TheFluff posted:

that's exactly what I'm not doing you gigantic moron

I'm saying that at this point there's no loving way we can attribute bad or good outcomes to any particular action or lack thereof because we don't loving understand poo poo! I'm not loving saying Spain bad, Sweden good! Sweden is definitely not doing well. But nobody loving knows why! Every loving expert is saying "yeah we have no idea either lol" and yet here you are confidently proclaiming there's cause and effect, bing bong so simple. The data quality is generally garbage, the infection mechanisms are very poorly understood, there's a gazillion influencing factors that nobody knows how to control for and yet people are incredibly fixated on "number go up more here than there". It's nonsense.

TheFluff posted:

Even if Japan has 50-60% more cases than they're reporting (figures I've seen circulating recently) that still puts them far, far ahead of almost anyone else. Even with the oldest population in the world.


what this reads as to me is "i'm going to ignore any evidence that clashes with my pet hypothesis"


all i'm saying is, when the evidence is all over the loving place and the data quality is garbage and the experts are openly stating that this is very poorly understood, it's a bit too early to be yelling "off with his head"

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

Okay, say people agree with you. What's the next step? What is anyone, individuals or governments, supposed to do, if the only guiding principle is "nobody knows why things happen?" Just let the chips fall where they may, write off any consequences as ineffable?

Katt posted:

What if like. Various types of Corona have been moving around Asia for centuries and people there have a slight resistance to it?


I mean India has no public healthcare to speak of and people live crowded with poor sanitation. Their numbers should be in the millions easily. Even if they're bad at testing the bodies should have been piled to the rooftops at this point.

quote:

Aggressive testing, contact tracing, cooked meals: How the Indian state of Kerala flattened its coronavirus curve

NEW DELHI — For hours, the health worker ticked through a list of questions: How is your health? What is your state of mind? Are you running out of any food supplies? By the end of the afternoon, she had reached more than 50 people under coronavirus quarantine. Weeks earlier, that number was 200.

Sheeba T.M. was just one of more than 30,000 health workers in the Indian state of Kerala, part of the communist state government’s robust response to the coronavirus pandemic. Other efforts include aggressive testing, intense contact tracing, instituting a longer quarantine, building thousands of shelters for migrant workers stranded by the sudden nationwide shutdown and distributing millions of cooked meals to those in need.

The measures appear to be paying off. Even though Kerala was the first state in the country to report a coronavirus case in late January, the number of new cases in the first week of April dropped 30 percent from the previous week. With just two deaths, 52 percent of positive patients have recovered in the state, higher than elsewhere in India.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...19a9_story.html

quote:

The coronavirus slayer! How Kerala's rock star health minister helped save it from Covid-19

On 20 January, KK Shailaja phoned one of her medically trained deputies. She had read online about a dangerous new virus spreading in China. “Will it come to us?” she asked. “Definitely, Madam,” he replied. And so the health minister of the Indian state of Kerala began her preparations.

Four months later, Kerala has reported only 524 cases of Covid-19, four deaths and – according to Shailaja – no community transmission. The state has a population of about 35 million and a GDP per capita of only £2,200. By contrast, the UK (double the population, GDP per capita of £33,100) has reported more than 40,000 deaths, while the US (10 times the population, GDP per capita of £51,000) has reported more than 82,000 deaths; both countries have rampant community transmission.

As such, Shailaja Teacher, as the 63-year-old minister is affectionately known, has attracted some new nicknames in recent weeks – Coronavirus Slayer and Rockstar Health Minister among them. The names sit oddly with the merry, bespectacled former secondary school science teacher, but they reflect the widespread admiration she has drawn for demonstrating that effective disease containment is possible not only in a democracy, but in a poor one.

How has this been achieved? Three days after reading about the new virus in China, and before Kerala had its first case of Covid-19, Shailaja held the first meeting of her rapid response team. The next day, 24 January, the team set up a control room and instructed the medical officers in Kerala’s 14 districts to do the same at their level. By the time the first case arrived, on 27 January, via a plane from Wuhan, the state had already adopted the World Health Organization’s protocol of test, trace, isolate and support.

As the passengers filed off the Chinese flight, they had their temperatures checked. Three who were found to be running a fever were isolated in a nearby hospital. The remaining passengers were placed in home quarantine – sent there with information pamphlets about Covid-19 that had already been printed in the local language, Malayalam. The hospitalised patients tested positive for Covid-19, but the disease had been contained. “The first part was a victory,” says Shailaja. “But the virus continued to spread beyond China and soon it was everywhere.”

In late February, encountering one of Shailaja’s surveillance teams at the airport, a Malayali family returning from Venice was evasive about its travel history and went home without submitting to the now-standard controls. By the time medical personnel detected a case of Covid-19 and traced it back to them, their contacts were in the hundreds. Contact tracers tracked them all down, with the help of advertisements and social media, and they were placed in quarantine. Six developed Covid-19.

(...)

Places of worship were closed under the rules of lockdown, resulting in protests in some Indian states, but resistance has been noticeably absent in Kerala – in part, perhaps, because its chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, consulted with local faith leaders about the closures. Shailaja says Kerala’s high literacy level is another factor: “People understand why they must stay at home. You can explain it to them.”

(...)

Once the second wave has passed – if, indeed, there is a second wave – these teachers will return to schools. She hopes to do the same, eventually, because her ministerial term will finish with the state elections a year from now. Since she does not think the threat of Covid-19 will subside any time soon, what secret would she like to pass on to her successor? She laughs her infectious laugh, because the secret is no secret: “Proper planning.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/the-coronavirus-slayer-how-keralas-rock-star-health-minister-helped-save-it-from-covid-19

TheFluff posted:

fine, reword the first sentence to "there is no conclusive evidence that shows lockdown strategies to be effective". masks seem to help a bit i guess?

military cervix posted:

Yes, because there is a gargantuan difference in those two arguments. Guess I got lucky for managing to call you out on this without being called a gigantic moron.

V. Illych L. posted:

it's worth pointing out that norwegian technocrats also seem to have favoured a similar strategy to the swedish one, but the norwegian government's hand was forced by the municipalities due to a quirk of our emergency laws and so we ended up having to have politicians treat it as a political matter, which seems to have worked out pretty well for now

at its heart this is a discussion about the limits of the political and the merits of neoliberal technical governance - by all technocratic reason, some pissant nobodies in local authorities should be making enormously much worse decisions than the state epidemiologist with all the resources and models available to him. if this is not the case, the contemporary dismissal of lay knowledge and democratic governance loses a lot of authority

TheFluff posted:

What part of "the transmission is very poorly understood" is hard to grasp? Do you just call anything that science does not currently have a well established explanation for "magic"? There are countries with strong lockdowns and many deaths and there are countries with weak or no lockdowns and very few deaths. The conclusion I draw from that is there must be other factors that we don't understand yet that play a bigger role, not that the virus is literally magic.

TheFluff posted:

i'm saying is, when the evidence is all over the loving place and the data quality is garbage and the experts are openly stating that this is very poorly understood, it's a bit too early to be yelling "off with his head"

TheFluff posted:

on one hand i don't want to argue against this because i basically agree with you that technocracy is neoliberal garbage, but on the other hand i'd say this is a really poor argument towards that end

TheFluff posted:

i said something and then i said something different, you could say i changed my mind or refined the argument in response to counterarguments people brought up i guess?

big scary monsters posted:

What policy is most effective rather depends on what outcomes you're aiming for as well. It could be that Norwegian local authorities have different goals in responding to coronavirus than the national government.

V. Illych L. posted:

at its heart this is a discussion about the limits of the political and the merits of neoliberal technical governance - by all technocratic reason, some pissant nobodies in local authorities should be making enormously much worse decisions than the state epidemiologist with all the resources and models available to him. if this is not the case, the contemporary dismissal of lay knowledge and democratic governance loses a lot of authority

Cardiac posted:

How is it in Stockholm, is the elder care in anyway centralised or is it full of private enterprises?

Potrzebie posted:

I'll just leave this here.

https://www.di.se/debatt/redovisning-av-dodlighet-for-befolkningen-bakom-ljuset

TL;DR, YOU MORON!
The excess deaths is not remarkable in a historical context, unless you use absolute numbers rather than per capita.

E: I understand it to mean that most of our deaths would have been anyway, they just died of covid rather than influenza/vinterkräksjukan/other

V. Illych L. posted:

i might have misread the newspaper article, but if excess mortality is significant it is by definition remarkable since the baseline is the historical context. the narrow point about april not being literally the worst month since 1993 is true, but not relevant to the point i thought you were trying to make

V. Illych L. posted:

i might have misread the newspaper article, but if excess mortality is significant it is by definition remarkable since the baseline is the historical context. the narrow point about april not being literally the worst month since 1993 is true, but not relevant to the point i thought you were trying to make

Cardiac posted:

One could also argue that Sweden’s high mortality rates is more of a Stockholm issue than a Sweden issue.
Especially if one does the comparison between Stockholm and Skåne, where Skåne so-far is far from Stockholm’s mortality rates.

SplitSoul posted:

Not content to let Støjberg toil in the commission on her clearly intentional violation of the ECHR and accountability act, the Minister of Integration now wants to ban non-binding wedding ceremonies for minors, which is supposedly a hugely widespread problem in the Muslim community, even though nobody has a clue if it happens and to what extent. Støjberg's defense is the mantra "Child brides!", that's why she had to lie to parliament and openly disregard the ECHR and the Ministry of Justice's evaluation on the legality of her directive, so the party whose sitting Foreign Minister hosed a kid has to appear proactive on the issue and blame the Muslims. Meanwhile, scores of Danes have been legally married with royal letters of consent in the past 20 years, and Støjberg's own party let former MP and convicted pedophile Flemming Oppfeldt run for city council just a few years ago.

D. Ebdrup posted:

Threadkiller Dog posted:

part time staff that couldnt afford to stay home sick. No one expected that apparently....

Threadkiller Dog posted:

If you're an hourly/on call with a zero hour contract being sick means a grand total of 0 sek for the duration. Would you even get that compensation for the first day now?

PederP posted:

Doesn't Sweden have labor unions? I'm not being entirely sarcastic. Considering that Denmark is the one being called out as a bourgeoisie shithole on a regular basis, it surprises me that Danish labor laws are ahead and that compensation packages for the roni apparently have better conditions for part-time/hourly-paid workers than in Sweden.

PederP posted:

Doesn't Sweden have labor unions? I'm not being entirely sarcastic. Considering that Denmark is the one being called out as a bourgeoisie shithole on a regular basis, it surprises me that Danish labor laws are ahead and that compensation packages for the roni apparently have better conditions for part-time/hourly-paid workers than in Sweden.

I remember being an 18-year old factory worker with my first real job and getting sick. I got a slip from the factory owner (who was also the head manager) with numbers and was told I could hand it in at the municipal office and get paid for the sickdays. After working a few months and having had some sickdays, the manager one day sauntered up and asked why I hadn't cashed in on my sick pay. I told him that I wouldn't take money out of public coffers that I didn't need, since I lived with my parents, and I'd rather the money be spent on someone more needy. To each according to his need and so forth. He was incredulous, "you're turning down money?", and shuffled away. From that day I think he thought I was insane.

But since I was paid by the hour and based on the physical output, I think even back then we had pretty good protection of sick workers. I know the conditions are worse for long-term sickness now, but it's strange to me that Sweden has karens-dage and such, when that's something we ditched decades ago in Denmark. Which brings me back to the first question: What are your labor unions doing, if workers are still not protected properly against sickness?

MiddleOne posted:

If you were booked you have an employment for those specific hours. You get called in sick, you get the karensavdrag (100% wage deduction for first sick day) which you can then apply for karensersättning (490 SEK Net compensation) from Försäkringskassan based on. Fun fact, if you have multiple employeers, or you have days inbetween when you've been booked, you're still only allowed to apply for one karensersättning for every 5 days, no matter how many deductions you've gotten. It's such a lovely lovely quick fix.

As for real sick-pay getting it is still somewhere inbetween difficult and impossible. Unless you're booked for a lot of days in a row and you're real lucky about on which day you get sick, no money for you.


In a magical time period known as the 90's/early 00's a social democratic government — quickly followed by a conservative government — dramatically deregulated our labour contract laws to allow for greater use of non-permanent contracts. Now employments can be as insecure or as short as the employeer wants.

Only whoops, our entire system is built around employees having permanent — or at least semi-permanent — contracts. When you're on allmän visstid for example (only formally employed for the hours of each individual shift) you're virtually a second-class citizen. You might be working 40 hours a week on a predictable schedule, but your rights aren't anywhere near as solid as someone with a permanent contract. You live and die at your immediate bosses goodwill and the law in many cases simply doesn't apply for you.

Just off the top of my head:

1. No labour security outside of what has been contracted
2. Virtually no right to sick pay
3. Shut out of workplace meetings (arbetsplatsträff for example)
4. No vacation bonus pay
5. No right of re-employment in future hirings
6. No right of transfer in case of workplace conflict
7. Virtually no day, week and month hour limitation laws on how much you can be scheduled
8. No compensation for political work
9. Limited access to the housing market

Unions have been a combination of powerless, ineffective and short-sighted in fighting this because over in permanent contract land (an ever shrinking population in our labour market) much is still fine.