Today I stumbled upon a piece that argued that Sweden had “got it mostly right and showed the world that lockdowns did absolutely nothing to save lives, but rather, cause catastrophic pain and deaths.” The following graph was posted as support for the proposition.
In the UK the lockdowns were put forward as a means to stop the NHS becoming overwhelmed. I think they were successful in that but I'd be interested to hear your views on that aspect.
Good question. I do not have specific perspective on the NHS, but we all appreciate that, in the early going, health authorities everywhere were concerned about their health systems getting overwhelmed. New York City was the focus of this kind in the United States. The federal government even dispatched a hospital ship to New York, but, mercifully, the city did not end up having to avail itself of that extra capacity.
Meanwhile, we can all remember the news coming out of the Lombard region of Italy in December 2019 or so. We certainly did get the impression that the system was being overwhelmed over the course of weeks or even a month. Folks would speak of basically being turned away. They’d identify this phenomenon with an old phrase which goes something like “solo di grano” or “solo di pane,” meaning, basically, “The hospital sent us away with nothing more than some bread to sustain ourselves.”
I can’t remember the exact phrase, but I do remember a grandmother of mine explaining exactly this phenomenon when the Spanish Flu burned through her village situated on the Lombard side of Lake Garda.
One thing we can say is that managing hospital capacity and keeping systems from getting overwhelmed is a generic problem. The “costs of keeping the lights on” (the fixed operating expenses) are non-trivial, so, the authorities have to take some care in deciding how much capacity (measured in beds, say) to maintain. And we can guess that demand for hospital services is seasonal. At the very least, fatalities exhibit strong seasonality. (I discuss this in depth in an older post: https://dvwilliamson.substack.com/p/same-as-it-ever-was-nothing-new-to.) Fatalities peak in the coldest months and subside to their nadir in the warmest months. “Cold-and-flu” season is an obvious driver of that seasonality, but, one thing I’ve learned from slicing and dicing CDC data is that obvious seasonality shows up in fatalities driven by heart conditions and cancers.
One might guess that, given there is obvious seasonality in fatalities there would be obvious seasonality in demand for hospital services. So, there’s a question: How does the NHS or any hospital system deal with surges in demand? They will have much experience with that. Indeed, there will be some “cold-and-flu” seasons that will be harsher than others. Some surges will thus be bigger than others. (There was an obvious spike in fatalities in the United State in 2018. I’d guess that this would have been a global phenomenon.) How did health systems deal with that? “Solo di grano?”
Oh, also: In my previous post I tune up regression results that demonstrate that we really can't show that lockdowns and vaccination programs mitigated COVID fatalities and caseloads--at least, on average, across about 180 countries. There will be outliers. That average effect is prominent in the data. And it suggests that maybe lockdowns and such didn't make a difference; COVID burned through the population; the first burn in early 2020 was probably the worst; the health systems around the world mostly weathered it.
One might think that, because the COVID toll is concentrated on the most vulnerable, that a population would look healthier after COVID had burned through it. Shouldn't median age of death from plain old death thus appear to increase in every country? But, no. In the United States it has also declined. I can only speculate that the public policy response has contributed to that. We do see in the data that excess mortality (in the US, for example) remains elevated, and that elevated excess mortality is being driven by increased fatalities among people under the age of 45. Something insidious is going on.
In the UK the lockdowns were put forward as a means to stop the NHS becoming overwhelmed. I think they were successful in that but I'd be interested to hear your views on that aspect.
Greetings, Sam --
And, good morning, my time.
Good question. I do not have specific perspective on the NHS, but we all appreciate that, in the early going, health authorities everywhere were concerned about their health systems getting overwhelmed. New York City was the focus of this kind in the United States. The federal government even dispatched a hospital ship to New York, but, mercifully, the city did not end up having to avail itself of that extra capacity.
Meanwhile, we can all remember the news coming out of the Lombard region of Italy in December 2019 or so. We certainly did get the impression that the system was being overwhelmed over the course of weeks or even a month. Folks would speak of basically being turned away. They’d identify this phenomenon with an old phrase which goes something like “solo di grano” or “solo di pane,” meaning, basically, “The hospital sent us away with nothing more than some bread to sustain ourselves.”
I can’t remember the exact phrase, but I do remember a grandmother of mine explaining exactly this phenomenon when the Spanish Flu burned through her village situated on the Lombard side of Lake Garda.
One thing we can say is that managing hospital capacity and keeping systems from getting overwhelmed is a generic problem. The “costs of keeping the lights on” (the fixed operating expenses) are non-trivial, so, the authorities have to take some care in deciding how much capacity (measured in beds, say) to maintain. And we can guess that demand for hospital services is seasonal. At the very least, fatalities exhibit strong seasonality. (I discuss this in depth in an older post: https://dvwilliamson.substack.com/p/same-as-it-ever-was-nothing-new-to.) Fatalities peak in the coldest months and subside to their nadir in the warmest months. “Cold-and-flu” season is an obvious driver of that seasonality, but, one thing I’ve learned from slicing and dicing CDC data is that obvious seasonality shows up in fatalities driven by heart conditions and cancers.
One might guess that, given there is obvious seasonality in fatalities there would be obvious seasonality in demand for hospital services. So, there’s a question: How does the NHS or any hospital system deal with surges in demand? They will have much experience with that. Indeed, there will be some “cold-and-flu” seasons that will be harsher than others. Some surges will thus be bigger than others. (There was an obvious spike in fatalities in the United State in 2018. I’d guess that this would have been a global phenomenon.) How did health systems deal with that? “Solo di grano?”
Oh, also: In my previous post I tune up regression results that demonstrate that we really can't show that lockdowns and vaccination programs mitigated COVID fatalities and caseloads--at least, on average, across about 180 countries. There will be outliers. That average effect is prominent in the data. And it suggests that maybe lockdowns and such didn't make a difference; COVID burned through the population; the first burn in early 2020 was probably the worst; the health systems around the world mostly weathered it.
an all important metric to take a look at, is the development of the average life expectancy during the covid19 episode.
sweden's went up by a couple of weeks to over 83 years.
most of the rest of europe saw it go down.....
Interesting. What is going with that?
One might think that, because the COVID toll is concentrated on the most vulnerable, that a population would look healthier after COVID had burned through it. Shouldn't median age of death from plain old death thus appear to increase in every country? But, no. In the United States it has also declined. I can only speculate that the public policy response has contributed to that. We do see in the data that excess mortality (in the US, for example) remains elevated, and that elevated excess mortality is being driven by increased fatalities among people under the age of 45. Something insidious is going on.