Sweden does stand out compared to their Nordic neighbors. They had ~1200 more deaths per million than Norway & Finland in the first year of pandemic. We're so inured to COVID death once we hit a million that some multiple of 9/11 doesn't stand out, eh?
See here's one of my problems with the pro-hard response side: they often seem to be a solution seeking a problem.
If you only look at the first year of the `sweden-vs-nordic-covid` link it looks pretty bad for Sweden, but if you extend it out, Finland and Norway traded early reduced mortality for later increased mortality.
This suggests Covid is highly transmissible, and restrictive policies just shift mortality out a little bit, not reduce it. Sure it's great to save lives, but at what cost to society? You need to balance mental health, the needs of children for social and educational development, and the economy.
You can't stop the world because people who are old or very sick are dying, that's nature, we're all subject to the same rules. You always need to balance the societal harm potential against the benefit, and with Covid our leaders seem to have forgotten that in many places.
Translation: I was wrong but I'll pretend I'm right.
Extend the timeline out as much as you want. Sweden still has a lot more cumulative dead per capita. And you are simply lying that Norway had increased fatalities and so just shifted it in time. The gap between Sweden and Norway slightly increased by May 2023.
Spare me your opinions and standard talking points after seeing data contradicting Sweden was some shining star of stellar policies due to GBD principles. A lot of our "leaders" like DeSantis forgot that pretending your expert in things you know nothing about and finding the most partisan hack doc you can for Surgeon General doesn't mean you're making correct decisions.
We could also talk about morbidity but that would make your weak argument even worse. After all, quality of life is SO important during the limited lockdown times but let's not measure significant decreased qualify of life for millions of Americans from Long COVID. And lets all hope there isn't significant subclinical issues like increased thromboembolic activity (frequently seen post-COVID) that will rear its head later.
There's the GBD proposal, and then there's the actual media tours by the GBD proponents, particularly on Fox, where COVID-19 was downplayed. Some of them famously wrote columns how there'd be maybe 10,000 fatalities and it was like the flu. Is it surprising that downplaying the virus also worked against spending huge amounts of money to protect the elderly? Like govt renting hotels to isolate elderly living with families? Or providing deliveries so they could stay at home?
I think Dr. Jay B seemed reasonable and honest enough. For instance you can find him saying that he's not comfortable comparing it to the flu, since he suspects flu deaths may be greatly overcounted. He talks now (not sure about before) about deliveries and hotels as you say. Etc.
But yes, the loudest dissenters seemed to be contrarians, rather than people with a specific plan. They take a big mash of GBD, "lol it's not that bad, not everybody's going to get it", "lol everybody's going to get it so there's nothing we can do anyway", "we're not obligated to look out for other people anyway", etc etc with all the inherent contradictions. Any signal that went against "THE COVID NARRATIVE" they signal boosted.
Something like insecurity must have been driving this stuff. I think some of the counter-maintstream points were right, particularly about being sober about tradeoffs, but overall it was a total embarrassment. Granted the other side wasn't much better.
I think Jay B was better than most of the GBD supporters because he seemed to focus more on the targeted prevention. The problem was he didn't counter the downplaying of SARS-CoV-2 by people using his own seroprevalence paper (which had problems), or at least I never saw him push back on Atlas and others. So his criticism about public health issues is completely devoid of his own part in the story. They went heavy with part 1 (COVID isn't that bad for non-elderly) and were surprised that downplaying the impact didn't shift resources to the elderly. If people using his data were saying the overall IFR was like the flu, why should the govt go way into debt protecting the elderly?
Completely correct? GBD advocated letting SARS-CoV-2 rip through the general pop BEFORE vaccines while "targeting" protection of the elderly, which of course no country managed to do, particularly their poster-child Sweden. Now GBD fans pretend Sweden was a success story when any observation of the COVID impact on Sweden vs their neighbors through the vaccine rollout shows a completely different story. (Sweden had ~10x death rate of bordering Norway for first year of pandemic.)
Also GBD pretends mortality is the only worthy metric. There's such a thing as morbidity as the millions of people with Long COVID would like to discuss.
But Bhattacharya and friends with strong connection to Hoover Inst have a particularly nice revisionist view of their early work:
* Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.
* Write seroprevalence papers with suspect specificity (changed between v1 and v2 of pre-print due to outrage from stat experts) that don't describe how the visual tests were interpreted, why they differ from the CZI BioHub paper's measurement of the Premiere test, or why a pathologist running ELISA tests to verify wanted off the paper.
* Stand by while friends like Scott Atlas make a media tour saying the seroprevalence paper suggests as many as 10,000 dead from COVID. Thus a fair portion of our population decides COVID is just the flu, and some of the GBD supporters still think it's "just a cold" despite the incredible evidence we have that it's much much worse (for example, see Iwasaki's work) and there's the little matter of over 1 million Americans dead.
* Then write the GBD before we have the vaccine or have any real public effort to try to protect the elderly.
On the bright side, Bhattacharya has been a proponent of the vax and many people (including me) agreed that targeted protection of elderly was very important. It's just that the revisionist commentary from his supporters is they were the only ones saying it. Completely false.
> * Go on Fox and other media to downplay SARS-CoV-2 before we even know what's going on.
They only were able to go on "FOX" because the left media's mind was already made up. Going against the narrative was absolutely forbidden.
I can't believe people still honestly believe anything "the experts" told them at this point. It takes massive privilege and echo-chamerism to look back over the last three years and still believe what "the experts" told them.
At least for America, the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity, even though the FDA grant an emergency use and later approval.
I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot). It would've probably been better if they never existed since people were fired to take useless experimental medical drugs with no proven positive effects.
The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.
"the 3 Covid vaccines all failed to show any actual evidence of protection or immunity"
You must be explicitly ignoring a ton of papers and data showing the opposite. The death rate of unvaxxed vs vaxxed is incredibly higher and CDC has data for it.
"I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)."
In early 2021, the US had the largest vaccination campaign ever peaking at about 3.5 million shots per day in mid-April. Do you know what happened to the death rate (excess mortality) in 2021 through June? It dropped substantially. Isn't it odd to you that mass vaccination using a "clot shot" somehow drops the death rate substantially? It's rhetorical because to form the opinions you have, you must go out of your way to cherry pick papers and ignore data (or have conspiracy theories that data contradicting your opinion is fake).
> I have come to the conclusion the vaccines saved virtually no one and has put a similar number into an early death (e g. The clot shot)
Would you mind sharing at a high level what research led you to this conclusion?
> The real thing that causes Covid to go away was Omricon, and other viruses re-spreading, political attention spans, and an upcoming election where the incumbent can't continue to use Covid as a reason for election.
Compare Sweden vs "their neighbors" as I said above. They had much worse COVID death rate from their Nordic neighbors (Norway, Denmark, Finland) through initial COVID and the vaccine rollout to summer 2021.
Feel free to construct a competing comparison showing how the 10x death rate of Sweden is just an artifact and not a failure of public health. Or are you going to claim they're just old people so no big deal?
I shouldn't have to do that, if someone wants to compare two nations' handling and come to a conclusion using statistics then they should be compelled to do the statistics correctly.
If you honestly think sweden has a “10x death rate” I think you are badly misinformed. That sounds not believable at all. Just like the “1 out of 4 (no wait, 10) people suffer from long covid”
10x the death rate is a huge difference. You’d be seeing mass death, far more than anywhere else. It would be extremely visible.
Every ounce of data generated for covid was highly politically motivated and extremely biased. It should all be taken with a huge grain of salt.
Sweden had a 10x death rate for the first year of the pandemic vs its direct neighbors. That's the data published by Sweden, Norway, and Finland. You can ignore it if you want or just claim it's "highly politically motivated and extremely biased" because it's against what you want to believe. All Nordic countries did relatively well on death rate, that's why GBD have seized upon Sweden as a success story, but it was obviously worse than Norway and Finland.
When I talk with GBD proponents it always boils down to this: they won't believe the data and make up a variety of reasons why not to trust it, then they turn around and trust far worse analyses like the article comparing Sweden and non-Nordic countries with much worse obesity and far different systems (like the article comparing Sweden vs other EU).
The “death rate” of covid wasn’t the only problem to solve for you know. The myopic fixation on covid to the exclusion of literally everything else was a huge mistake. There is more to track than just “covid death rates” or “covid spread”… covid didn’t exist in a vacuum and asking society to do what it did was so absurd I still can’t believe people bought into it.
It takes immense privilege and a very sheltered life to think covid was the only thing worthy of focus. There is a balance to be had when treating a disease.
People needed to take off their blinders and see what damage their mitigations causes.
Andy point still stands. 10x the “death rate” is massive and would be very visible. It wasn’t. It was only visible if you looked at it with a microscope.
What society did to attempt to mitigate covid was a disaster no matter how well it worked. And the kicker is it didn’t work at all… which is probably why every pandemic plan said explicitly not to do masks and lockdowns and school closures.
Glad to hear we've moved from me being "badly misinformed" (now that you took a second to look at the actual data) to now having a "myopic fixation on covid".
Speaking of myopic, please do talk to the families of the ~1200 additional deaths per million people in Sweden and tell them their tragedy was "only visible if you looked at it with a microscope."
Agree. They should’ve allowed for more discussion before sending invitations and more effort should've been made to come to a mutually beneficial solution. But going from an invited keynote (great honor) to an invited talk (honor) is not what I would call a deliberate attempt to "disgrace one of the experts in my field." It’s a single track conference where the speaker would be heard by all attendees and could’ve championed his ideas to the larger Rust community.
What does "last minute" mean here? Isn't RustConf in mid-September and it's a single track conference so speakers are heard by all participants? It would be a good way to get your work and opinions out to the broader community.
Clearly the process was botched and more effort should've been made to come to a mutually beneficial solution, but going from an invited keynote (great honor) to an invited talk (honor) is not what I would call a deliberate attempt to "disgrace one of the experts in my field."
It also looks like they added MLIR backend to Triton though I wonder if Mojo has advantages since it was designed with MLIR in mind? https://github.com/openai/triton/pull/1004
I hadn't looked at Triton before, I took a quick look at it and how it's getting used in PyTorch 2. My read is it really lowers the barrier to doing new hardware ports, I think a team of around five people within a chip vendor's team could maintain a high quality port of PyTorch for a non-NVIDIA platform. That's less than it used to be, very cool. The approach would not be to use any of the PTX stuff, but to bolt on support for say the vendor's supported flavor of Vulkan.
Maybe you are purposely ignoring many data points of how badly things are going. Musk instituted blue checkmarks that are purchased by a subset of customers with particular views. If you question this, look at the responses to Biden tweets and see the positions of anti- vs pro-Biden comments.
Because of this, Twitter is ridiculously partisan on my feed. I’ve limited my consumption of it to very small subject matters and will likely jump ship totally to BlueSky with some Mastodon thrown in. I know a lot of people in science who have completely abandoned Twitter.
Yes and even if the motivation of all the people leaving Twitter were futile, it still happened. I no longer see the content I once saw and that is an objective measurable effect which not only happened during Musk's watch but arguably happened in direct reaction to what he said and did.
I was trying Tailwind out a few weeks ago for a very simple static web page. I'm close to beginner with slight knowledge of CSS and HTML. It was surprising to me that all the styling disappeared from <a> tags, and it took some Googling just to see how to work around that. I wound up just going with Spectre to get an acceptable solution. The Tailwind docs seem more for its target audience and not pure beginners. Is there some resource to learn Tailwind in the manner you are suggesting?
I'm unsure what you mean by "...all the styling disappeared from <a> tags..." so I can't confidently provide insight. My first thought was perhaps you're referring to the special `visited` state of an `a` element. However, a `visited` link should not lose styling that it is applied to the element explicitly, so it's unlikely to be that -- part of the value of Tailwind is that it prevents this class of issue.
Can you provide more insight into the specifics of the issue? I am happy to try and diagnose the issue -- even if you've moved on from Tailwind, you might get value out of understanding the issue! A GitHub repository link would be ideal, or some code in a Gist :)
My gut feeling is that the issue you're describing has nothing to do with Tailwind. One of the challenges of learning any library or technology: you can experience an issue outside of the bounds of your understanding and misattribute the issue to the tool in question, even after decade(s) of experience, this'll still happen!
They are also using a pure Go version of leveldb (github.com/syndtr/goleveldb) and not the more battle-hardened Google leveldb, RocksDB implementations, or even the dgraph-io Badger WiscKey-style approach.
https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-covid
https://tinyurl.com/sweden-vs-nordic-cumulative
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7797349/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5