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Greg Kemnitz's avatar

As for centralized approaches, all these people are in the same online groups, go to the same conferences, and read each other's papers, so it's not surprising that there's a strong notion of "we will do things This Way and No Other" that develops quickly...

As for funding, one huge problem with federal funding is it comes with so much mandated things-to-do around it that often half or more of the grant money disappears in "administration" as opposed to actual research.

I saw this at Postgres at Berkeley "way back when", and apparently the "overhead problem" of such grants is even worse nowadays...

Preparing a grant proposal and walking it through the bureaucracy is a major undertaking - often quite a bit more complex than writing a nontrivial scientific paper...

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Laura Creighton's avatar

In Sweden we _did_ isolate the vulnerable. The end-of-life nursing homes _were_ locked down. And this meant that people who had been promised that their last months spent there could be spent surrounded with family ended up dying alone or with health care workers. This is what the king was critical of in his widely-reported "we failed those people" quote. By taking the quote out of context from his speech, people were left to fill in the blanks and assume that the king was in favour of stronger lockdowns, when the failure he was speaking about was not finding a way to let the dying see their loved ones. The people in the care homes were all expected to die within the year (except for some with dementia, who also are cared for in such places) because this is the major criteria for being accepted into such places in the first place. And while isolating them could protect them from dying of covid, they were still going to die of whatever had been killing them that had brought them to the care homes.

In addition, on On March 16th, the Public Health Authority urged people aged 70 and over toavoid unnecessary social contacts as far as possible. We basically told the old people to stay at home, until either the disease went away or we got vaccines that worked. We were all set to do this for 3 or 4 years, the time we thought it would take to test and develop a vaccine, based on how long it was done in the past. So we organised into groups that delivered groceries, meals, craft supplies, books, lumber and what ever else to the old people. This happened everywhere, and was organised by the church, and the grocery stores, and golf and other athletic clubs, and homeowners associations and so on and so forth. It was pretty much all private acts of generosity and kindness, and not something the government did, which pleased those of a more libertarian bent who had long listened to statists claiming that this sort of communal undertaking was not possible in the modern world.

The very oldest were already making use of 'hemtjänst' -- people, and this part is funded by the government and is available for everybody, who come by a few days a week to clean the house, help them with tasks around the house, and with showers, haircuts and the like if needed. And since Swedish elders tend to live alone, and not with family members, we thought we were well set up to isolate the elders as compared to other places.

Most of the early deaths in Sweden came from people who were isolating, either collectively locked down in the care homes, or by their own choice though personally being visited by hemtjänst. Locking down the country as a whole wasn't going to get these people any more locked down than they already were doing voluntarily. And the greatest pandemic failures were had were related to *not enough isolating equipment for the staff here* and *improper training in how to use the equipment we did have*. It is notable that the variant of covid circulating in Sweden in 2020 was not the same variant as was circulating in Denmark, Norway or Finland (or Italy, and most of Europe). The variety we got was called 20B/S:1122L

and it was unique to Sweden and part of Latvia. Something called EU1 was the majority over most of Europe.

see the wonderful graphs at https://covariants.org for this information.

This has naturally fuelled speculation at the time that 1122L may have been more deadly than the EU1 sort. We'll never know now. But what was evident in the first measurements we took was that the people who were dying in the earliest stage of the pandemic were catching covid from their doctors, care providers (in homes and as hemtjänst), ambulance workers, cleaners who worked in the care home, etc. And these people were catching the disease from other people in their professions. We know this because for a while the variants remained separate, and they all circulated, yet the old people pretty much all got sick and died from 1122L, which meant that it wasn't 'general spread' that was the culprit here, but the focused spread of the variant which was prevailent in health-care settings. And if we had _had_ a lockdown in Sweden, there is no way that these particular workers would have been locked up -- they were the epitome of people doing vital work that could not be halted.

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