A Swedish doctor's perspective on Covid - <AUTHOR> https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/08/04/how-bad-is-covid-really-a-swedish-doctors-perspective/ <comment><USER2> Sweden didn't go into total lockdown but still did a lot. In the grocery store the cashiers are in a plastic bubble. Wherever there is a line there are marks on the floor to show where to wait to keep distance. Nobody shakes hands for quite some time. Yes, people go to Cafes/restaurants but restaurants have been assessed and assigned covid-friendly seating layouts. There are many more things that clearly separate today from last year for daily life in Sweden.

So numbers going down and death rate staying low should be partly connected to this. Also, Sweden is quite a different country to begin with. Sparsely populated and half of all households are single person. So this 'doctor' is a bit careless while he tells the world to do like Sweden. It might end up much worse.

<comment><USER3> > Sweden didn't go into total lockdown but still did a lot.

Indeed; both Sweden ([https://ycharts.com/indicators/sweden_unemployment_rate](https://ycharts.com/indicators/sweden_unemployment_rate)) and Norway ([https://ycharts.com/indicators/norway_unemployment_rate](https://ycharts.com/indicators/norway_unemployment_rate)) have experienced anomalous increases in their unemployment rates that seem clearly linked to the pandemic.

If the article's thesis is correct that Sweden minimally-disrupted the status quo, then we would have expected to see little employment response.

<comment><USER4> That would assume Sweden's economy is completely independent of its European neighbors and even the rest of the world. In 2020, that's not true at all. Even without Covid, recessions in the US or Germany or other large economic partners will cause problems for small countries like Sweden.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "COVID is over in Sweden" is a pretty bold claim with ~400 daily infections, and increasing again as per [https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...](https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa)

Just like in other EU countries, it is now the younger population which seems mostly affected, and thus the mortality is lower - which is ultimately some good news.

Summer holidays are now almost over though, so people are traveling home from vacations abroad, are going back to work, schools will start up soon and people finally get access again to health care (good luck seeing a doctor in July in Sweden). The impact remains to be seen, but it would be surprising if most other EU countries see infections increasing but not Sweden.

I remain pretty skeptical of this Swedish exceptionalism, so my guess is this blog post will not age well.

<comment><USER6> [https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deathrate&oq=sw...](https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deathrate&oq=sweden+covid+deathrate&aqs=chrome..69i57.7800j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

Sweden's death rate is down to zero today and has been trending down since mid April. Summer Holidays did not start until late May where deaths were already half of what they were in mid April. This post isn't aging, it's already aged.

<comment><USER7> > Sweden's death rate is down to zero today

No, it isn't.

Sweden has fairly laggy reporting of deaths, with the deaths often taking several weeks to show up in statistics, so at any given date, deaths attributed to the last few days are always dropping to close to zero.

I looked into this a bit in mid-APRIL, when somebody claimed that deaths were dropping to zero. At the time, substantial revisions occurred for about three weeks after the date, and occasional revisions for about four weeks.

(It's entirely possible that similar phenomena occur in other countries; Sweden is the only country I looked at in detail).

<comment><USER8> Several weeks is a bit of an exaggeration. Lag in reporting has been around 4-5 days on average. Lately the lag has increased somewhat as the number of reported deaths has gone down.

Don't take my word for it, see for yourself at [https://morberg.github.io/covid- notebook/covid.html](https://morberg.github.io/covid-notebook/covid.html)

GitHub repo here: [https://github.com/morberg/covid- notebook](https://github.com/morberg/covid-notebook)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are a lot of highly problematic claims in the article. This one stood out to me:

>Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is available. That could take years. No country is willing to wait that long.

Actually it might very well just be half a year until we have a vaccine. Multiple candidate vaccines are in phase 3 and they are already being produced en masse, ready to be released if the vaccines prove to be successful. And it's not like other countries in Europe "shut down completely" and remain shut until today. In Germany people are leading their normal lives, the only difference being that people wear masks in super markets, register on a list when visiting a restaurant and there are no mass events/discotheques. Remaining at this status for half a year or maybe a year to prevent tens of thousands of deaths seems extremely doable.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, it appears that a significant chunk of people are not interested in taking the vaccine. [1] If only half of Americans are going to get the vaccine (that figure is from May polling, referenced below), we can't pin all of our hopes on it.

I should note that I'm not saying it's unreasonable of people to be hesitant to take this particular vaccine, given how it is being rushed. Even scientists have said that there is not currently enough evidence of safety/efficacy that they would feel comfortable taking it or giving it to their families. [2]

1: [https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/08/01/897939117/public-health-expert-calls-to-repair-distrust-in- a-covid-19-vaccine)

2: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/sunday/coronaviru...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/03/opinion/sunday/coronavirus- vaccine-efficacy-trials.html)

<comment><USER11> Those that don't take the vaccine will get the virus and, if they survive, similar immunity.

<comment><USER12> Clarification: You can still get infected by viruses after you receive vaccines for them. Your severity of infection will be lower, but it's still possible to get sick even with a vaccine, just less sick than you would've.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i don't know what is the actual truth and we probably won't know which way was the "correct" decision until well after this pandemic is over (assuming it ends). i think the biggest issue with the US response is the bad messaging and iffy attempts at lockdown and reopening.

taiwan didn't go into lockdown but the country respects social distancing and masks and is very adamant about quarantining, tracing and cleaning.

do you think the average american citizen will adhere to any of that? forced quarantine for 14 days if you are infected or fly-in while a phone app afterward traces your movements to make sure future outbreaks can be traced? will people wear masks? will people maintain the social good over the individual? (answer for the US is apparently not)

i don't know culturally how sweden viewed these things but from what i can tell most people at least tried to maintain some form of social distancing. some swede can chime in here and correct me on that.

but what they've said about the nordic countries though, is that sweden's economy has shrank the same size as denmark's[0], while denmark which went into lockdown, suffered 8x fewer deaths, 5x fewer by percentage of population. that is the effect no lockdown has had on sweden.

also as a discussion to that both sweden and denmark's new cases are slowly creeping up, but denmark's is at about a quarter (~100/day) compared to sweden (~400/day).

[0]: 4.5 for sweden, 4.1 for denmark. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden- economy-c...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy- coronavirus.html)

<comment><USER14> Yes you are correct during the worst part of corona my experience is not the same as the doctor from the article. Many people strictly kept away from places with large amount of people close together. A lot of employers changed to work from home. My employer says we will continue WFH until end of year. That said people still socialised, though outside and in smaller groups.

In the end our high mortality rate can't be overlooked. We need to change our strategy for future similar pandemics. That said, I think the most interesting stats to look at when deciding what we should have done differently is the breakdown of deaths per age-group. Less than 100 deaths are among people younger than 50. So almost all of our ~6000 deaths were among the elderly. That is what needs to change. Next time we need to be quicker at protecting the old. Otherwise our strategy could have worked, the rest seem to be able to build up their defences to the virus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "In total covid has killed under 6,000 people in a country of ten million. A country with an annual death rate of around 100,000 people."

This is basically deliberate disinformation. In April and early May Sweden had 30-50% excess mortality. And this was despite actually stopping the virus through soft lockdown. What the full count would have been had they let the virus rage unchecked is hard to say, but he's comparing the numbers from a virus that was stopped relatively early with the normal numbers of deaths for a whole year. Do the same exercise for April and it doesn't look good at all.

The reality is that more than 5000 people died unnecessarily in Sweden through failed government policy. And that's before we start counting the adverse health effects on the people who survived.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the charts are pretty stark and show that Sweden has fared worse than the other nordic countries: [https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus- chart/?areas=swe&areas=nor&are...](https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus- chart/?areas=swe&areas=nor&areas=dnk&areas=isl&areas=eur&areas=fin&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&cumulative=0&logScale=1&perMillion=1&values=deaths) or compare excess mortality between Sweden and other nordic countries in the charts halfway down [https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...](https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938) I'm surprised the myth of Sweden doing well is still being bruited about.

<comment><USER17> Sweden chart is going downhill at the same rate as other countries with strict lockdown. There is a significant gap in mortality but I think the point is that people initially thought they would explode with COVID cases like early days in Wuhan (i.e. graph will go up, not down). Now it looks like they either have already hit zero new cases or going to hit them very soon. I think this is important fact worthy of studying deeply.

<comment><USER16> Check the charts I shared. They did explode initially, with far higher rates than similar countries, and they have taken much longer than similar countries to bring their death rates down. The earlier poster suggesting over 5000 more dead as a direct result of the policy is borne out by all cause mortality comparisons with similar countries.

Now possibly all these countries will be able to keep their low rates, but I'm concerned about the future: number of cases is on the rise again in Europe as a whole and increases in deaths will probably follow within the next month. I think we're still a way from being able to make a final reckoning.

The do-not-lock down case is mainly that we won't be able to control it until there's a vaccine, so lock down or no, total deaths will be similar. This isn't bourne out by the figures. Countries that allowed a larger spike initially have had much higher mortality rates (e.g. Compare the UK and Germany with now similar infection rates but very different mortality rates). Flattening the curve genuinely does seem to save lives.

The UK was keen to play the herd immunity game until they realised just how many people that would kill.

<comment><USER18> Every "minor second wave" rise I have seen seems to be followed by a much smaller (if any!) rise in deaths than the waves in the first half of the year, at least in countries were the health system isn't completely overrun. It might be improved testing capacity and strategies leaving a smaller fraction of infections undiscovered but I doubt that: we are _less_ and to predict test outcome now that the virus is everywhere a little instead of concentrated in few, intensive clusters and capacity hasn't improved _that_ much. Another explanation that I often hear is that somehow spread has now shifted to younger people but why would that be? Older people tend to be less mobile, aren't socializing as widely, in short: they are more likely to be dead-ends for the virus than the young. Is expect the elderly to be just as much receivers infection chains spread by the young in March as in July.

That leaves us with improved treatment. We clearly don't have a miracle drug, but my impressive is that doctors know much better now than a few months ago what actually causes Covid-deaths and that they are now far beyond just supplying oxygen according to treatment recipes for completely different illnesses and hoping for the best. I expect the implications of this to become the center of heated debates any day now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Only thing anyone can do is go to a shoe store, buy some running shoes and start running like 5 to 10 miles a week. Lay out in the sun and start eating healthier. If you can't run just walk. Play basketball, play soccer whatever. Why do people worry so much about things they can't control, when there are things they actually can control. If some of my facebook friends were more worried about walking everyday instead of who is and isn't wearing a mask they wouldn't be 250lbs.

<comment><USER11> This.

Have been taking hour walks in the sun since May.

Never have I gotten so much sun before! Feels great

<comment><USER20> Some of us are allergic to the sun...

Still do what I can at sunrise and set

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> " _Covid has at present killed less than 6000 in Sweden. It is very unlikely that the number of dead will go above 7,000. An average influenza year in Sweden, 700 people die of influenza._ "

The average number of people who die of influenza in the US is about 35,000. So we should expect 350,000 deaths and then we'll be all good?

<comment><USER22> I think his point is you can't compare the impact of the flu because 1) it hits every year (versus a quick outbreak) and 2) many people are vaccinated.

Don't forget the '17 flu seasons was 65k deaths in the US. So we're at a little under 3x right now. So yes, Covid is worse, but we don't bat an eye at 65k deaths due to the flu.

<comment><USER23> Consider that recovery from coronaplague is lengthy and that a good amount of those discharged form hospital are looking at permanently reduced lung function. Death isn't the best metric here.

<comment><USER24> I hear this a lot, but I've never seen this claim put in context of a comparison to lung function following viral pneumonia from viruses other than SARS-CoV-2.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I've only hear about it as a typical result of pneumonia

<comment><USER23> Yes, but severe pneumonia is what sends COVID patients to hospital. It's a frequent complication, much more frequent than in the annual flu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sweden achieved zero excess mortality in June.

Excess mortality is the best measure, because it accounts for the impact of the disease, as well as the impact of actions taken to fight it (not all of which will be good).

Looking only at covid deaths is therefore misleading, as it only optimizes for that one thing. Looking at the big picture is the better way to make policy.

[https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality- covid](https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid)

</comment><comment><USER27> > "it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics […] Covid will > never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut > down their entire economies"

> "That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality."

This sounds wrong to me for several reasons. First of all, it's silly assuming that other countries are shutting down their economies without a very good reason for doing so. As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & death rate was growing so fast, that it was putting hospitals & morgues way beyond their capacity. At the same time, the situation was keeping non-COVID, hospital-worthy visits out of the healthcare system, thus creating a massive public health problem.

(Let's not forget the improvised hospitals, improvised morgues, etc. These were very real.)

It'd be interesting knowing why somehow the COVID cases 'vanished' from this doctor's hospital. But instead of looking into why this happened, this doctor is just saying "turns out that the problem went away, so in the end it was good that we didn't bother too much about it".

And the thing is - we're not through it yet. Thankfully the death rate seems not being as bad as we thought it could be, but this could very well be down to current measures such as isolating elder people, testing at-risk populations, higher awareness levels, and the fact that the average infection age is now much lower than it was in March. So, now, healthcare systems are not collapsing.

There's a myriad of variables that likely affect the virus spread and outcome. For example, the age and characteristics of the populations where the virus is spreading, how population is distributed around the territory (and its density), how frequently this population "comes together" (social behavior - ever seen a swede profusely hugging and kissing?, public transportation, remote working…), and so on.

And when it comes to the healthcare system capacity debate: Sweden frequently put elder, infected people straight in palliative care ([http://archive.is/VC5vb](http://archive.is/VC5vb)), bypassing hospitals. Other countries did admit elder people into hospitals, thus putting more strain into the healthcare system, which later on prompted a lockdown to prevent said system from collapsing.

<comment> _-___________-_ > First of all, it's silly assuming that other countries are shutting down > their economies without a very good reason for doing so.

I certainly wouldn't want to assume that governments only ever do the correct thing, or the thing that is in my best interests, so I think it's reasonable to ask questions.

> As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & > death rate was growing so fast, that it was putting hospitals & morgues way > beyond their capacity. At the same time, the situation was keeping non- > COVID, hospital-worthy visits out of the healthcare system, thus creating a > massive public health problem.

The UK enlisted the army to build enormous field hospitals and staffed them with doctors and nurses from other hospitals. Most of them closed after seeing only a few patients, since all other hospitals were operating far below capacity. Emergency rooms were ghost towns. Meanwhile, all elective surgery was cancelled, reducing the quality of life for thousands of people while doctors stood around waiting for the promised influx that never happened.

It seems to me that the response in the West has been largely reactionary, driven by fear and public opinion, and disconnected from any real analysis of what genuinely works and what the long-term plan is -- with the possible exception of Sweden, who despite all the "they don't care" rhetoric you see in other comments, not only put a lot of analytical care into their approach, but discussed that analysis openly.

<comment><USER27> Maybe it was based on seeing what happened in other countries, ie. Spain and Italy? I can say for sure that the impact in the health care system here in Spain was very significant.

<comment><USER28> It's hard to disentangle cause and effect though. Countries that were very hard hit also had the most extreme government reactions to it. This can compromise the efficiency of the healthcare system, for example, I've read that in Spain at the peak of the epidemic many nurses and doctors were self- isolating because they'd tested positive, so there was a huge loss of healthcare capacity. Then later on it was discovered that a lot of positive tests are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people don't transmit the disease, so this just hurt healthcare capacity for no reason.

Many countries had problems with care home workers abandoning their jobs, for example to return to their home countries before borders closed. There are some quite horrific stories of the terrible conditions created in care homes in some of the places with excess death spikes.

The imagery of ice-rink morgues etc had a similar effect. There was no real demand surge for morgue space, but undertakers were refusing to work until they were supplied with ample PPE because they thought they would be infected by the bodies with a killer virus. Same story in Bergamo. So then a sudden shortfall in PPE was converted into a shortfall in funeral capacity, even though at that point there was no sudden tsunami of bodies. This then led to more panic especially amongst health system workers.

It's very hard to disentangle what really went on here.

<comment><USER27> > "Then later on it was discovered that a lot of positive tests are > asymptomatic and asymptomatic people don't transmit the disease, so this > just hurt healthcare capacity for no reason"

I think it makes sense to isolate anyone who tests PCR positive for coronavirus, right?

Also, is it 100% sure that asymptomatic people will not transmit the disease? What if they are just pre-symptomatic? Where do you establish the cut-off?

<comment><USER28> No. Why would it? Given how mild almost all infections are, and that doctors/nurses can routinely save lives from much more serious conditions, it's a strange cost/benefit analysis that assumes it's better to lose huge chunks of healthcare capacity than for some people to get COVID.

Asymptomatic is being used as a different classification than pre-symptomatic in the literature. Asymptomatic means you never develop symptoms. Pre- symptomatic means you haven't yet but will. Pre-symptomatic phase is not long though. Typically just 1-3 days, I think, from the latest literature.

Given the tiny window of time that exists when people are infectious and might not know it, and given the very low likelyhood of a PCR test being done in exactly that time, and given that PCR testing has a lot of problems (e.g. triggers even if your body has destroyed the virus), and given that nurses and doctors are pretty important, I can't see it being useful to actively test in hospitals. It's everywhere by now anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sweden is effectively as locked down as anywhere else. The prevalence of the virus is diminishing there because people are not going out and getting sick, rendering R_t<1\. I don't participate in social distancing because my government says to, and I certainly don't stop because my government says to either.

<comment><USER22> _Sweden is effectively as locked down as anywhere else._

Is that true? Are all the schools closed? Are most people working from home? Are most businesses shutdown?

That's not what I've read (outside this article).

<comment><USER9> But this is also not the case for all the other countries in Europe which (according to the author) have taken the wrong approach to COVID. The more I think about it the more this article confuses and worries me. It's a thinkpiece that is not grounded in the scientific reality.

<comment><USER30> > It's a thinkpiece that is not grounded in the scientific reality.

What does that _mean_? As a scientist myself, 'science' can basically never say anything definitive about reality. Not for something extremely well measured and controlled like GR, and especially not something where the evidence on the ground and influencing factors (policy, social opinion, culture) shift with a frequency on the same order of scale that our measurements can be tallied.

<comment><USER6> It means that people who have no idea what science is like to pretend they have a deeper reason for their biases other than their innate preferences. They do not like that pointed out to them and will violently react to anyone who does.

You can't have a scientific response to the virus when you don't know what the asymptomatic transmission rate is, or what the true death rate is. As can be seen here it does not go well when they are made to even consider that they don't have all the information needed for a scientific response: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077233)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> NYC is a good case study since it's one of the first place hit and is now more or less "done" with covid in the same sense used in this article (it had a peak and is now on the right tail).

NYC is at 2716 cases per 100k and 281 deaths per 100k: [https://www.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases](https://www.cdc.gov/covid- data-tracker/#cases)

States with aggressive reopening policies like Florida/Louisana/Arizona etc had spikes recently but are also coming back down. They are sitting at around 2-3k cases per 100k (deaths will lag).

Even if the reason why those states "peaked" is because of herd immunity, it seems like it still requires at least 3k cases per 100k. That would translate to 300k cases for a population of 10 million but Sweden is only at 80k right now.

I highly doubt they have herd immunity.

<comment><USER32> Your numbers are way off.

25% percent of NYC was seropositive in May. So that works out to about 25k per 100k people.

The reported cases have always been just the tip of the iceberg. And we never knew how big the underwater part was. We still down't.

Take the current situation, is the disease penetration larger than that in March/April? Most likely not, not even close, yet the reported new cases are about 5x larger.

<comment><USER33> The most recent, randomized studies of the NYC metro area finds SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in about 14% of participants when they randomly solicit people directly. Prior studies put out ads looking for participants, naturally drawing in people who "had that unexplained thing a few months back".

Even when directly appealing to people the participation rate is likely higher among people who suspect they may have had it.

We know that testing was very limited early in the outbreak, when NYC was hit, and that it caught only a fraction of the people infected. But all metrics are that there is still a huge victim base in the area.

The drop is more likely entirely behavioral.

<comment><USER32> Good to know. My 25% numbers were from an announcement by Cuomo where the report claimed that the sample collection and data processing (corrections) were statistically sound.

Even at 14% seropositivity the true number of people that had the virus is likely larger. There are reports that some (many?) people that recover do so without needed antibodies.

Working backwards, taking the fairly accepted value of 0.6% fatality rate, the 30K deaths in NYC would indicate around 5 million infections. Now the the NYC fatality rate is likely higher due to Cuomo's mind boggling order regarding nursing homes.

Regardless I think it is fair to estimate that the true number of cases in NYC is likely to fall between the reported 400k and the upper limit of 5 million. At 25% seropositivity would be around 2 million, to me sounds believable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would COVID have been a "pandemic" if we did not have the internet? The Swedish perspective is interesting. I wonder if Google trends can be broken down by nation to reflect what the concerns of different countries are. How many COVID searches in Sweden vs the US vs other nations ?

<comment><USER35> it's not even pandemic really, in Czechia we consider flu epidemic when we have 1500 active cases per 100K population, with coronavirus we are on like 50 active cases per 100K population with roughly 1-2 infected deaths (don't confuse with deaths because of virus, it's just very sick people who are at same time also infected) per day, some days 0-1, some days max 4-5 despite everything completely open - bars, restaurants, shops, you don't need face mask anywhere even indoor like 1.5 month and pretty much nobody wears face mask

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Finland has roughly half Sweden's population but 5% of their COVID deaths. Sweden's economy contracted 8.6% to the EU's 11.9%.

Hope those 5000+ unnecessary deaths were worth 3.3%.

"Considering that 70% of those who have died of covid are over 80 years old, quite a few of those 6,000 would have died this year anyway."

Wow.

<comment><USER37> At $100k per quality-adjusted life-year and 10 QALY lost per death, those 5k deaths are $5B, about 1% of Sweden's GDP. So by the same math used to determine if medical treatments are cost-effective, it's breakeven if that GDP difference persists for about four months. We should also account for QALY lost due to people who get severely ill but recover, but I'd guess the net result is surprisingly close to breakeven. Perhaps this means the policymakers just chose different but roughly equivalent (by that math) options, or perhaps that's just chance.

Of course you could say that math is horrible and inhumane, and any equation involving dollars and human lives will feel that way. But the point is that health care spending is already rationed by something like that standard, and every dollar of GDP that disappears is a dollar that's unavailable to spend in other ways (including medical treatments that are cost-effective by that standard).

To be clear, I think Sweden erred by not mandating masks, which seem cost- effective to me by that standard. Their response otherwise seems reasonable to me, not obviously better than stricter approaches but not obviously worse.

<comment><USER38> Plausible long-term damage to the brain of a significant percentage of COVID patients, in both severe and non-severe cases—-according to a Lancet paper—should change the QALY-based calculation by a great deal.

[https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...](https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137738752)

<comment><USER39> That is an incredibly bad paper. They have gone on a fishing expedition across dozens of algorithmically detected differences, barely adjusted their statistical significance thresholds to make up for the fact that they're searching for _something_ that might be "significant", and even then, the best they can do is come up with...50% of people have something. A coin toss.

This is the medical literature version of the xkcd green M&M comic:

[https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Are we now going to ignore the weeks of horror that New York went through and many South American countries are going through right now?

Contrary to the author's claims, no one in their right mind went into lockdown trying to decrease the total number of deaths, not directly at least. Lockdowns were/are there to smoothen the spike of cases and prevent medical system from the overload.

As to diminishing cases, could it be that people got the habits of social distancing and hand washing? In a small country without large cities it would not take much to take R_t to the values that are close enough to 1.0.

</comment><comment><USER41> Its baffling that lots of government still want to continue the lockdown.

<comment><USER42> It's baffling that you would take this singular anecdotal factually-cherry- picked account of one doctors experience during one nations allegedly ineffective (lack of a) response to COVID as sensible advice moving forward.

For one, his per-capita-death-rates are wayyy off. (1 out of 200 dying? try around 8% in Spain and Italy...)

For 2, yes, it's precisely about slowing the spread 1) giving a chance for emergency services to handle the influx instead of being slammed in one go 2) attempting to quash a given outbreak

So many sweeping generalizations here and so little counter-point to the facts the general public have become well-acquainted with, I'm afraid our Good Doctor seems a bit eccentric and witless writing such a trivializing dismissive blog post.

Let's call him "an outlier" even for Sweden, as travel is not making his strange claims that "covid is over for Sweden" look even sillier.

Covid is not finished for "the world" at large, and it's an interconnected world, and suspicion of "t-cells bearing COVID immunity rather than antibodies" as if the PCR were just a cheap placebo test and no antibodies were detected in prior COVID sufferers (it does detect them.)... this is all making light of what deserves serious engagement.

Fire this man or get a committee investigating his various claims as flippant blogs are not the appropriate realm for such incendiary topics.

<comment><USER37> > 1 out of 200 dying? try around 8% in Spain and Italy...

You have conflated the CFR and IFR, and are thereby spreading gross misinformation. From the article:

> And remember, the risk of dying is at the very most 1 in 200 if you actually > do get infected.

They're talking about the risk of dying "if you actually do get infected" (i.e., IFR), not the risk of dying if you get infected and test positive (i.e., CFR). Most people infected suffer mild enough symptoms that they don't seek a test, so the CFR is much higher than the IFR. This is especially true during severe outbreaks, where people with mild symptoms are explicitly encouraged to just stay home until they get better (or worse) to avoid further stressing the medical system.

A recent meta-analysis estimates the IFR around 0.7%[1], a little higher than the Swedish doctor's numbers but pretty close. The exact number will vary dramatically with the age structure of the population, since the IFR is >100x for old people vs. young.

1\. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v4.full.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've posted this in replies but I want to put it as a top-level comment as well.

Here's a chart showing the effective transmission rate (R value) as a function of "social connectivity" and "herd immunity";

[https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1291860668342079490?s=21](https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1291860668342079490?s=21)

I think what you can find in many examples across the globe is that without an innate geographical advantage or well-established cultural protocols, you cannot reduce "social connectivity" enough with an immunity of 0% to keep R below 1.

For most peoples and places, it's only through a combination of reducing social connectivity and increased immunity that R will ultimately fall below 1.

Interestingly, both factors do not necessarily only move in one direction along the axis over time, and neither factor can be entirely controlled, even given an effective and widely produced vaccine.

I can only pray that at least immunity is quite durable, lest we find ourselves in a repeating cycle of R cresting well above 1.

At least until an effective vaccine is available, there is a massive cost to pay to push R downward, _regardless_ of which axis you choose to push on.

And the next time someone laments why did we lockdown if only to end up with so many cases, I think for most countries the only answer to get to R below 1 is actually that "you need both".

<comment><USER44> If I'm interpreting this series of graphs correctly, it's also assuming that social contact is uniformly distributed across the population (i.e. every person has an equal number of daily contacts). The less true that is, the fewer people need to be infected for herd immunity effects to become significant. We don't have good numbers on what the real distribution is, but there is growing evidence this is a significant effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've seen some other comments echo this sentiment. I was never "stunned" by how lethal this virus is. Though I have read plenty of stories to realize it can be (and in a lot of instances) was brutal for people who had it. I did, however, have a breakthrough in my understanding as to why they shut everything down.

Everyone, as far as I'm concerned, has a right to proper healthcare. The medical professionals realized early on that based on how easily the virus spreads and how it is plenty more lethal than a common cold, they knew letting everyone catch it at the same time would've overwhelmed the healthcare system. There is no chance most people would've gotten proper care, thus more people would've died than had to.

I'm still not fully convinced of what the doctor had to say. Let's give it a full-year where we've gone through all the seasons to see if he really is right about the fact that Sweden did it the right way.

EDIT: Also, during those first months medical professionals learned more about how to handle it. They took those learnings and applied them to the next group of patients. That knowledge would've never been put to use (in theory) if everyone had the virus at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER46> Counter arguments:

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20096909v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20096909v1)

[https://covid19-projections.com/denmark](https://covid19-projections.com/denmark) vs [https://covid19-projections.com/sweden](https://covid19-projections.com/sweden)

Its also possible Sweden just got lucky with the prevalent strain [https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.233866v1....](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.233866v1.full.pdf)

I would love it if Sweden was right and tackled this in a way that does look like a seasonal flu, but I think the science is still out on that. It does seem the science points mildly towards it being quite as deadly as initially thought, but I would not the Swedish death rate a total win.

<snark> Forget all that Sweden is the best approach, we should copy it in America especially the very solid social health care system :) </snark>

<comment><USER22> Your first paper isn't a counter argument at all. It's just a measure of excess deaths (which the doctor never claimed weren't happening).

<comment><USER46> true that.

I guess my counter would be:

* It was solved at a greater expense of human life, its easy to say "those people would have died" but that is harder to prove ethically. Could the excess deaths have lived on _longer than a flu season_?

* Is there a good argument that it is in fact over in Sweden?

* Are there other variables that might have made Covid-19 not so bad in Sweden?

If I was to take more direct counters to the article:

> I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will > see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won't > have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those > countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the > day anyway.

Maybe, but that could also be a case of thinking that the death rate is a fairly simple linear model, which would fly in the face of the various epidemiological models that we use (not just for covid but since the 1920s)

> No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is > completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some > level of immunity because they've been infected with a similar strain > previously, or because they're vaccinated.

Is Covid-19 completely new? By this reasoning it would as stated be more infectious due to a lack of known immunity. With this line of reasoning why wouldn't a _different_ cornovirus also give a more uniform immunity? Why would a novel Cornovirus strain have a greater impact over a novel Influenza strain?

I could go one but I feel like I am sniping.

Personally I dont think the world wide response has been great, I do think we have overreacted but I also would argue that its not just another influenza and should be ignored as such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Plausible long-term damage to the brain of a significant percentage of COVID patients, in both severe and non-severe cases—according to a very recent Lancet paper—should change any tradeoff analysis by a great deal. The range of harm could be far beyond the number of deaths.

Cerebral Micro-Structural Changes in COVID-19 Patients – An MRI-based 3-month Follow-up Study

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370\(20\)30228-5/fulltext)

"Interpretation

Study findings revealed possible disruption to micro-structural and functional brain integrity in the recovery stages of COVID-19, suggesting the long-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2."

[https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137...](https://mobile.twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1290916583137738752)

"Manifest brain damage in 55% COVID-19 patients

..higher bilateral gray matter volumes (GMV) in olfactory cortices, hippocampi, insulas, left Rolandic operculum..

No significant difference between severe and non-severe COVID"

</comment><comment><USER47> Just for information there is a next step for the locked down country and that is to test and then track down all those who potentialy has been infected. I heard the ipedimiology expert of Denmark tell that this would make it possible for even the most high risk groups to be free in society with out risk. So the lock down was not in order to eliminate the virus, but in order to get time to build up the capacity to test, track and trace. The reason for this is that in order to have a well functioning social contract in a welfarestate it's neccessary that no part of the population is consodered expendable. So as a society we can not afford the kind of deaths that sweeden had. The high degree of trust that is necessary to work is created by everybody are taken care of and that everybody has value. It's very different to a social contract like the one in us. And I am not stating that one is better than the other. Just different.

</comment><comment><USER48> Is this guy an undertaker or a urologist? His tag seems to have both words but I do not speak Swedish.

Anyway it may not be a perfect extrapolation or comparison but if you take his numbers, 6000 dead in a country of 100 million people and you adjust that to the US population don't you come out with 330 million people and 198000 dead?

We are not far from that now and if the trend continues we will blow past that in a month or so. That's one race I didn't want to be winning.

<comment><USER49> > Is this guy an undertaker or a urologist? His tag seems to have both words > but I do not speak Swedish.

His name tag says "Underläkare", which is a title meaning "assistant physician". The term is defined in this Swedish Wikipedia article:

[https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underl%C3%A4kare](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underl%C3%A4kare)

Google translates it as follows:

"Assistant physician in Sweden is a title for all the doctors on duty who do not have specialist competence..."

Underneath that it says "VO kirurgi och urologi" which translates as "Acting supervisor[1] - surgery and urology".

The red tag says "Läkare", which is just "Doctor".

[1] [https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/VO) (literally "officer on duty")

<comment><USER48> Thank you for the interpretation of the name tag. I appreciate the effort. I should've made the same effort myself.

In fact, in rereading my own comment I notice that I fat-fingered a number in the comparison I was trying to make. Where I show their Dead vs Population size as 6000 / 100 million that should've been 6000 / 10 million. I had one too many zeroes on their population figure.

Not my finest hour and a real drag for me personally since I have spent so much of my career QC'ing other people's work and pointing out their defects. I need to pay closer attention to my own output since I obviously am not perfect either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'd note that the article doesn't address the issue of ER capacity at all. Most wealthy countries' citizens expect to be able to get treatment if they catch COVID, but if the US didn't implement lockdowns, that wouldn't be tenable. The author's thesis may still hold that this would still be a small proportion of deaths, but it would be a less popular decision than lockdowns.

</comment><comment><USER51> It seems to me the only conclusion we can draw by studying Sweden is that Sweden's policy may have worked for their country for the studied timeline. Let's see if it continues to work going forward. We can't say for sure that the policy was what kept virus propagation under control, it might just be the set of factors outside of the government policy. Similarly we can't just apply the same policy elsewhere, in completely different circumstances, and expect for it to yield similar results. Policy has to be decided based on as much data as you can gather, find out the main virus propagation causes and try to deal with those in an effective way. Don't do something because "Sweden did it".

</comment><comment><USER52> Interesting take from someone inside one of the outlier nations -- but all his numbers are about morbidity.

Claims are made that SARS-CoV-2 must be widely spread through the community now (because cases requiring hospitalisation are dropping) but what then are the numbers for neuro, renal, respiratory etc complications caused by this virus?

Personally, the stats make me reasonably confident I would survive an infection, but the fact that significant quality-of-life effects in the mid to long term seem to be a random distribution scares the willies out of me.

</comment><comment><USER53> There is a political element to covid that is often... ignored.

<comment><USER54> You win the prize for the understatement of the century.

The ideological clarity of the covid _regime_ is sublime. All sorts of debated matters are decided, by "science", and that is that. Whether by accident or design, the covid _regime_ , the "new normal" that MSM has been educating us about from the very beginning, is a blueprint for a global authoritarian technocracy with its own internal logic, ethics, and mores.

<comment><USER55> I share your concerns about authoritarians using this occasion to bend things in a bad direction but are you asserting that the virus is not a real thing or that some group with authoritarian aims is behind its release? Because if the virus is a real thing then surely protesting by gathering into crowds and falling victim doesn't harm the bad guys right? Help me understand if you don't mind, serious questions it's hard to word things so they don't sound incendiary to one side or the other (or both) since the issue is so politically charged.

<comment><USER54> It's a perfectly reasonable set of questions.

Please note I stress that I am commenting on the virus "regime".

Is the virus real? I think we should assume it is real, regardless of the facts. Let's say it is real.

Should we concern ourselves with whether it is (a) natural phenomena, or (b) man-made;

and whether regardless of its provenance, the spread of the virus was due to (a) chance events, or (b) intentional release?

Again, I say, to seriously answer any of these questions is an unreasonable burden. So, let's call it an "act of god".

Now, we are at the point to discuss sensible response, rational response, _reasonable response_ , to a collective health issue: a virus that has reached pandemic stage and posses certain risk probabilies across various demographics.

Does the above scenario mandate that governmental norms be bent if not broken? For example, is it acceptable that from now on society will be governed by executive decrees and not legislative bodies?

How long should we tolerate such encroachments on what we know to be the basis of free societies?

Should not a health care matter of such grave import and impact on our lives be subject to the input of a wide range of experts in related subject matters?

What "authority" has designated certain institutions, such as the Imperial College as an example, as fonts of indisputable claims regarding the gravity of the situation and required remedies?

Why are dissenting experts and workers in the "frontlines" subject to media blackout, de-platforming, and loss of income?

I could go on and practically write a little book here. But that should suffice as to "why" some of us are rather concerned, to say the least.

<comment><USER56> You asked a lot of questions that seem to imply a lot of conspiracy-driven actions, but you didn't really state any definite opinions or present any evidence that supports those implications. If you're going to "write a little book here," you're going to have to say what you believe and present the evidence for why you believe it.

<comment><USER54> That is a _laughable_ mischaracterization of the post to which you are responding.

These are legitimate questions that definitively need to be asked and answered in context of a complete workover of our societies, instead of being dishonestly dismissed.

<comment><USER56> You said you had so much information that you could write a little book. Is your book going to consist entirely of questions that appeal to thoughts of conspiracy and shadowy action by oppressing forces? Or will you simply state your opinions about how things are and support those with evidence?

<comment><USER54> That is your characterization and borderline trolling. Only a troll would claim that insisting on legislative oversight of executive, to take one item, is indicative of irrational fears.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> FWIW this is being pushed by fringe elements like this: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR8d4wQT- iOj7bJynoBTEeg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR8d4wQT-iOj7bJynoBTEeg)

edit: also state backed TRT [https://twitter.com/RachaelRuble/status/1291957654697455621](https://twitter.com/RachaelRuble/status/1291957654697455621)

</comment><comment><USER58> Wouldn't this article be considered "misinformation" on most social media sites?

It's important information that I don't think should be censored, but it goes contrary to WHO.

<comment><USER59> "Sebastian Rushworth M.D." clearly states at the beginning of his internet post that it's anecdotal, even though his bio suggests he's trying to correct internet misinformation with "science". It absolutely shouldn't be censored. I mean, if I was considering taking this guy's medical advice - I'd want to know about this.

<comment><USER60> I agree with most of the things in this article, but it smells an awful lot like a planted piece.

The name is very unusual for a Swedish person, I can only find three people with that last name in Sweden, and none of them has the first name Sebastian.

The image of him in a gas mask is vague enough that you can't identify the person based on that.

The blog is a hosted wordpress that only has a couple of articles going back a few days.

The English is very good, I didn't see a single Swedishism, which makes it less likely the writer is actually Swedish.

The article talks about other kinds of deaths that are also bad, and mentions opioid deaths. That is a cause of death that is _extremely_ rare in Sweden, but which would be familiar to an American audience. Using that as an example while talking about Swedish deaths is very odd.

So all in all this piece smells off.

<comment><USER61> Henrik I believe you are being overly suspicious. A simple call to KI or wherever he stated he worked would have brought an end to that.

<comment><USER62> That would not guarantee that the texts on Wordpress were written by a Swedish medical doctor.

I have now tried to contact him by Facebook Messenger, where he has had an account for many years. I asked if he wrote those texts on Wordpress.

<comment><USER62> And he confirmed that it is him on the Wordpress site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> T-A [https://www.thelocal.se/20200806/its-a-bad-sign-sweden- sees-...](https://www.thelocal.se/20200806/its-a-bad-sign-sweden-sees-renewed- rise-in-infections-among-young-adults)

</comment><comment><USER63> Long term consequences are where it's at. This article talks none of it. Let's hope that Sweden doesn't have heart failure and ground glass lungs for the next decades at high rates. Such a gamble from one doctor.

<comment><USER61> If you have any info, please share? I don't really get what you're saying.

<comment><USER63> Google Covid-19 long term consequences

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Confused by this:

> Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths > only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is > available.

Wouldn't shutting down completely for a month or two effectively end covid ?

<comment><USER65> The UK, France, Spain, India and Australia who all shutdown (to varying degrees) are now experiencing significant upticks in cases. Even Vietnam is now fighting hard to tamp down a resurgence of C19 despite impressive initial measures to try to stop it.

You'd have to be completely sure that during your lockdown, the virus burned itself out inside each household. You'd have to have a really strict lockdown (e.g. troops on the streets, imprisonment for violation) to do that; I think maybe only Italy & China did anything close to that. And of course it would only take a handful of exceptions to re-ignite the virus (see Australia).

<comment><USER64> Have not heard about India's shut down

I know the UK was going for herd immunity at first and then switched

Spain did lockdown drastically once things got pretty bad

My next question would be on Sweden's case: is herd immunity real? Or as the virus spreads it reinfects ?

<comment><USER66> Is there a citation for herd immunity and the UK? It was bandied around by the left wing press when they were looking for blood but I never saw any concrete evidence beyond it apparently being mentioned in passing.

<comment><USER65> [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/03/uk- backed...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/03/uk-backed-off- on-herd-immunity-to-beat-coronavirus-we-need-it/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> it's same here in Czechia except only ~390 infected people died (not because of COVID, but they were infected when they died), in country of 10.6M where each month die roughly 10000 people, so roughly 400 people out of 40000 dead within 4 months of virus. truth we had mandatory masks like one of the first in Europe and even outside (insane), but we don't have them like two months, not even indoors more than one month and there is NO spike in deaths, quite opposite, there is less than 1-2 people dying per day and whole country has <30 serious cases in hospital. most of the newly infected cases are asymptomatic or very mild cases, almost nobody needs hospitalizationd espite daily new infections between 200-300

we will know only later what was the impact of this virus, but everything leads to completely unproportiante response with pretty much no excess deaths, if you look at yearly stats even in failed countries like UK or US

in UK is already in 6 consecutive weeks total death toll from all causes lower than 5 year average implying people who would die through the year just died within short time window and now the stats are catching up and number of excess deaths is falling

[https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032](https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1290568780251308032)

I can imagine it's gonna be pretty much same in US despite anti-Trump hysteria amd scaremongering, but of course you won't have huge headlines about lower than average death toll per week, that's not very attractive for media

I wish people would be so enthusiastic about other deaths too, half million people in US die every single year from smoking, but I don't see anyone banning smoking as much as we wasted tons of money on this minor virus killing pretty much nobody

</comment><comment><USER67> > Shutting down completely in order to decrease the total number of deaths > only makes sense if you are willing to stay shut down until a vaccine is > available.

We forgot about the whole "flatten the curve" thing awfully quick. Overwhelmed medical system of Italy was the main cause for their grim consequences. Good for Sweden their healthcare has so much backup capacity.

</comment><comment><USER68> TLDR;

 _It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven't seen a single covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that means virtually no-one is getting infected any more._

</comment><comment><USER69> According to the comments the article was cross-posted to a UK doctor's blog, Dr. Kendrick's blog (which I haven't visited). So I'd like to comment on this article from the point of view of a UK resident, as I am.

The first thing to note is that in the UK, with a supposed lockdown imposed (now lifted), the number of deaths from Covid-19 so far is 46,596 [1]. That's in a country of almost 70 million [2]. The article above reports about 6,000 deaths in Sweden so far. We can look at different ratios and statistics, like per capita death rate (for the entire country) or case fatality ratio, etc, and we must of course accept that "death from Covid-19" sometimes means "death _with_ Covid-19" and sometimes "death _by_ Covid-19". Finally, we can note that the majority of the people who died were of a certain age and had underlying issues so they may have been dying already anyway.

The fact remains that more than 45,000 people is a big number of people to die within a couple of months. It's a much larger number of deaths than 7,000 and it's not a number that justifies sitting around doing nothing. Not for policy makers, not for doctors, not for the general population.

Of course the article makes the point that the situation in Sweden is now much better than in other places, because Sweden did not impose a lockdown like those other countries. So, in theory, without a lockdown the UK would have many fewer infections thanks to heard immunity. But, what would be the cost of acquiring this herd immunity? If more than 45,000 people died under lockdown, how many would have died without it? Of course this is a difficult question to answer- but it stands to reason that we would see more deaths, perhaps many more [4]. How many peoples' lives saved justify a lockdown? 50,000? 100,000? 10,000?

To be honest, I can't get my head around this dreadful arithmetic. Epidemiologists and perhaps some doctors also are used to thinking of case fatality rates and population-level statistics, but the fact still remains that even a thousand people dead from a single, possibly preventable cause, is something that the majority of the population of any country would accept as intolerable. See for instance the recent explosion in Beirut which killed "only" 135 people (last I looked). And yet, this seems to be considered by everyone as a great tragedy (certainly by the press, always obsessed with body counts, but by everone else also). If we accept that everything should be done to avoid losing 135 people in an explosion, shouldn't everything be done to avoid losing more than 45,000 people in a disease outbreak?

_______________

[1] [https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html](https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom) reports a 2020 estimate of 67,886,004.

[3] This all is before looking at excess deaths in the UK in the months of the lockdown, which I won't do because I find the way these are measured and reported a bit confusing (e.g. I've found excess mortality plots for the last five years - but that's a short time and there may be much more variation over 10 years, say, or 35, so I'm not sure we learn much by looking at those plots).

[4] Again I'm not going to try to quantify "how many more would have died without lockdown" because we simply don't have the data for accurate estimates. Some estimates have been derived, notably the estimates from the Imperial Colledge modelling team, but there's no way to rely on them with any certainty.

</comment><comment><USER70> its time to stop this! I am so proud to see my fellow germans rise up: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=htDrDieOgh0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=htDrDieOgh0)

<comment><USER9> > proud to see my fellow germans rise up:

That is (luckily imo) only a tiny minority of Germans. I would be very interested: are the current restrictions really that bad? You need to wear a mask in supermarkets, do you think that's actually that big of a deal?

<comment><USER71> It's the patronizing way things get pushed that is a problem. Including you pointing out someone being in the minority, _followed_ by asking a question: the answer is kinda moot if you already established might being right as valid in your view. It's a very thin veneer of good faith, and completely transparent to the person it's done to.

If I told you to list 3 things you're grateful for each day, and hounded and sanctioned you for not doing it, if I talked about all these Nazis I know who incidentally _also_ are not doing it, and meaningfully nodded your way every time, and made fun of you in filter bubbles... wouldn't you _just do this minor thing that may actually be beneficial and is unlikely to do harm_?

This is the problem, and to _use_ a pandemic to normalize that just makes it worse, morally speaking.

<comment><USER9> >If I told you to list 3 things you're grateful for each day, and hounded and sanctioned you for not doing it, if I talked about all these Nazis I know who incidentally also are not doing it, and meaningfully nodded your way every time, and made fun of you in filter bubbles... wouldn't you just do this minor thing that may actually be beneficial and is unlikely to do harm?

The difference being that there is a strong scientific consensus that wearing a mask will save many peoples lives. I don't want to be patronizing and me pointing out that op was in a minority merely wanted to correct the "fellow germans" statement. But sometimes it's difficult not to be patronizing if you are following the strong scientific consensus on a topic. Because wearing masks shouldn't be a political issue if you can't develop a reasonable counterargument.

<comment><USER71> Listing 3 things you are grateful for each day will improve your whole life and all your relationships. As something that is likely to do good and isn't much of a sacrifice, it's the same thing, and you didn't answer the question.

> Because wearing masks shouldn't be a political issue if you can't develop a > reasonable counterargument.

You are the one making it about the masks and only the masks, even the protests aren't, and I for one said IMO the pushiness is the problem, not what is being pushed.

<comment><USER9> > it's the same thing

It is not. Masks are meant to protect everybody, they are not meant to protect yourself. I'm not in favor of preventing consenting mentally stable adults from doing basically anything to themselves and – to answer your question – I would obviously object to other people forcing me into adopting any unreasonable habit. But this is about protecting society and risk groups.

> IMO the pushiness is the problem, not what is being pushed.

By "the pushiness" do you mean the laws that are in place to force people to do things? Because those are pretty common in all sorts of situations.

Or do you mean the general attitude by commentators (in the media/on twitter etc.) towards people not abiding by those laws?

<comment><USER71> I didn't say "it's the same thing", I said " _As something that is likely to do good and isn 't much of a sacrifice_, it's the same thing"

> I would obviously object to other people forcing me into adopting any > unreasonable habit.

There is nothing "unreasonable" about naming 3 things you are grateful for each day. If you did it each day, you could probably get it down to taking a few seconds.

> Or do you mean the general attitude by commentators (in the media/on twitter > etc.) towards people not abiding by those laws?

I do mean the attitude, but not about not abiding to laws per se. It's just a wholesale dismissal. Like, what does "mentally stable" have to do with anything, why did you weave that in there? Because instable people are complaining about masks or think G5 causes Corona? What do, for example, arguments put forward in the OP article have to do with that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> An observation and a question:

1) I'm glad I don't have this guy as a doctor. 2)If it's not a big deal, why is he wearing a mask in the picture? Catch covid-19, rub some dirt on it, and move on. If you die, you were going to anyway.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cynical perspective:

Trump doesn't want to reopen too fast because it won't be clear by the election (October, when mail-in voting happens) that this was a good strategy.

Democrats don't want to reopen too fast because keeping the economy shut down is bad for Trump's reelection chances.

Too cynical? Perhaps. But I do think that perspectives like the author's are dismissed too quickly because neither 'side' sees a way in which following this advice will help them in the upcoming election.

Regardless, it is a real shame that COVID has been so politicized, given the tremendous medical and economic repercussions that we are seeing.

<comment><USER22> _Trump doesn 't want to reopen too fast_

Hasn't Trump been the one flippantly saying "it's not a big deal" and "we'll be back to normal quickly" and "we'll get the kids back to school shortly"?

How could anyone view his behavior as "not wanting to reopen too fast"? It seems the exact opposite to me.

<comment><USER25> He wants the points for arguing that it's the right thing to do, but without the risk of finding out it wasnt

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> The author doesn't state (and I don't know the real-time info) about whether the country is locked down and social distancing/masks, etc.

If so, it's not like their laissez-faire attitude (the previous months) is the success he's making it out to be. They only have stabilized because they adopted the recommended measures finally, if that's true.

<comment><USER58> The Swedish government never locked down or encouraged any sort of social distancing. Their plan was herd immunity and they appear to have gotten it right.

<comment><USER9> That's simply incorrect. Even just looking at the government website it literally states that people should distance themselves. [https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and- risks/disaster...](https://www.krisinformation.se/en/hazards-and- risks/disasters-and-incidents/2020/official-information-on-the-new- coronavirus/sa-minskar-vi-smittspridningen)

<comment><USER58> You are right. I should have said that they didn't enforce social distancing. ie. They didn't ban church or arrest people that held parties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> 2 separate studies are pointing to herd immunity being impossible because SARS-CoV-2 antibodies disappear over time and previous carriers could become infected again.

There haven't been any cases of reinfection afaik but we'll see in due time.

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.09.20148429v1)

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179)

<comment><USER75> Memory B cells exist and will produce antibodies as needed. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_B_cell](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_B_cell)

Proving herd immunity impossible is a rather bold claim and the threshold for that has simply not been met.

We do have a rather large confidence that this virus isn't going anywhere and will be endemic. It will join the 200+ Cold viruses that hit us every year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This doctor[1] is basically claiming that all of Sweden, or the vast bulk, have had SARS-CoV-2 and are now immune. This goes completely contrary to every medical authority, and is the sort of claim that generally gets something removed as disinformation. Disinformation does well on HN.

Of course you get to the article's slant when it claims that Sweden is "normal" right now, which is an outrageous lie.

Virtually all events are cancelled. Social engagements are non-existent. Streets are empty. Huge percentages of people work from home. Bars and restaurants were closed for a period of time in hot areas, and regardless have operated under a significantly reduced capacity. Sweden's summer school break began at the PEAK of their outbreak, and we'll see what happens when they return in a little over a week.

Sweden's societal reaction to COVID-19 is basically _optimal_ as a general society, and some parts of the US that are "locked down" have much higher social engagement. Either we've redefined normal to be "completely and absolutely unlike the before times", or this guy is just twisting reality pretty generously because he likes the views, particularly among a certain conspiratorial segment of the US population (a Swedish MD whose blog is in English).

[1] An MD who has extraordinarily little expertise in virology or immunology. Yet he discounts immunity tests. This is like a JavaScript developer telling you why Metal is better than Vulkan.

<comment><USER73> Yes, I was noticing this too -- author doesn't state whether the country is locked down and social distancing/masks, etc. now.

If so, they've only stabilized because they adopted the recommended measures finally.

<comment><USER22> First paragraph - "Unlike other countries, Sweden never went in to complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continued to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public."

<comment><USER33> Sweden has adopted virtually every recommendations _without it being mandated_. This is an enormous difference from some Florida Man arguing why lockdowns are unnecessary. As much as people focus on face masks, in Sweden the sparsity of people given their response makes it much less of a necessity.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/i58jjj/helgtr%C3%A5...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/comments/i58jjj/helgtr%C3%A5d_coronavirus_20200807_09/)

There you go -- read about Swedes talking about their COVID-19 experience. It is a universe removed from normal, or what Florida-man-using-Sweden-as-their- no-biggie-example claims.

Here you go - [https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/nastan-alla-fick- coro...](https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vast/nastan-alla-fick-corona-efter- fest-i-dals-ed)

Someone had an ill considered party. Despite the amazing herd immunity nonsense this guy is arguing (again, contrary to the entire expert community), most of the partiers got COVID. Ooops!

<comment><USER22> So if I understand you correctly, although Sweden hasn't closed schools, children aren't attending?

And although non-essential businesses aren't closed, Swedes aren't going to those stores?

And masks aren't mandated, but most people are wearing them?

<comment><USER33> The snark is adorable and comically out of place.

Swedish schools closed for the summer break just as COVID was peaking. They return in just over a week. Businesses are sparse because few people are shopping. Restaurants and bars were closed, and other than that have strict reduced occupancy.

But Florida man is sure that Everything Is Normal. It's hilarity. That "look they didn't close their schools"...when they were closed regardless. Hurr.

"And masks aren't mandated, but most people are wearing them?"

Masks are necessary when you're in close proximity to other people. Swedes aren't getting in close proximity to other people. Are you getting this?

The Cult of Idiocy that has overtaken the US isn't there in Sweden. Florida in their highest level of lockdown has dramatically more social interaction than Sweden minus it.

<comment><USER76> Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You break the site guidelines routinely, and we ban accounts that do that.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The 5 foot ground rod and its use in the National Electric Code (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://iaeimagazine.org/magazine/2018/07/30/the-5-ft-ground-rod-and-its-little-known-use-in-the-nec/ <comment><USER3> Once I had a situation where the length of the ground rod mattered.

We were building a fusion reactor prototype, and as far as I am aware the NEC code doesn't really have a section for that. I'm sure that much of what we did was probably against best practices.

We had a number of high voltage power supplies running in one room of our lab, and on days when the humidity in the air was low, the ionization in the air would charge up all the metal surfaces in the room. So, even if something was not connected to a high voltage, you would get a nasty shock when you touched it. All these devices were connected to the normal, "third prong" wall socket ground, but apparently the route through the building to ground was too resistive to handle the large amount of ionization in the air.

When working in a room with 180,000 volt power supplies, random shocks rapidly become more than annoying.

Spence, our electrical engineer, had the idea that the quickest way to fix the problem was to run a grounding rod into the soil right outside the window. We pounded a rod into the ground with a sledgehammer as far as we could, which was about 5 feet, I guess. Then we ran a 1/4" copper cable from the rod, through the window to connect to the main reactor chamber.

This worked great! At least for a couple of months. Our lab was located in a swamp, and the soil was basically a few meters of dried leaves. You could actually feel the soil move up and down when you walked on it. When August came around, it had not rained for quite a while, and the water level in the soil had dropped below the level of the grounding rod. The dried leaves in the soil insulated it quite well. We started getting shocks again, and it took us many hours of troubleshooting before we realized that the ground was not actually ground anymore.

We went out and pounded the rod a few feet deeper, which was easier now that the soil was dry. This reached the water table, and fixed the problem.

<comment><USER4> Also helps if you dump a large quantity of salty water. The salt eventually leaves too, but helps retain some of the water and makes it more conductive.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. We had the first generation color copiers in the California high desert and whenever paper jams became frequent we knew it was time to pour salt water on the building grounding rod!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was building a workshop last year and as I have few old 3-phase metalworking machines and the power comes through a 50m (150ft) buried cable I had to install proper ground for the building and another two independent ground connections for the lightning protection. I have no bedrock, but my soil is pretty much 100% clay plus a football sized stones here and there around the building. The code around here is that the ground connection should be no more than 4 ohms resistance. I was lucky with two lightning protection grounds. For one a single 2.4m rod was enough and for the other two rods (I had the type that screws into each other so you can make the rod longer and longer if necessary) were required.

However, I wanted to locate the electrical ground few meters away to avoid the possibility of a lightning strike raising my ground potential. I ended up having to install 6 rods to get down to 4 ohms. The first two rods were 7 ohms, the next two 2 meters away were 15 and the final two were 25 if I remember correctly.

The take away from that story is: always measure your ground resistance. Never assume 8ft is enough if you have a certain type of soil.

<comment> kube-system How exactly is that measured? If you're trying to measure the resistance between the ground rod and actual ground, how do you get the second reference point?

<comment><USER6> There are two standard ways to measure. The meters that do the measurement usually support both. First method involves two mobile shallow ground electrodes you place 20m away from your ground rod (so electrodes are 40m apart and your ground rod in the middle). I'm not sure how exactly it is possible to measure this when the quality of ground those two extra electrodes is unknown, but it works. The meters cost few thousands $ so I assume it is not trivial.

The second method involves an already known good ground - like for example one supplied by the electricity company. Here they usually bury galvanised steel thick tape along their ground cables. That tape is hundreds of meters long and underground so it is assumed to be a really good ground. It is only used to ground outside metal bits of the power delivery equipment that are likely to be touched by people and it is separate from the ground connection supplied in the cable itself although one is supposed to connect it to the delivered ground when connecting the house cable to the electricity delivery point. Then every house is supposed to have at least two lightning protection grounds and an extra "electricity supply" ground that is again connected with the ground in the supply cable. Please bear in mind I'm no electrician and all of the above is based on me observing electricians at work when they were connecting my house, my workshop and working on lightning protection for both. I may be mistaken on some details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> L.A. County made us drive FOUR 8 foot ground rods into the ground, no less than 8 feet apart, for our ground-mounted 13 kW solar array.

This is ridiculous beyond description and it is NOT in the N.E.C. at all.

The problem you run into with places like L.A. County is that incompetent plan checkers just want to play "cover my ass" and make up rules. There is no practical way to challenge them. They are the absolute authority (unless you have millions of dollars and YEARS to fight them).

I checked with contractors and the recommendation was "just do it and don't complain or they'll make your project a living nightmare".

So, we did.

They still made the project a nightmare to complete. They added a massive chunk to the overall cost and it took six months longer than it should have taken to complete it. Their interference made it such that this solar system will likely never recover the construction costs. Well, maybe in 30 years. It's a shame. Had I known the nightmare it is to deal with this bureaucracy I would have invested my money elsewhere.

California is sucking more and more with time. L.A. County is even worse.

<comment><USER8> A 5/8" x 8' copper grounding rod is $14 at Home Depot; 3\4 x 10 is $33. I'm very confused on how the extra $100 would meaningfully affect the project in either time or BOM.

<comment><USER9> With respect, this is like saying "but the hard drive on Fry's discount shelf only costs $100, why is your NVME-over-Fiber SSD storage system so expensive?"

Hint: what the consumer can buy over the counter, and what gets used in a professional setting, are frequently two radically different things that may only be tangentially related.

<comment><USER10> With respect, what you're saying is absolute nonsense in the context of ground rods. They're hunks of metal clad in copper and driven into the ground with a sledgehammer. They're so simple that there's literally no part of a modern PC that's analogous. The ones you can buy from Home Depot for $15 are identical to the ones I buy from a professional electrical contracting supplier for $15 - they come off the same factory lines from the same manufacturer.

There are other components used in contracting that have a bit more product segmentation, but the whole "frequently radically different things that may only be tangentially related" bit is wildly exaggerated. We use the appropriate components for the job, and often that means the same stuff you could buy at Home Depot. You're paying for that knowledge of what's appropriate/necessary and the labor to do the work, not for super-special premium contractor ground rods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What do you do for grounding if your house sits on bedrock?

We _barely_ had enough for the "buried in trench, 30" deep" option at our house before hitting the solid lava everything here is built on. (And it's buried in mostly gravel, there is practically no dirt.)

<comment><USER12> A ground driven into rock or buried in dry gravel isn't going to be of much use. Typically electrodes are buried in a mixture of bentonite and gypsum, which is pH neutral and provides low resistance. There are also chemical (salt) earth fills which work well but require thicker copper electrodes to deal with corrosion. Various conductor arrangements are used, but in shallow trenches there is always the problem of the wires being cut. A radial or cartesian mesh burial over a larger area would be typical. You can buy electrical mesh and ground enhancement fill for this purpose. Note that you still need it to be below the frost layer in your region -- which varies from 15cm (California) to 300cm (Canada) depending.

An earth connected via a distant cable isn't going to be effective against lightning (transients are high frequency and hence conductivity is constrained by the skin effect, and long wires have high inductance even if they have low DC impedance), and additionally is poor practice as it is more lightly to be cut without someone knowing in the future. I doubt any EE would approve it when other methods are available.

[https://blog.nvent.com/erico/erico-what-is-soil- resistivity-...](https://blog.nvent.com/erico/erico-what-is-soil-resistivity- and-how-does-it-affect-grounding/)

Cf IEEE 80 & 81

<comment><USER13> Fun story, in the Marine Corps they pee on the rods to make them ground better. (for mobile CoC's)

<comment><USER12> Let's hope they do that before they power up their gear. Ouch.

The mobile radar and HF guys have lots of tricks like this, but also spend lots of time hammering spikes with a sledgehammer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Kinda like IBM, no one ever got fired for using an 8 foot rod in a situation where a 5 foot rod was to code.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm kind of surprised to read that entire article and not encounter the phrase "ohm meter" anywhere in a search. Rarely does anything serious have only one ground rod. Three legged telecom towers will have three rods, one attached to each leg, linked together by a ring of 6 gauge copper buried outside the perimeter of the concrete foundation.

Multiple 5 foot ground rods in the correct configuration bonded together could offer much more conductivity to the earth than one 8 foot. The article seems to be obsessing about the length of the rod and not the scientifically measurable ohm resistance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why do the US regulations specify the method and not the result? That seems bizarre.

Here in the UK, most earth connections are provided by the power company, but in rural areas you may be too far from the substation, so a ground rod is permitted - as long as it provides an earth loop impedance (Z) of less than 200 Ohm.

So if you want to provide your own earth, you have to keep driving ground rods deeper, or adding new ones until the "Zeds" are good enough.

It looks like the US regulations permit you to bang an "8 foot" rod into dry sand, and walk away as though that's job done??

</comment><comment><USER17> As we are talking about grounding...

I think the greatest problem that troubles me personally is that the single- point grounding required by lightning protection is _almost never_ implemented properly in the vast majority of installations.

I realized the existence of this problem when I wanted to install a mesh network in a school campus, so I started reading documents about lightning protections, amateur radio publications have good resources on it, and all of them indicate a correct installation should eventually bound all grounds, including mains ground, telecommunication ground and lightning protection ground at a single-point via low-impedance connections (even if they have their own ground rods), also, all metallic objects and structures, such as gas pipes, fire escapes, etc, should be bounded to ground as well. This is to prevent a voltage gradient developing between different grounding points in case of a lightning strike, and it's usually required or implied in electrical or building code.

However, who ever obey this rule in practice? I've seen various installations of outdoor/rooftop Wi-Fi networks, and all the lightning protection they have is a gas discharge tube and a ground connection of unknown quality, I don't think the installation is legal. Also, many buildings were in compliance of the code when they were built, but even adding an extra metal frame or a cable-TV box will invalidate the entire lightning protection, at least from a technical or legal perspective.

I guess the reason behind the non-compliance is that the likelihood of a lightning strike is already low, even if it does strike, it's possible that even a non-compliant lightning protection system can work to an extent. And if it doesn't work, most people would just accept the damage. As a result, it's a concern for radio hobbyist only, whose antenna increases the likelihood significantly.

But I was still shocked when I first understood the fact that most (low-rise) buildings don't have a technically sound lightning protection system and bet the safety of the building on luck. And its practical consequence is: if you want to put a rooftop antenna for amateur radio, with good lightning safety and in compliance with the code, in many cases, the answer is you can't - <USER2> building often doesn't even have a technically sound lightning protection system to begin with. I read many hardcore radio amateurs redo the entire electrical wiring at their homes to the proper standards.

High-rise buildings are much better, lightning protection is serious business, but you are not usually allowed to put a mesh network antenna on top of them. But if you are allowed, I've heard that some people even got a chance to have a friendly conversation with the civil engineer who's in charge of the building's lightning protection system and work out a solution together.

<comment><USER18> This is called equipotential bonding and a failure to implement or maintain it leads to occasional but tragic or fatal outcomes, we had one recently locally where a 12 year old girl was seriously brain damaged and needing life long care because she touched an outdoor tap.

<comment><USER19> That's probably why the two faucets in the UK are required to be electrically bound with a counductor, under the wash basin or sink. If the mains is in contact with a pipe and not the other, touching both faucets would result in electrocution. Also an extra argument for a single combined faucet for both cold and hot water.

<comment><USER20> Separate faucets for cold and hot water is one of those inexplicable British things for an immigrant like me.

<comment><USER21> it was inexplicable for me as a native too - although I recently discovered that it was specified by older regulations as they were worried about contamination between the hot and cold-water supplies. The hot water supply was traditionally fed from a header tank in the loft (attic) and so wasn't safe to drink.

<comment><USER22> A British coworker said he thinks it's because authorities were worried about the water supply being intermittent. A rooftop tank solves the contamination back flow issue via an air gap. And provides water when the mains aren't working.

I also suspect the British would have found a old school US style water heater to be somewhat frightening.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVK6bkj5Ug4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVK6bkj5Ug4)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Grounding, Bonding, and All That

I have been reviewing the Mike Holt NEC video seminars, just listening like background music while I build some workbenches on the weekends.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRNS1x1jcKbEgNJx26RWB...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRNS1x1jcKbEgNJx26RWB8O4Fm1Ny- bxK)

<comment><USER24> ^ THIS - Go watch at least first video "Grounding - Safety Fundamentals" This was a very eye-opening video. I totally misunderstood grounding before watching this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For a great intro to grounding, check out this series of articles

[https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/grounding-dos- donts...](https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/grounding-dos-donts-why- part-1.335582/)

It's written from the perspective of a ham operator, but all the principles are the same no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER26> Are all domestic buildings grounded this way in the US? Here (Sweden) I believe houses that aren't far from transformers are only grounded at the nearest transformer (where power is transformed from 10kV 3-phase into 230/400V 3-phase+neutral for distribution to each house.

<comment><USER27> Yes, all domestic buildings in the US have their own earth ground, and this is and has been required by the NEC (National Electrical Code).

Often this is a thick, 8-foot long copper rod pounded into the ground not far from the electrical panel, connected to the panel by a ~1cm diameter copper cable. (There are other allowed methods, including using a similar copper electrode encased in concrete or in the building foundation.)

It looks like this (which shows a galvanized-steel rod rather than the more canonical copper, and shows a further connection to a second ground rod, which is not required everywhere):

[http://www.wireyourownhouse.com/panel/images/grndrodexample....](http://www.wireyourownhouse.com/panel/images/grndrodexample.png)

Also, certain sub panels (e.g., in garages) will need their own separate earth ground, made the same way.

This "grounding electrode" is in addition to a connection ("bond") to the domestic cold-water pipe, usually done where the pipe enters the building. (That pipe itself may be a hunk of copper buried in the ground.) The electrical bond to the water service is not a substitute for the dedicated grounding electrode mentioned above, it's to ensure that the plumbing does not become electrically charged.

<comment><USER28> All except homes built many years ago where someone felt it was satisfactory to clamp a single wire to the water line. I've seen this numerous times.

Not to mention the numerous instances of 20A breakers on 14awg. It's simply amazing what one will find in some homes... like the person who clipped both ends of an extension cord to feed an outlet out of a junction box rather than spend $20 on home wiring. Or the person who literally covered a chiseled-out trench in plaster with painters tape to conceal wire. And on and on...

<comment><USER29> > where someone felt it was satisfactory to clamp a single wire to the water > line. I've seen this numerous times.

Our house was built in the 70's and that is what we used to have. After we upgraded our panel though we got not 1, but 2 grounding rods.

<comment><USER27> According to this thread [1], it was the 1978 code that required a dedicated grounding electrode.

That's 40 years ago, but of course many houses have not been upgraded since then, and some localities might not have adopted the 1978 NEC until later.

[1] [https://forums.mikeholt.com/forum/active- forums/nec/86062-co...](https://forums.mikeholt.com/forum/active- forums/nec/86062-code-year-for-ground-rods?t=135832)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I recently installed an IKEA kitchen hood, and was surprised that the power connector only had two pins (IEC C17/18). The hood has a aluminium frame (albeit painted) with metal pole switches. Can someone explain why this doesn't need to be grounded?

<comment><USER31> Perhaps the same reason toasters aren't. It is very likely that one will have two hands on the toaster when one is shocked. You have two choices: ground it, in which case the current races up one arm, through the torso, and down the other arm (frying your heart in the process). Or, keep it ungrounded and let the current race down your leg to the floor (sparing your torso and hopefully taking advantage of the fact that your shoes will provide a little more insulation that your two bare hands on metal in the first scenario.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> We're currently building a house in Germany and the grounding consists of a couple dozen meters of thick (maybe 10mm) wiring which is laid out in the concrete ground plate of the house.

<comment><USER19> A couple of dozen meters? Wiring? Encased in concrete? Five to ten meters of zinc coated 30x5mm flat bar steel bound to three to six 3/4" rods is usually enough depending on the soil characteristics. And it's usuall buried directly in the soil next to or around the bulding. I wonder what bulding codes you've got there.

<comment><USER33> The relevant code is DIN 18014. And it distinguishes between different kinds of ground plate. Some are considered sufficiently "earth-feeling" to be considered ground themselves, others require separate corrosion-resistant grounding to be put in the earth around them. Zinc-coated steel is not considered sufficiently corrosion-resistant.

Here's an article in German with some pictures of how it's done: [https://www.elektro- plus.com/elektroplanung/fundamenterder/a...](https://www.elektro- plus.com/elektroplanung/fundamenterder/ausfuehrung-des-fundamenterders)

<comment><USER19> Allright. This makes sense as it reduces the electro corrosion on the rebar and also prevents other unfortunate accidents such as the hot wire coming in contact an exposed metal part or a metal pipe which is itself in contact with the rebar.

I have seen a scenario where ligtning struck a DHW solar panel installation, skiped from the plumbing to the rebar and also melted hole in the plumbing while doing so, draining all the antifreeze on the walls. In addition it destroyed all the electronic appliances in the house. If the panels along with the rebar would have been properly grounded, such as scenario would have been mitigated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Note to readers: NEC is _National Electric Code_ , which is the regulation of all electrical installations in the USA.

The NEC here is not _Numerical Electromagnetics Code_ , an electromagnetic simulation program, commonly used for antennas, which often have a ground connection as well. And it's obviously not the NEC Corporation, the Japanese electric company, whose semiconductor department is now a separate company known as Renesas.

When I first saw the title, it took me a few seconds in my mind to solve the hash conflict here. I wonder how many people on HN know all of these entities simultaneously.

<comment><USER34> You are not alone, at least.</comment></comment>