their money there.

Someone like Gov. DeSantis would disagree with your conclusions, and one argument he would make is that if restrictions are so great, then why is California’s unemployment rate 8.3 percent while Florida’s is 4.3 percent? Is that a fair comparison?

It’s true that if unemployment is your metric, California has a very high rate relative to Florida. But people who dropped out of the labor force because of COVID — either because they contracted it or because of concern for themselves or their families — are not counted in the unemployment rate. Likewise, there’s evidence that states that opened up earlier may have reduced their employees’ hours because fewer people were coming through the doors; the reduction in hours per employee was 4.2 percent in Texas versus 1.1 percent in California. So unemployment is actually quite complicated, and you can’t really rely on it.

[The UCLA report also suggests that “the answer lies in the structure of the California economy.” In California, “sectors with a high degree of human contact” — that is, “leisure and hospitality, education, retail trade, and health care and social services” — contributed only “0.3 percentage points to annual GDP growth over the decade preceding the pandemic.” But last year, “they accounted for 75 percent of the state’s job losses.”

Meanwhile, the sectors driving growth in California — “information, professional and business services, manufacturing and financial services” — weren’t hit nearly as hard. That helps to explain the discrepancy between the state’s unemployment rate and its overall economic performance. UCLA expects “many of those lost jobs to return.”]

What about 2021? California has kept many of its restrictions in place for the first half of the year. Florida has not. Yet due to vaccination, cases have been going down in both states for months now. Does that change anything?

The data we have for 2020 is pretty conclusive. The data for the 1918-19 pandemic is pretty conclusive. The data for Scandinavia is pretty conclusive. So far, the data says that with NPIs, there's no trade-off between better health outcomes and better economic outcomes. I don’t expect that to change.
More...

Why did tougher COVID restrictions help state economies?
https://californianewstimes.com/why...lp-state-economies-san-bernardino-sun/435825/

In April 2020, as the pandemic went into full swing, economists announced: “Tough calculations: COVID-19 presents a tough choice between life, death and the economy.” Immediately Americans condemned the blockade of the recession, in the words of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The destruction of millions of lives across the United States … There is no benefit to correspond to the COVID mortality rate. ” By the end of the year, some states, especially Texas, had finished COVID restrictions to improve economic activity.

2020 has been merciful in the past, but there is data (from the Bureau of Economic Analysis) to assess the “calculus” of each state. And looking at that data, the results may be surprising, especially in large states with more diversified economies. It is difficult to find the actual trade-off between the blockade of COVID and the decline in economic activity.

If anything, we find the opposite.

First, let’s take a step back and look at the larger state data. Washington, which has above-average COVID restrictions, ranked first among the states that performed better economically than the United States in 2020. This was followed by three less COVID states (Arizona, Colorado and Georgia), followed by three more severe states (North Carolina, Maryland and Georgia).

Next was California, one of the toughest states, in eighth place. Following California, only the other three states economically outperformed the country. In Texas, Indiana and Florida, everything wasn’t that strict. Trade-offs are difficult to find across these 11 states. States with high COVID restrictions worked well economically, and states with low COVID restrictions also worked.

And if you look at all the states beyond these 11 states, you’ll find impressive patterns. States with stricter interventions have, on average, produced better economic and healthier outcomes.

Is this just a statistical anomaly? The answer seems to be no. One of the reasons I am confident in the results is to look at other countries. For example, consider Sweden, which is famous for having few strict COVID measures. In 2020, Sweden was in poorer health than similar Scandinavian countries in Denmark, Norway and Finland. At the same time, its economic consequences during the pandemic were no better than any of its healthier neighbors.

This discovery is in line with history. A 1918 flu epidemic survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis took influenza more seriously, and later released St. Louis had better economic and healthier results than the earlier released city of Philadelphia. I found out that.

Similarly, a 2020 survey of the 1918 pandemic found that cities with more stringent interventions had better employment and improved health.

What explains this seemingly strange but lasting result? The power of government signals.

The state sends a message to its citizens when it shows through policies and declarations that the pandemic takes it seriously enough to curb the spread of the disease and impose measures (sometimes extreme) to protect public health. am sending. Part of that message is about business. The state says that protocols are in place to make open businesses as secure as possible, and if that is not possible, the business will be closed.

But, as Sweden did, it sends a different signal when it indicates that the state should make choices about what to do during a pandemic through policy, and the government does not make choices for them. “Citizens, choose yourself wisely,” he says. Therefore, open business will be busier than closed business, but open business can be better in places with more stringent restrictions.

Does this show up in the data? Yes, in some respects. Using OpenTable data on pandemics, California restaurants and bars saw a more dramatic reduction in the number of diners than Texas. However, when these individual businesses were open, employee working hours were down 8.9% in Texas, compared to only 1.5% in California. But this is just choosing two states. The decline in food numbers in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Ohio was close to California due to Florida, Georgia, and Missouri restrictions, and the latter was comparable, despite being close to the Swedish approach.

Retail sector data depicts a similar situation. In the same large states mentioned above, there is no significant correlation between changes in retail sales and the severity of COVID interventions. A similar analysis of retail purchases by store type shows no correlation between intervention and volume. And the same result applies to the minimum of 10 states. People went to online platforms to buy goods at about the same rate, regardless of the severity of the intervention.

The bottom line is that people react to the information they have and the signals they receive from the government. Obviously, business closures will increase unemployment in the affected sectors. However, there is no evidence to suggest that closures or other public health interventions have led to worse economic consequences. Therefore, such trade-offs must be between sectors directly affected by the intervention, and in states and countries with less intervention, the overall infection rate is higher, resulting in a voluntary decline in demand and an increase in absenteeism. Can be seen.
Even knowing all this, you may believe that freedom of choice is well worth the social and health costs of that freedom. But empirically, it is not a trade-off between health and financial outcomes. This is a trade-off between freedom of choice and public health.
 
Wednesday: Covid-19 vaccine booking to open to ALL adults in Sweden
From July 14th, it will be possible for all over-18s to book their Covid-19 vaccination in every Swedish region
https://www.thelocal.com/20210713/covid-vaccine-booking-open-to-all-adults-in-sweden/

Uppsala announced on Tuesday that its vaccine booking system would open to over-18s on Wednesday, after opening to over-21s on Tuesday. That means all of Sweden’s 21 regions now offer the vaccine to all adults. You have to have turned 18 to be able to book.

In Uppsala, booking is possible through 1177.se or by calling 018-617 35 00 in case you are not able to log in with a BankID app or similar. This is also the number you should call if you don’t have a Swedish identification number (personnummer). The vaccine is free and available to everyone who lives in Sweden. This article by The Local explains how to book the vaccine where you live in Sweden.

Across the whole country, 5,523,876 people have received at least the first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to the most recent update from the Public Health Agency on Friday. That’s equivalent to just over two thirds (67.4 percent) of the adult population, while 3,562,731 have received two doses.

Currently the vaccines being used in Sweden require two doses and are only being given to over-18s, but the country plans to roll out the vaccine to over-16s as well as over-12s who belong to a Covid-19 risk group once all adults have been offered the jab.

Meanwhile, adults in a Covid-19 risk group may be offered a third dose as early as the autumn, according to comments from state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.
 
gwb-trading said:
...Meanwhile, adults in a Covid-19 risk group may be offered a third dose as early as the autumn, according to comments from state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.
More...

The Public Health Agency of Sweden and Anders Tegnell...both talking about vaccination...

I love it. :D

wrbtrader
 
Swedish researchers are paying unvaccinated people $23 to have their Covid shot
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/26/swe...aying-people-23-to-have-their-covid-shot.html
  • Swedish scientists are attempting to find out if financial incentives could encourage people to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
  • Handing out $23 gift cards is one of four techniques being tested to determine how the public could be motivated to accept the vaccine.
  • Many regions in Sweden are now offering Covid-19 vaccines to all adults over the age of 18.
(More at above url)
 
Myth debunked: Sweden did a good job handling the COVID-19 pandemic
https://timesofmalta.com/articles/v...ood-job-handling-the-covid-19-pandemic.889000

Wrong! Many have touted Sweden for not imposing a strict lockdown at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. But this led to a higher death rate compared to other Nordic countries, and little economic benefits.

The Financial Times wrote back in 2020 that economics had predicted that Sweden would have a similar contraction rate to its GDP as the rest. The Swedish central bank predicted that GDP would contract by 7 to 10 per cent and unemployment would increase to 9 to 10.4 per cent. Data from Eurostat (accessed in 2021), shows that Sweden contracted at a much more modest real GDP growth rate of -2.8%. By comparison, Malta suffered a much worse -7.8% contraction due to our dependency on tourism, but similar countries either did just as badly, like Finland (-2.9%), or better, like Norway (-0.8%).

Norway had a much stricter lockdown and suffered just 799 deaths, compared to Sweden’s 14,615 deaths. Norway has half the population of Sweden but nearly 20 times fewer deaths. The two countries have similar cultures, ways of living, socialising, health systems, and so on.

Sweden took a chance with attempts at herd immunity, trusting its population to maintain safe distancing without needing stiff lockdowns and other measures. Sadly, they didn’t work. Sweden is not a role model of how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
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