Mega-Thread: Coronavirus Pandemic

[Tuor]

You are talking about Belarus, and looking at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (assuming that the statistics is accurate) the following large developed countries have done less tests per capita than Belarus: Japan, Greece, S. Korea, Sweden, France, Hong Kong, Finland, Czechia, Canada, US, Norway, Switzerland.

Whereas UK, Australia, Germany, and Russia have tested more per capita.

... And Portugal.

There is no obvious pattern in that, meaning that tests per capita is in itself not a meaningful measure - if you can contact trace and contain the early cases, you avoid it spreading through the entire country and then you don't need massive testing.

people just don't understand how tests work. Each supected person requires 2 initial tests, a test and a counter-test (because PCR tests aren't 100% accurate), and then, normally the tests done to declare recoveries are normally counted aswell.

As you might have already realised, not all of those tests are meant to detect new cases.

[Granyala]

As you might have already realised, not all of those tests are meant to detect new cases.

Since the testing limits apply to all countries and since you do not need to test millions of people, to get a statistically representative result, I choose to disregard the differences when calculating rough estimates.

I'm not using them for decision making anyway, I know they aren't accurate enough for that. I merely use them to get some perspective.
That perspective told me today, what others said earlier: Sweden's approach is neither beneficial nor scientifically viable.

[Coolthulhu]

You do realize the difference between the word "ALL" and "SOME". Right?
Good. Moving on.

You'd love that, wouldn't you? Yes, makes sense you would, after failing to address the fact that you put words in my mouth and came up with an outlandishly dishonest reply, beaten only by this one ("there's a difference between all [a word you put in my mouth] and some", really? That the best you could came up with?).

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The nurse and her husband was tested.
We all got symptoms that we all shook off...easy assumption.
But embrace that amusement.
Because I've always found amusement that anyone pretending to care about any stranger's death is truly lying to themselves. Because you really don't. There's no emotional bond, nothing invested. And nothing to care about

Oh, so now they were tested. Are you implying/admitting that you werent? I thought you originally said that you had tested positive in January, which would've meant doing a viral test (and you claimed you did an antibody test later, when confronted with the fact that unless you were on of those 7, there's no way you could've "tested positive in January").
So on top of being a liar, you are also plagued by an utter lack of civic sense and a callous disregard for the safety of others. Nice.

If that's what you want to call it.
But as I've put it earlier, if there's no personal involvement why would you care?

Didn't take long to confirm my thesis either. Utter and complete lack of civic sense.

[Skulltaker]

Yeah.."if"
One of these days..but never from your ilk.

It's cute to see a pathological liar call others 'ilk'.

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If that's what you want to call it.
But as I've put it earlier, if there's no personal involvement why would you care?

I dare you to spend 10 hours with a dying person and say that again. Because if that's how you truly feel, you're a sociopath. Don't worry, though, we all know you're nothing but hot air, I won't expect you to actually do that.

[Tuor]

... and since you do not need to test millions of people, to get a statistically representative result...

Tests are not about statistics, they about detecting real cases so we can isolate them and prevent them from spreading the disaese even more. How more tests we do, better, more real cases we will detect, sadly, the testing capabilities are extremly limited for everyone, its nearly impossible to detect assymptomatic cases, as they won't search for medical care.

The testing capability needs to be boosted worldwide.

Sweden's approach is neither beneficial nor scientifically viable.

The pandemic is still long, long aways from ending, time will say if you correct or not, but for the time being, i tend to agree with you.

[Shadowferal]

I dare you to spend 10 hours with a dying person

Wjy would I do that?
Hmm sounds like you're not familiar with my personal history. Hint; I'm not bothered being called sociopath.
*shrugs*
If your thing is shedding tears over strangers' deaths you must spend an enormous time in your little corner over the millions that die every year...or are you selective and reserve your time for just this virus' deaths?

It's interesting that whenever some good news gets posted others insist on ignoring it and burying it with negativity and venom. Leads me to believe that many here are going to be sunk into a depression when a cure does come about.

[Skulltaker]

Wjy would I do that?
Hmm sounds like you're not familiar with my personal history. Hint; I'm not bothered being called sociopath.
*shrugs*
If your thing is shedding tears over strangers' deaths you must spend an enormous time in your little corner over the millions that die every year...or are you selective and reserve your time for just this virus' deaths?

It's interesting that whenever some good news gets posted others insist on ignoring it and burying it with negativity and venom. Leads me to believe that many here are going to be sunk into a depression when a cure does come about.

Yeah, no-one cares about your tragic made-up backstory. And a very nice attempt to lead the argument ad absurdum, but I'm not buying into your forcefully edgy narrative. You're full of it, and you know it. On top of being a liar, that is.

[Shadowferal]

Yeah, no-one cares about your tragic made-up backstory. And a very nice attempt to lead the argument ad absurdum, but I'm not buying into your forcefully edgy narrative. You're full of it, and you know it. On top of being a liar, that is.

Quite alright kid.
Your personal opinion about me isn't relevant.
Now retreat to your little corner. More deaths for you to cry over.

Hmf...India's death toll is going to be exacerbated by the starvation deaths. But that has ever been the case even without the current virus.

[Skulltaker]

Quite alright kid.
Your personal opinion about me isn't relevant.
Now retreat to your little corner. More deaths for you to cry over.

Always cute when people try to go on the offensive when they realize they have maneuvered themselves into a corner. More trying, less lying, please.

[Cynep]

Whats your point?

My point is, is there a ballpark number for too much or too little testing at country / region level, at this specific point in time? Obviously such number would grow as time goes on. Will we see countries approaching / exceeding 100% testing rate before this ends? So many interesting questions about the testing statistic.

I mean, compare Belgium and Netherlands, similar neighbouring countries. Belgium has almost 4x tests per capita. I'm sure both countries have their reasons for their testing strategies? And for a country where Covid measures amount to saying "there's an infection, so be careful", Belarus is testing quite a lot. Which means if Belarus can afford it despite not caring much, test kits are not really a limiting factor. What is, then?

In USA, testing is concentrated around NYC area while majority of US states have lower testing than Belarus. Do they believe it's not useful to mass test? Why does Belarus test so much then, they aren't that rich to just waste resources?

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You are talking about Belarus, and looking at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ (assuming that the statistics is accurate) the following large developed countries have done less tests per capita than Belarus: Japan, Greece, S. Korea, Sweden, France, Hong Kong, Finland, Czechia, Canada, US, Norway, Switzerland.

Whereas UK, Australia, Germany, and Russia have tested more per capita.

There is no obvious pattern in that, meaning that tests per capita is in itself not a meaningful measure - if you can contact trace and contain the early cases, you avoid it spreading through the entire country and then you don't need massive testing.

Good post. There's no easy correlation, that's why I asked. I don't believe differences in testing numbers between countries are entirely random.

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Congratz Sweden for the world record on % died. ''An example to follow''. If Spain, France and Italy did follow this ''example'' deaths would be milions

i wonder where @stevenho is to comment on this development?

Since stevenho is not answering, I'll address this as the next in line of Sweden apologists :|



You must be talking about this, because Sweden was never close to the top in any other comparison. So yes, after all European countries already peaked, Sweden very slightly overtook UK for 6 days in a row, before losing "top spot" to UK again.

But no, world record in absolute numbers belongs to USA by far, and in per capita deaths to Belgium. In fact, #2 spot goes to Isle of Man, #3 to Spain, then Jersey, Ireland, UK, Italy, France. Sweden is in 9th place when it comes to records, 7th if we stretch and ignore tiny islands.

That said, their strategy indeed didn't work well short term, because it was aimed at reaching endgame, and this pandemic turned out to be less dangerous than it looked in late March when their plan was set in motion. And they screwed up with nursing homes. Still, it's too early for conclusions, let's see if the second wave comes to other countries, and what will be better - two waves or a single super long one.

[Secret Arcade]

But the point was that you cannot use the same factor in both Germany and Sweden, because they have different testing criteria.

If Germany has 6-8 times number of confirmed cases (as estimated by RKI) it would currently be 1.2%-1.7% instead of 2%.
Based on the anti-body tests it seems realistic that Sweden have had at least 3%-4% infected.

And we don't know what will happen next - as the German restrictions are easing.

Based on the anti-body tests in Stockholm County, they have a factor of about 15 between confirmed and unknown cases.
Using the same factor for my county (third in population, second in population density), we'd have about 1.5% with antibodies compared to the 7.3% for Stockholm. For us to be equal to Stockholm we'd need a factor over 70.

With today's number of confirmed cases, applying Stockholm's factor of 15 on the entire country would put us at 4.76%.

[Granyala]

Tests are not about statistics, they about detecting real cases so we can isolate them and prevent them from spreading the disaese even more. How more tests we do, better, more real cases we will detect, sadly, the testing capabilities are extremly limited for everyone, its nearly impossible to detect assymptomatic cases, as they won't search for medical care.

Not the point.
The point is to get a feel for how many people are infected.

I didn't make this up, scientists said that they run current models with [people tested & confirmed] x 6 - 8 = the sum of people infected we don't know about.
I merely allowed for a larger margin of error by using x10.

Yep, the math would agree with your second point: this pandemic is just beginning. We have years till we reach herd immunity, if we manage to keep a lid on the uncontrolled spread. Only a viable vaccine would accelerate this. Though to be frank: if Sweden's approach is proven inferior this early on, it's a safe bet to say they won't make a sudden "come back" and be proven right as time progresses.

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You'd love that, wouldn't you? Yes, makes sense you would, after failing to address the fact that you put words in my mouth and came up with an outlandishly dishonest reply, beaten only by this one ("there's a difference between all [a word you put in my mouth] and some", really? That the best you could came up with?).

I have no interest in arguing with you. Maybe I did misinterpret or use bad wording, my initial post was not aimed at "putting words in your mouth" it was aimed as a reminder that not all Corona deaths can be prevented.

As a sidenote:
You were one of the people that came up with the completely nonsensical and uncorrelated "people have gone to war over less".
If you care to discuss the actual topic, we can do that but I have no clue what the above has to do with the topic at hand.

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And they screwed up with nursing homes. Still, it's too early for conclusions, let's see if the second wave comes to other countries, and what will be better - two waves or a single super long one.

I really wonder what their numbers would have looked like if they didn't.

[stevenho]

Since stevenho is not answering, I'll address this as the next in line of Sweden apologists :|

Haha
I haven't visited this forum in a few days because the weather is great, golf courses are open and they opened all restaurants too.
I kinda forgot there is a scary pandemic around.
Or is there.

[Forogil]

Good post. There's no easy correlation, that's why I asked. I don't believe differences in testing numbers between countries are entirely random.

Time magazine recently had another take on this, a graph where they showed that number of tests early on (not total number of tests) was sort of correlated with current deaths per capita; so that all countries that did a lot of tests early on had few deaths now.

However, if it were a simple correlation one would expect that countries that didn't test much early on had high number of deaths, in some cases that was true - but other countries that didn't test much early on had a low current death-toll.
Maybe it's a combination of early testing and something else, maybe it's some confounding variable.

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Haha
I haven't visited this forum in a few days because the weather is great, golf courses are open and they opened all restaurants too.
I kinda forgot there is a scary pandemic around.

Are restaurants back to normal - or have they switched to mobile payment, and changed seating arrangements (to spread out the seats, not just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic) etc?

[Secret Arcade]

I really wonder what their numbers would have looked like if they didn't.

Just over 88% of all deaths in Sweden are people age 70 or over. Of those, roughly 50% was in some sort of nursing/care home and another 25% or so got home care.
If there had been a 100% success of protecting one or both of these groups, the total death toll would have been somewhere around 1200-2200 rather than 3925.

[stevenho]

Are restaurants back to normal - or have they switched to mobile payment, and changed seating arrangements (to spread out the seats, not just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic) etc?

Can pay cash, but they did make more space to make it less crowded.
Which is good news for me, since I don't like sitting so close as to have other people partake in my conversations, which can happen in some places.

[Granyala]

Just over 88% of all deaths in Sweden are people age 70 or over. Of those, roughly 50% was in some sort of nursing/care home and another 25% or so got home care.
If there had been a 100% success of protecting one or both of these groups, the total death toll would have been somewhere around 1200-2200 rather than 3925.

Quite a costly failure to protect then.

[stevenho]

Yes, Sweden failed to adequately protect the elderly.
I wonder what will come of the investigation that was launched over it.

[Coolthulhu]

According to the CDC’s most current estimate only around 1 in 3 cases are asymptomatic.

Ok. But they're still a thing, and 1 in 3 isn't exactly a small number. Paucisymptomatic cases a are a thing, too, and often confused with seasonal allergies - a friend of mine got conjunctivitis and a runny nose, called his doctor who decided to have him to a viral test of an abundance of caution, and he turned out to be positive. Likewise many people who have the same symptoms test negative because they're just suffering from seasonal allergies (those who respond to antihistamine treatment almost invariably test negative).

I have no interest in arguing with you. Maybe I did misinterpret or use bad wording, my initial post was not aimed at "putting words in your mouth" it was aimed as a reminder that not all Corona deaths can be prevented.

As a sidenote:
You were one of the people that came up with the completely nonsensical and uncorrelated "people have gone to war over less".
If you care to discuss the actual topic, we can do that but I have no clue what the above has to do with the topic at hand.

Fair enough. You badly-worded something obvious and I assumed you were looking for an internet fight out of numbers, hence my hyperbolic reminder. That's all there was about it.

[PhaelixWW]

Those estimates are a month old.

The findings of the study may have just been released, but the study was performed in late April. If you bothered to read the quote I posted, it said as much.

Stockholm has seen its case count grow by 33% since the end of April (and 66% in the last month), so Stockholm is likely at 10-12% by now.

The point is that Sweden went on record earlier in April saying that they expected to have 30% immunity in Stockholm by the beginning of may, and the reality turned out to be a quarter of that.

Then again, they also estimated the herd immunity threshold as low as 40% in Sweden. They had people outright stating that they would achieve herd immunity in May.