Comparisons between different countries are always problematic - because their rates of infection and death differ due to differing populations and behavior. More crucially, whether government enacts a lockdown is not random. Countries are unlikely to institute lockdowns unless the covid-19 death rate is high. In order to compare between countries, you need to address this correlation.
That's true, but it's an inherent problem with the field. Once we start talking about spread in the wider population and government policy, we've moved beyond biology to the macro social sciences and collective human behavior, where it's almost impossible to run controlled experiments with controls and predictions that are made and then tested. Instead, we have to rely on historical data, and not only does knowing how it works out beforehand make predictions suspect, but cherry picking and biases mean people looking at the same events come to completely opposite conclusions (this happens all the time -- look at how many different things are blamed for causing the Great Depression, for instance), building models and theories to fit historical patterns is rarely predictive in useful ways, and there are always excuses when they fail. Nonetheless, in this time of the coronavirus, places like Sweden, Japan, Belarus and so on are the closest we'll find to a control group. I have less faith than you in controlling for all relevant factors, because that decision itself is so highly subjective and can lead to almost all the problems with historical data.
The paper from the first link does not have any discussion about the inherent correlation of lockdowns and death rate. Further, it has a single author whose field is oceanography. It has not yet been peer reviewed. I don't inherently dismiss it, but I don't think it should be taken as the final word. The lack of any approach to the systematics seems like a major missing piece.
I think Sweden's approach isn't crazy and I can understand advocating for it - but I think there are arguments both ways, which come down to rationally comparing evidence. Sweden has still had a huge economic recession, and it has a higher infection and death rate than it's neighboring countries Norway and Finland. Comparing it to Italy and Spain is more like apples and oranges.
Now, if you wanted to make an economic claim, these were mostly OK sources (the last 3 more than the first 2). If you wanted to make claims about the transmissible curb and the lockdowns, these sources seem weak, at best.
I never said it was the final word, I just provided a source. I find it entertaining how many people with disparate backgrounds are publishing papers on sars2 -- which isn't completely inappropriate. A lot of researchers with medical backgrounds lack the statistical skills needed for these kinds of analyses, and we've been overvaluing people with M.D.s next to their names and undervaluing people with other skills. A virologist is an expert on diseases, but a masters or Ph.D. in some statistical field is often better at this kind of analysis, especially if it's combined with epidemiology. The area where it really became criminal, though, is economics. The public health lead in one state -- who has zero background in economics and never even worked in the private sector in her life -- kept talking about how the pandemic would affects the economy, how the lockdowns and other measures they took were to "save the economy", and how not locking down would be so much worse. Her statements were taken as the Word of Science!, when she literally has less background in the area than the average person on the street.
It also reflects more generally on the state of the science around COVID-19. Have you seen the retractions at the Lancet and the NEJM? I provided links many pages back on how weak most of the research on the topic has been, when measured against the standards of evidence-based medicine. Many highly influential studies that had a great impact on public policy were based on a tiny number of completely non-representative cases. Much of this is inevitable when it comes to a new disease, because massive randomized double-blind studies require a huge investment in time, money, and human resources. But we needed better messaging, that explains to the public not just what the latest study said, but the degree of certainty. Which is of course anathema to politicians, who want to be able to present clear easy solutions. They also lost the clinical judgment side; doctors make judgment calls in uncertain conditions all the time, but large organizations like the CDC and WHO want to wait for all the evidence to come in, so are bad at that; and as a result they were slow on some common sense measures like supporting masks. The data has gotten better, and stronger consensuses have emerged, but we're still in the early days. The weirdness of the disease certainly hasn't helped.
That's why I have been focusing more on the economic side lately. A disease is a public health issue, but lockdowns are an economic issue, so we should be hearing from both types of experts. But there's never been an economics Fauci -- and no, the Secretary of the Treasury doesn't count. He's an executive who came up through IT; he has no real economics training at all. The government and the news have almost entirely focused on public health officials, and taken their statements on economic matters as holy writ, which is nonsense. It's sheer ignorance on display when people like Cuomo proclaim that it's about saving lives, and that any life lost is too much, while they completely ignore all the people who will die or suffer serious effects because of the shutdowns. I mentioned earlier in the thread the
UN report stating that hundreds of thousands of children were expected to die due to the lockdowns, to
the report from Well Being Trust that they expected as many as 75,000 suicides attributable to the disease in the US alone, not to mention all the news coverage from places like India or Mexico on the horrendous effect the shutdowns have been having on the extremely poor.
Some new sources. Let's start with NPR, who yesterday ran a bit comparing Denmark and Sweden. They pointed out that the number who died in Sweden was a lot higher (6000ish compared to 700ish, IIRC; adjust for Sweden having almost twice as many people), but that Sweden's current death rate was about half Denmark's. They expect the death totals in the two countries to eventually converge (relative to population size), but that Sweden is and will be far better off economically. The guy they interviewed from Denmark talked about how it wasn't just the shutdowns, but how they varied erratically and kept getting turned on and off, that hurt business and drove away all their patrons. He went on to say he now thinks they should have done what Sweden did. I'm mostly mentioning this because I never expected a piece from NPR of all places to praise Sweden's response, which suggests it's getting wide traction.
Remember the Imperial College of London report, which early on on the pandemic used highly faulty models to predict over 2 million deaths in the US, and was the basis of a lot of policy? Even that report considered the lockdowns to be a short-term, temporary measures to flatten the curve. The whole purpose of that argument is to suppress the number of cases at any one time, in order not to overwhelm the hospital system, not to reduce the overall number of cases. In other words, Sweden front-loaded their deaths, but the rest of the world is catching up, and will eventually reach comparable numbers. Just at a much higher economic cost. I haven't seen any good explanation for the indefinite months-long lockdowns that ensued, except for political fear of high numbers
now. There was
a hammer and dance argument of intermittent lockdowns to keep the caseload relatively stable, but as the man from Denmark that NPR interviewed explained, an erratic series of lockdowns is really terrible for the economy, because businesses require predictability and it makes it hard for customers to plan or develop habits; and I don't think the actual curves we've seen in infection patterns vis-a-vis lockdowns match that plan. The rest of the arguments typically involve contract tracing or vaccines, but combine a lot of wishful thinking with a lack of specifics.
A few interesting links
https://accadandkoka.com/episodes/episode126/ non-MD epidemiologist (on kidney disease) on covid data
https://accadandkoka.com/captivate-podcast/episode140/ it's a minority view, but she makes a strong argument that we've reached herd immunity
https://accadandkoka.com/captivate-podcast/episode143-2/ difficulties with observational trials (gets a bit abstruse)
https://accadandkoka.com/captivate-podcast/episode131/ NJEM/Lancetgate
https://swprs.org/facts-about-covid-19/#latest tries to summarize the latest news/science (new source to me, familiar with some of the stuff like cross-immunity, but others I'm not so sure about -- links are great, tho)
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31035-7/fulltext#%20 hard lockdowns don't protect the vulnerable
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life one of the few attempts at an economic cost/benefit analysis of the shutdowns
https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/insight/2020/economic-impact/ estimate of economic damage
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/covid-19-is-also-a-reallocation-shock/ 32-42% of jobs lost are permanently gone
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/how-are-small-businesses-adjusting-to-covid-19-early-evidence-from-a-survey/ small businesses dying
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2677445 mortality increases based on the economic shock
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/2/21241261/coronavirus-modeling-us-deaths-ihme-pandemic the models suck