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We just did our initial testing online, and apparently, 80% of my class are super-geniuses.  Despite repeated written and verbal pleas to not help their kids do the test, most of them did just that.


Awesome. 


As a parent, you have the right to have as many kids as you want and raise them as poorly as you feel like. 

No, telling them the answers on a test doesn't make a parent a bad parent, but it's stupid.  It's how we show evidence of growth and now that's down the drain.  

We just did our initial testing online, and apparently, 80% of my class are super-geniuses.  Despite repeated written and verbal pleas to not help their kids do the test, most of them did just that.


Awesome. 


As a parent, you have the right to have as many kids as you want and raise them as poorly as you feel like.

No, telling them the answers on a test doesn't make a parent a bad parent, but it's stupid.  It's how we show evidence of growth and now that's down the drain. 

Heh I understand - I keep telling my wife not to worry about it - but she is stressing. 

So, you clamp down and it recedes, you open up some and viola', it's back

I still can't explain Sweden very well.  They are very low now, no apparent resurgence.  Area under the curve?

Sweden is down under 200 new cases per day.  Georgia is around 2,500, similar population.  How did that happen?

Are you telling me it was better compliance with individual guideline behaviors?

I doubt it.  They had 87,000 reported cases.  That is under 1% of the population.  You'd have to raise that by a factor of 50 or more to reach theoretical herd immunity.

Is actual HI nearer 1-3% of known cases?  Huh.

Georgia has 260,000 known cases (total), which is about 2.5% of the population.

Georgia is at 500 deaths per million, Sweden is at 575, somewhat worse.

I don't think you can compare cases.  Different countries, and within the US even different states, are handling that completely differently.  From the overall number of tests performed, to the types of test and their accuracy rates, to the manner of reporting, the differences just make it impossible to compare.

Out of curiosity, is there any source of info that shows the number of tests performed in each region-- Georgia and Sweden-- either total, or measured against a timescale?  Are they performing largely different numbers of tests, or is the testing comparable?  I suspect Sweden simply isn't performing as many tests, so their "known cases" number should be lower.  It would make sense given their approach-- don't shut down, mask up, voluntarily social-distance, and stay home if you feel sick.  That approach would also be congruent with limited testing, since the point of their approach was never to determine every single person that is sick, but rather to tell sick people to stay home while letting the virus run its course as long as hospitals don't get overwhelmed. (Which was actually similar to what our original approach in the USA was, until somebody highjacked the message and decided ZERO CASES was the only acceptable outcome).

I think you need to compare hospitalization numbers (in total or over time) and deaths/million (as you already have), to get a closer comparison between the two regions.

Sweden also has very different demographics than here. Fewer multi-generation households, a lot more one-person households, generally a somewhat uniformly wealth nation where a lot of people were already WFH. 

Plus, they have more of a tendency to trust their government than to assume that a mask mandate is part of the Bill Gates Illuminati Bilderberg Koch/Soros master plan to enslave us all before feeding us to the lizard people.

You can look at case numbers, but Sweden is still 6th in Europe in deaths/1M population amongst populous nations (i.e. San Marino and Andorra excluded). Their deaths/1M number has been rising faster than Italy/UK/Spain ahead of them and is growing VERY close to those countries, so they could be 3rd in Europe within another 1-2 months. And that includes Russia in "Europe". 

Then there's utee's point. Maybe they're not testing that well. They're roughly 17th in Europe in tests/1M population amongst populous nations. The 5 nations above them in deaths/1M are also above them in tests/1M, so it might not be apples-to-apples. 

But even then, with limited testing, Sweden has the 2nd-highest cases/1M rate amongst populous nations in Europe. The only one higher is Spain. 

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Then you compare them to their "peers" which is the Nordic neighbors of Norway and Finland, which are the closest demographic comparisons to Sweden, and Sweden has 10x the deaths/1M rate as those two countries and >4x cases/1M rate of those two countries. They both have equal or higher tests/1M rate, so it shouldn't be a testing discrepancy.

So I'm not sure we can walk away from this and say Sweden did "well". It's too early to know whether some of those other countries will catch up when you talk about the total "area under the curve", but I think a lot of people talk about how wonderful Sweden is based on raw numbers without accounting for the fact that it's a country of low population so it just doesn't seem as high as other places. 

And to bring up the state of GA, as I know you do, Cincy, GA has over twice the tests/1M rate that Sweden has, and has a slightly (~20%) lower deaths/1M rate than Sweden. They do have a significantly higher [3x] cases/1M rate. Not sure how to explain that difference where they have 3x the case rate but a lower death rate... Maybe they're more aggressively testing a younger portion of the population whereas Sweden isnt? I don't know...

Cincy has brought up Sweden about 93 times, as if it'll skew the numbers towards something different.  I don't understand it.

OAM, everyone has brought up Sweden, including myself.

Because Sweden was an outlier in their response to this thing, so it's an extraordinarily interesting case. 

There have been a few people in this thread who have brought up Sweden IMHO based on ideological priors and flat out said they did it "right", but as far as I can tell, that's at the very least not Cincy, utee, or me.

We're just honestly fascinated by their case because it was handled so differently than the rest of Europe. And I believe epidemiologists will be studying it for years after this thing is over. 

Cincy is advocating for it by sheer volume of mentions, imo.

You are lying again.

I am trained as an experimentalist.  Sweden is an experiment.  We should be able to learn something from that experiment.  It has naught to do with whether it should be advocated for as an approach.

Compare and contrast.  And yes, there are multiple variable involved, that is part of what makes it interesting.

Nearly everyone predicted a total disaster for Sweden with their approach, hospitals overrun, much higher death toll, and certainly a continuing epidemic.  Instead the epidemic rates by any measure have dropped dramatically.  I can't explain that other than to suggest they did hit herd immunity somehow.  If they did, that is a critically important piece of information.

Georgia is dropping as well now, as I've noted 93 times.  I'm struggling to explain that also.  States hit very hard early like NY and NJ have come WAY down.

If you don't want to discuss the possible differences and explanations, fine with me, but I do.  Or we could just come up with the trite simplistic mindless blame game.