[cas14655]

Sweden Age Adjusted Mortality 3rd January 2020 through 18th June 2021: -2.3%

Source: ONS

Not only did lockdowns fail, they were unnecessary and cruel and tyrannical. I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was.

[lesuorac]

> Not only did lockdowns fail

That's the exact opposite conclusion the article finds while taking into account more countries and just one.

If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking .... Like go to the store and buy identical pens but of 100 different colors. Now throw them down the stairs and record which goes the farthest. Now repeat it again. Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest. That pen isn't actually superior, you're just doing garbage analysis.

> I sincerely hope that the responsible people will face justice that is just as harsh as the lockdown enforcement was

I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.

[michael_j_ward]

Sweden was the well publicized "control group."

It was not selected post-hoc, it was selected in 2020.

The result was more death early and less death later, while suffering no learning loss or adverse effects on the children and little loss in quality of life.

Here's an article from 2020 disparaging the high costs [0].

If you find any major news giving an update now that Finland and Norway have caught up in excess death, please share.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/it-s-been-so-so-surr...

[pacerwpg]

Of note, the 'more death early and less death later' resulted in significantly more death overall. It wasn't a wash.

[michael_j_ward]

Yes- there is a life-year cost to bringing death forward.

But there has now been no excess mortality in Sweden compared to it's neighbors Finland and Norway (and all 3 blow the US and Europe out of the water.)

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...

[cas14655]

> If you have to search out a single country out of over a hundred to find supporting data you probably are just p-hacking

You are not considering how positivism works. If you say lockdowns work you have to prove that in all instances. I just need one (1) counter example to disprove your theory completely.

> Do this enough times and you'll find a pen with p<0.05 that goes the farthest.

Cherry-picking. Yeah, that's what focusing on Australia and NZ while ignoring Peru and Sweden is, exactly.

Finding two patients who got better after blood-letting is not enough to prove blood-letting works. Your theory has to fit all the available quality data (so no China or model "data" allowed).

> I'm sure they're be so upset to get free money per month while not having to work.

Yeah that was the extend of lockdowns. Go tell that to the people that where locked up without visitors in nursing homes for months on end.

[1MachineElf]

Don't ignore the conclusion bullet point and analysis towards the end of the article which stated in multiple ways that lockdowns fail the cost-benefit analysis.

[ZeroGravitas]

Similar to people exagerrating Australia/NZ as people being locked in their homes for two years, Sweden gets the opposite.

They had some constitutional limit on lockdowns, and a Health official who was a bit overenthusiastic about 'herd immunity' but they also had lots of recommendations and an expectation that people would actually obey them.

> As the outbreak reached Sweden, authorities responded with limited measures, in contrast with lockdowns and legal restrictions introduced in other countries. The Swedish public were expected to follow a series of non-voluntary recommendations[note 2] from the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten). These included working from home where possible, limiting travel within the country, social distancing, and for people above 70 and those with potential COVID-19 symptoms to self-isolate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden

"non-voluntary recommendations"? Note 2 is:

> A Swedish government agency is an independent body with delegated power to pass binding regulations as well as recommendations on how someone can or should act to meet a law or binding regulation within the agency's area of activity (in this case The Swedish Communicable Diseases Act). Although there is not a legal framework for a governmental agency to impose sanctions on someone for going against its recommendations, they are not optional as they work as guidelines on how to act to follow a law or regulation (in this case an obligation to help halting the spread of an infectious disease). The Swedish Constitution prohibits ministerial rule – politicians overruling the advice from its agencies is extremely unusual in Sweden – and mandates that the relevant government body, in this case an expert agency – the Public Health Agency – must initiate all actions to prevent the virus' spread in accordance with Swedish law, rendering state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a central figure in the crisis.

[fnordpiglet]

A respiratory disease requires collocation of people. How do people get infected in a lockdown? Over the internet?

[didericis]

In the stores they go to in order to feed themselves and run errands, or by people that drop off food.

It only takes one person in an apartment building to infect the whole building if the ventilation is poor.

[robertkoss]

Typical hindsight bias. At the time of the debate (April 2020) we DID NOT have the data to say that a lockdown was unnecessary.

[HideousKojima]

Nor did we have the data to say it WAS necessary, but we sure as hell could predict most of the negative social and economic side effects easily. Causing profound developmental delays in an entire generation of children and lowering lifetime educational attainment for almost every single teenager was worth it though, I guess.

[lesuorac]

We had data from December 2019 until April 2020 showing that it spread quickly and can kill you.

We also had data that strong action can stop an outbreak (i.e. Aviation flu, Swine Flu, Ebola, etc). Sure when we took those actions early enough to curtail the outbreak it leads to people thinking the actions were useless (see Y2K debate) but it doesn't actually mean the actions were useless. People only notice when the dam collapses, not when it doesn't.

[cas14655]

By March 2020 we had the Diamond Princess Data which established an upper bound of 1% case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID. We already knew then that it's definitely not the Spanish Flu (2.5 - 10% CFR), not Cholera (3%), not Smallpox (3%), not SARS (11%), not even Measles (1%-3%).

Not only did we never do anything like COVID measures for any of the diseases you mentioned but the WHO described the individual NPIs that would later make up the COVID "lockdowns" as "never recommended under any circumstances" in their 2019 flu pandemic recommendations.

What happened with COVID was an unprecedented overreaction by historical standards where we threw overboard everything we knew to try authoritarian gobbledygook on the back of the carefully cultivated FUD around COVID coming out of China.

[omginternets]

The principle of caution cuts both ways. During the pandemic, it seems to have only cut one way.

It is possible to support lockdowns while still recognizing this.

[OrvalWintermute]

Maybe lockdowns and protections where appropriate for the at risk populations?

The blanket lockdowns of individuals not at risk was the height of tyranny!

[robertkoss]

You said it yourself, we were lacking the data which in a fat tailed event like a pandemic means that you should be as careful as possible.

It boggles my mind that people don't understand how to act under uncertainty.

[HideousKojima]

The absolutely devastating economic and social effects were known, the possible effects of the disease both short and long-term were unknown. So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating? That makes zero sense. And there were alternatives proposed to lockdowns like the Great Barrington Declaration that were not simply not considered, but were actively suppressed and smeared by government officials and their media lackeys.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises, is it underway?”

-NIH director Francis Collins in an email to Anthony Fauci about the Great Barrington Declaration

[robertkoss]

Great Barrington -> 4th of October. Are you even reading my comments? I am referring to the first lockdowns which took place in April 2020.

"So we decided to go for the known devastating effects in case the disease was also devastating?" Of course we do in case of a pandemic, since we are dealing with a completely different underlying distribution of effects.

[HideousKojima]

Fine, from the WHO in 2019 (and before Wuhan) about what the response to future pandemics ought to be:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...

Contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening and border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances."

[cas14655]

In itself your statement is accurate: we did not have data that is impossible to have.

In broader context the implication is not correct. We had experts consider long and hard what to do in the case of an influenza pandemic and the consensus for decades had been to disrupt society as little as possible.

This is the WHOs evaluation of NPIs in 2019 (PDF Warning): https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789...

It says Contact tracing, Quarantine of exposed individuals, Entry and exit screening and Border closures are "Not recommended in any circumstances".

The experts thought about and decided it was not worth it.

[robertkoss]

You don't want to generalise (COVID similar to influenza huh?) if you don't know anything about the virus.

I repeat myself, at that point We didn't know much about SARS2.

[cas14655]

Well, you are right in a way. Contact tracing, masks and social distancing make even less sense for corona viruses which we full well knew in 2020.

[shrubble]

So they were just accidentally correct?

[cloutchaser]

Going by this argument we should lock down for every possible adverse future event where it might help.

Thinking about it lockdowns could definitely help with climate change, should we just lock down for the next 20 years?

[robertkoss]

What a nice strawman you constructed there.

[cas14655]

Please describe the strawman.

[hnuser847]

Please don't give them any ideas.

[eldaisfish]

you are making the classic mistake of judging past actions with future knowledge.

Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time. They are also good at reducing social contacts for transmissible disease and the best evidence of this was the almost total lack of a flu season in the northern hemisphere.

While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.

[HideousKojima]

>Lockdowns work and they worked well given what what was known at the time.

Objection, arguing facts not in evidence.

Edit: in response to the part you added after your original post:

>While the social and economic cost is now known to be immense, public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.

The social and economic costs were mostly predictable back before the lockdowns ever happened. People opposed to the lockdowns were practically screaming what the consequences would be. They were ignored with calls of "If it saves one life!" and "You're killing grandma!"

Meanwhile it's come out that several (if not all) countries that imposed lockdowns didn't even attempt to do a rudimentary cost-benefit analysis prior to locking everything down.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lockdown-files-rishi...

[eldaisfish]

how do you square this with the fact that more and more people are calling in sick and many are continuing to die now that much of the western world has given up on pandemic restrictions?

[pacerwpg]

We cannot continue to live under the tyranny of sometimes wearing a mask.

[HideousKojima]

Of wearing a mask in any and all public places, you mean? Because that's what was done, and the linguistic development of millions of children has been damaged as a result: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/masks-can-be-detr...

[pacerwpg]

Would you mind providing a link that supports your conclusion.

[pacerwpg]

Interestingly the economies of the world seem to be fairing worse now that lockdowns have lifted and there are labor shortages in every area.

The effects of people dying and the unchecked spread of illness were ignored with calls of "you're killing the economy!".

[HideousKojima]

Only if your premise that the labor shortages (and other economic issues) are caused by pandemic deaths is correct, mind you. The overwhelming majority of deaths (around 80%) from the pandemic in all countries was amongst retirement age individuals, most of whom are out of the workforce.

[pacerwpg]

200,000 working age people in the US dying isn't nothing. It could also be explained by disabilities as a result of COVID and people unable to work as a result of that.

[OrvalWintermute]

it could also be explained by All Cause Mortality being higher in vaccinated populations than unvaccinated (which, by the way, is the proper use of ACM when you compare two populations with a control).

[peteradio]

> public health officials have a duty of care to the most vulnerable in society.

This seems to imply they only need to protect the most vulnerable. You wouldn't sacrifice strong for weak, that is not duty of care.

[thisisauserid]

In the absence of data do something drastic. Got it.