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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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Somewhat related The Swedish govermnetal statistics bureau released new data on excess mortality in Europe

Turns out Sweden has had the lowest excess mortality in Europe during the pandemic. Previously there some of our neighbours had lower numbers but now that the data is in for the full 2020-2022 it turns out sweden is even below them and compared to Finland Sweden had half as high excess mortality.

This strikes me as a somewhat funny result because Sweden both didn't really lock down or use masks, but at the same time we were very good at vaccinating people, so it's not because "people aren't dying from the vaccines" either like some people like to imply. It seems to me that hysterical people and conspiracy theorists everywhere can go and pound sand.

Should be noted that for large stretches of the crisis, Finland actually had less stringent measures than Sweden.

The oxford stringency index is alright for large-scale studies where you use the entire dataset to mine for trends, but it falls short when making individual comparisons. The reason being the differential in enforcement and on-paper laws were quite varied from locale to locale, and this adds a tremendous amount of noise to the data. To make sure a comparison you would have actually had to be on the ground in both countries and carried out a detailed study taking those things into account. I don't want to give examples now because covid talk is tiring, but one simple example is Japan, they had no legal mask mandates, but did it feel like such on the ground, there definitely was a social one. Or in India there were on-paper mandates/restrictions for all kinds of things, but people stopped giving a shit altogether 2 weeks after they were put on paper.

How does Sweden compare to Denmark/Norway/Finland in vaccination percentage? I thought all Scandinavia/western Europe were good in that.

They are, and rates are broadly comparable. Sweden has marginally lower (like 1% lower than Finland) full vaccination rates but higher total doses administered.

One can generally say that the Nordics have been good at vaccination and that Swedens more open strategy seemingly didn't come with any cost at all could even have helped.

Sweden's state department of public health thinks that the lower excess mortality might have something to do with a comparatively more successful initial targeting of risk groups for vaccination, but I've not seen any data on that.

Well, hold on there. For the entire lockdown I had to listen to how the difference in excess mortality between Sweden and other Nordics proves "Sweden's irresponsible approach" was wrong, now it turns out their excess mortality was actually lower, and not only are we supposed to forget all about the lockdown argument, the same comparison is now used to argue for the vaccine, even though there are no significant differences in vaccination rates between the Nordics?

I'm not even entertaining that argument, until the pro-lockdowners are publicly made an example of.

Good point, Sweden is doing well despite giving the mRNA vaccines. I'm happy you found a single western country that used mRNA and is not experiencing a precipitous increase in death. And they have excellent foresight to avoid giving risky vaccines to children.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-recommending-covid-vaccines-kids-aged-5-12-2022-01-27/

I know Sweden acknowledges that the risks of the vaccines are only useful when comparing against the risks of the virus.

"Conspiracy theorists." Why are you drawing conclusion on a single countries demographics? This is not a good faith accusation to people who are worried the novel mRNA vaccine is causing unnecessary morbidity and mortality, even Sweden has decided to stop putting children at risk. Is this responsible for their better mortality statistics? Hard to tell but I know you need to update your priors here.

There is a radical difference in allowing 5 year olds, and 12 years olds, to receive nanolipid particle injections. And you failed to mention that.

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