Menu Sign In Contact FAQ
Banner
Welcome to our forums

Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

gallois wrote:

I looks like Norway did handle things very well and have also learnt things for future pandemics.

Norway came out of this unbelievably well as it actually had negative excess deaths during the pandemic. That’s a feat no other country managed. No doubt things were handled well, but also other factors like its geographical location with land borders to only a few, likewise sparsely populated, countries was strongly in its favour.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Thanks for the summation @LeSving
It looks as if it was quite efficient stating the basics of what went right and what went wrong.
I looks like Norway did handle things very well and have also learnt things for future pandemics.
I also agree with RobertL18C that every country will be different but I hope our Governments have learnt from what they did badly and how to do better next time.

France

The problem with these enquiries they are dealing with different countries and different terms of reference to easily read across.

Scandinavia has a lower density of population, better than average wealth and wealth distribution, better than average health services capacity, and arguably a culture where civic obedience is a virtue.

Oxford (EGTK), United Kingdom

The Norwegian inquiry can be read here (if you can read it ) This is technically part 2, but part 1 was finished before the pandemic was over, more like an interim report.

Basically it say the pandemic was handled (exceptionally) well all things considered.

  • One of the lowest mortalities
  • One of the lowest reduction of economic activity
  • One of the least intrusive and burdensome measures.

Bad points:

  • The health care was not at all prepared for anything like this.
  • Very resourceful and creative handling of the vaccine situation (combined with friendly EU and some friendly countries). However, this showed a general weakness in the vaccine situation.
  • Very messy handling of the boarders and messy and changing measures.
  • The immigrant population did not receive good enough communication (disproportionally affected by the disease)
  • The measures affected children and young people way too hard.
  • The pandemic has widened the social and economic differences in the society.
The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Yes – young people suffered badly. Socially too by not being able to see their friends.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Peter wrote:

that may be the biggest cost of all

IMO (and not only mine) the biggest cost for the future will be the school closures.

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

I’m sure the situation was similar in most countries that applied extensive protective measures.

I agree… with some variations due to differences in covid vulnerability among health workers e.g. the UK NHS workers were a lot more vulnerable (genetics and lifestyle) than say the E European immigrant workers in the German health service. Sweden, I don’t know; maybe halfway?

The cost of the measures is absolutely huge and much bigger than the obvious subsidy etc cost. The lockdowns and the peripheral business support measures produced a generation of dead lazy people. This ranges from Italian ski lift workers turning up at 9am or later if they feel like it (used to be 8:15 on the dot at Cervinia) through GPs locking down their appointment allocation systems to stretch waiting times to so many weeks you forget why you wanted to see them, through the CAA taking weeks what used to take days, through industry degrading its customer service to an often useless level.

Then the underlying cost of the most experienced people anywhere “re-evaluating their life” and taking early retirement (able to do so because most were “all paid off”) which destroyed so much commercial and industrial capability and that may be the biggest cost of all. I heard that some 7 digit number of people vanished from the workforce in the UK and these were generally the very best people any company had. IME, since 1978, and even in a company with a high % of young workers (which mine was) the few employees over 40 produced about 90% of the useful activity so losing the 50+ ones would be devastating.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I’m sure the situation was similar in most countries that applied extensive protective measures.

I’m sure that’s right in terms of the level of wasted resources, and moreover the issue is not just the short term money already spent, it’s the damaging long term effects on society that are not yet resolved. Anybody with common sense could see what was happening, and what would happen, from the inception of the government over reaction.

I am glad to see one government come clean. Perhaps more will follow.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 27 Nov 15:06

Airborne_Again wrote:

According to major Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, researchers of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health have published a report about the cost of the Covid pandemic. They estimate that about 2000 lives were saved by Norwegian pandemic measures – measures that came at a societal cost of about €120 million for each saved life. They note that this is about 100 times more than what the Norwegian government is normally prepared to spend on saving a person in productive age from a lethal disease. (And then most of the 2000 were people over 80 years of age that already had health problem.)

I’m sure the situation was similar in most countries that applied extensive protective measures.

This came up at the time, but QUALYs and health spending were not something the public was ever going to understand or a road politicians were going to go down.

EGLM & EGTN

You could well be right. But what was the alternative? Does the research come to any conclusions on that in case there is another pandemic? One also has to ask whose money were they spending?

France
10031 Posts
Sign in to add your message

Back to Top