CPH-Flyer

There are indications that the infection levels in Stockholm are on a sharp rise again.

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a...ar-i-stockholm

fransknorge

No, no, the epidemic is over in Sweden. It can not be.

GUWonder

The talk about the pandemic being over in Sweden is worth less than the fecal matter in the Stockholm sewage system that tells us that the pandemic is far from over.

Even the Swedish health authorities are talking about current coronavirus response measures remaining for next year too. They obviously don't seem to be of the opinion that the pandemic is over in Sweden, even as they still seem inclined to pursue the "herd immunity" experiment.

RedChili

Let's get some perspective on this question and compare it with the most famous pandemic of history: the Spanish flu. It's estimated that 500 million people, or about 33% of the world's population, were infected with the Spanish flu. At that time, there were no PCR tests, so "infected" meant that you were visibly ill.

During week 39 (the last week which is included in the newest weekly report from Folkhalsomyndigheten), there were 2.4% positive tests. The official testing is semi-targeted, which means that the number of positive tests in the general population is much lower. How much lower? The only large-scale random testing that has taken place recently was in Umea University, where 0.06% were positive. During the same week as the Umea testing took place, the semi-targeted testing was 1.2% positive. We can therefore calculate that the actual positive cases in the general population of Sweden was somewhere around 0.12% in week 39.

While the numbers for week 40 aren't official yet, let's for argument's sake assume that we've seen a new doubling, to 0.24% of the population. Remember that many of these are asymptomatic or have only mild symptoms. Only 24 people, or 0.0002% of the population, are in intensive care.

If we had a time machine and we could travel back to the time of the Spanish flu, and if we would have spoken to doctors that were in the middle of that pandemic, and we would have told them, "In 2020, there will be a pandemic where 0.24% of the population will be infected, many of them asymptomatic, and 0.0002% will be in intensive care," they would have looked at us and thought ... well, you take a guess what they would have thought.

fransknorge

Your entire post is assuming the pandemic is finished and in the past. It is not.

RedChili

I'm not assuming anything about the future. I'm talking about the reality that exists today.

According to what we have seen so far, this is what I would like to call a "hi-tech pandemic," in two senses:

1) For many "patients," the reason why we know about them is that we have hi-tech instruments that allow us to discover that apparently healthy people have been infected. Historically, this was not so. Patients were only considered infected when they were visibly sick.

2) Mass media and digital social media allow us the "benefit" of instant knowledge about what's happening all around the world. Historically, people only knew about what they could see all around them.

Now, let's do an experiment and say that we remove the hi-tech testing, and we remove the mass media reporting and digital social media debate, and we only know what we can see with our own eyes and the knowledge that comes from our friends and family: I, personally, know hundreds of people here in Sweden -- the true number is probably close to one thousand. And as far as I can tell, only one of those was seriously sick in covid-19. Then, I also know a handful of people (including myself) that had flu style symptoms. If I hadn't read or watched mass media or digital social media, I would never have known anything about this pandemic. And that's not what pandemics used to be like. And that's why people that went through the great historic pandemics, would have laughed at us if they had seen our hysteric reaction to a "pandemic" where 0.0002% of the population is in intensive care.

fransknorge

So you mean society, science and technology progress ? And what is serious today was not 100 years ago ? I mean if you had told people in the 1800's that in 2020 we would have a strong reaction to racism they would have laughed at us.
In other breaking news, the sun will set in the west this evening.

RedChili

Here's a couple of updated graphs to illustrate what I'm talking about. The first is the total mortality in Sweden per day per million during the first 38 weeks of the year (I've got some bug that doesn't allow me to change the headline of the graph from 37 to 38). As we can see, the mortality has been slightly higher than 2016-2019, but lower than 2015.


The second graph is mortality per month per million for the years 2015-2020. Once more, we can see that the excess mortality that existed in April-May 2020 have been compensated by a mortality deficit in January-February (probably because of the unusual warm winter), and a mortality deficit in July-August. So far, we can summarize this year by saying that some people that "should" have died in January-February were allowed to live a couple of months extra due to the warm winter, and some people that "should" have died in July-August had their lives shortened by a couple of months due to the virus.



Once more, without doomsday prophets like Tegnell, Carlsson, Lofven, and myriads of others appearing on TV every day reminind us that there's a pandemic going on, we wouldn't have known of it at all. This is the first "pandemic" in history that we know of because we have experts telling us that it's going on and not because we can see it around us.

RedChili

What is considered a serious pandemic today would not have been considered serious five years ago. Sweden had higher mortality five years ago than we have today.

As to comparing it to racism: Apples and oranges. Racism has to do with philosophy, not with science. Philosophically, the Western world was probably better off 200 years ago than 80 years ago.

RedChili

According to WHO, 760 million people may have been affected by the virus. That's really interesting because with a little over one million deaths so far, we get a mortality rate of 0.14% of the infected. Which basically means that covid-19 is about as deadly as the regular flu. Professor Ioannides wasn't far off the mark when he calculated a mortality rate of 0.175% percent in March. All the "experts" that predicted Armageddon, such as the Swedish "experts" that predicted 96,000 deaths in Sweden, should have worked as movie directors in Hollywood instead of in universities.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/c...ation-n1242118

fransknorge

This is very poor journalism. The 760 million people are an extrema of an error bar while the other extrema is 100 millions, assuming 1 millions dead (which is a low estimation) and an IFR range of 0.125-1%, with the most likely being 200 million people infected.
As for the flu ........, here is some data:


Interestingly I did a search and you are copy/pasting a talking point from the far-right that they repeat since the WHO miscommunication.

CPH-Flyer

You'd probably also find that multiplying the confirmed infection number by roughly 20 to get a worst case scenario would probably also get a different worst case scenario for number of fatalities. While a lot of these would be cases were people would not have noticed they were sick, a lot of them would also occur in places in the world where there are no means of knowing, or capacity to test why they are sick. Dividing the confirmed number of fatalities with the worst case scenario infection number to conclude the rate of case fatalities is highly misleading. But admittedly the article does not have an estimate of what this means for the number of fatalities.

GUWonder

The Swedish authorities decided to maintain the 50 person limit for event attendance. Apparently, they still think it’s too risky in Sweden to raise the event size limits. In other words, yet another sign that they don’t find the pandemic over in Sweden.

RedChili

I haven't copied and pasted anything other than the link to the article. If others happen to be of the same opinion as me, and are making the same argument, I'm fine with that no matter if they're far right or far left or far anything.

Pandemic or not, I really cannot fathom how they can have a hard rule of 50 people. It's quite obvious that the infection risk is much higher in a small bingo club room than in a large outdoor sports stadium. In my opinion, the limit should be based on the size of the venue, not a hard number of people.

GUWonder

The larger an event -- regardless of density during the portion of time seated at the event -- the more likely that it increases the population of people encountering each other at the various bottlenecks that are applicable to going to and attending an event and are relevant to event hosts, service providers and guests. Even events outdoor have this problem -- as has become increasingly clear with an event at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW in Washington, DC, that became a super-spreader event. The larger an event, the larger the population of people it attracts and the more likely they end up in-taking the virus spread by other individuals affiliated with an event.

By the way, even well more than a century ago, people knew that someone could be infected with a communicable disease even if not showing symptoms of the communicable disease of concern. This is why the history of ostracizing household members of those exhibiting a communicable disease has a long history that goes back centuries, even long before microscope sales became an international business.

And about news of communicable disease, such news in one part of the world becoming news in other parts of the world also goes back more than century too.