Coronavirus (COVID-19)

People keep arguing about excess mortality and lockdown effectiveness but not offering any objective statistics. It's mostly smoke and mirrors.

I posted this on the CGC forum but I'll report is here in case anyone wants to discus it more freely

Here's an interesting article.

This article focuses on a comparison of 2 statistics across 32 European countries during the pandemic:

Excess mortality
GDP performance

There's been a lot of criticism about Sweden's approach to the pandemic compared to other countries because they have so many Covid deaths compared to other countries. Sweden's approach was always about a 'total harm minimalization' across all of their society rather than just protecting people from Covid alone. They got a lot of criticism for their response but there are some very interesting statistics emerging.

It looks like Sweden has one of the lowest excess mortality numbers out of the 32 European countries studied (23rd out of 32) at 7.6% and

ALSO has one of the strongest GDP percentages out of the 32 countries studied (4th out of 32) at only a 2.9% contraction with only 3 countries performing better


If I'm spitballing this correctly and the US has about 3MIL deaths a year with about 600,000 excess deaths last year that places their excess deaths at 20% over the previous average, near the top of the European numbers with Liechenstien and Spain in that range.

Also, a Google search shows that the US economy GDP contracted at an estimated 3.5% last year compared to Sweden's 2.9% - both countries did much better than most of Europe on this front but Sweden fared better than even the US


To me this is fascinating because it gives a very objective way of looking at how well lockdowns work in regards to the economy and overall excess deaths, which probably is a better measure of the general effectiveness of lockdown measures than just focusing on Covid deaths alone, which is all the media in the West is focusing on.

To me it highlights the following:


Sweden's less restrictive pandemic measures may have been more beneficial for their general public in preventing other causes of death outside of Covid that stricter measures may have increased in highly restrictive countries
Sweden's economy didn't fare as poorly as other countries that did much tighter lockdowns
Sweden was probably able to achieve this because the culture is so different and they (like most Scandinavian countries) are much less concerned about optics than they are about the actual science


If this all holds true it looks like Sweden's approach may have been better at preventing deaths over all across it's country than other comparable countries.

Am I doing this correctly?

Sweden’s COVID strategy 2020 — A look at the numbers

Those last few posts of banners are so hypocritical that Hulk's nose is poking through my computer screen.

He went after me on almost every one of my posts over the last year with emoticons so hard that I could probably fill my fridge up with stickers made them but is now calling you a kid for doing it?

I'm surprised nobody will reply or dispute the all mortality data from Sweden when compared to Europe or the US. And they did it voluntarily and without masks. Well, no. I'm not really surprised.

I've asked for studies comparing the benefits of lockdown to the cons of lockdown. Nobody has produced one. In fact, 500Club said he's taking a break right after I posted that.

I've posted an article that compared all cause mortality and economic recover in Sweden to the rest of Europe and shows that Sweden is over all fairing better than most countries nobody has a comment on it but it should be front page news. The guy that wrote the article has 100 Twitter followers and it will never see the light of day.

But I'm the stupid one because I disagree with people.

I wish people would be more honest with themselves. I have no problem going out there and wearing my heart on my sleeve and taking my knocks.

Lockdowns have consequences.

THE LONG-TERM IMPACT OF THE COVID-19 UNEMPLOYMENT SHOCK ON
LIFE EXPECTANCY AND MORTALITY RATES
Francesco Bianchi
Giada Bianchi
Dongho Song
Working Paper 28304
www.nber.org/papers/w28304
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
December 2020, Revised January 2021

ABSTRACT
We adopt a time series approach to investigate the historical relation between unemployment, life
expectancy, and mortality rates. We fit Vector-autoregressions for the overall US population and
for groups identified based on gender and race. We use our results to assess the long-run effects
of the COVID-19 economic recession on mortality and life expectancy. We estimate the size of
the COVID-19-related unemployment shock to be between 2 and 5 times larger than the typical
unemployment shock, depending on race and gender, resulting in a significant increase in
mortality rates and drop in life expectancy. We also predict that the shock will disproportionately
affect African-Americans and women, over a short horizon, while the effects for white men will
unfold over longer horizons. These figures translate in more than 0.8 million additional deaths
over the next 15 years.

Francesco Bianchi
Social Sciences Building, 201B
Department of Economics
Duke University
Box 90097
Durham, NC 27708-0097
and CEPR
and also NBER
francesco.bianchi@duke.edu
Giada Bianchi
Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital
Harvard Medical School
4 Blackfan Circle
HIM 742
Boston, MA 02115
GBIANCHI1@BWH.HARVARD.EDU