I felt I had to write this in order to fight disinformation from Sweden that might put kids and teachers at risk when other countries contemplate whether to open schools or not. In Sweden, our failed health authority "researched" their decision to keep schools open
#COVIDー19 /1

Their conclusion, like all their other conclusions when assessing their work, is that they did the right thing. What a surprise! /2

As we know that schools are a hub in transmission of most respiratory viruses, and the decision to keep them open were made in a situation when little was known about long term health effects on kids from infection, that alone would indicate it was not a wise decision. /3

But let's ignore the risks that was willing to be taken with the lives of kids and teachers for a while. Let's assume that the uncertainty of the situation in which the decision was made, would have indicated it to be a poor decision no matter the outcome. Let's look at outcome/4

So what our health authority did in Sweden, was to compare us with Finland, that had close their schools and went into lockdown.

Finland pretty much managed to stop the virus in their country in an admirable way./5

Finland then opened the schools for the last 2 weeks before summer, at a time when few of the kids could be assumed to have the virus in their household. It seems plausible that very few, if any, of the people in school for these 2 weeks would be able to spread the virus./6

Even if a few kids would be able to spread the virus in their schools for these 2 weeks, could the effects be seen in statistics from school transmission? With assumed R0 and mean interval times, we must assume that spread fueled by schools opening would not be able to grow /7

So looking at statistics for kids infected with SARS-CoV-2 linked to schools, it would be pretty much impossible to draw the conclusion that Swedens public health authority did about open schools not having an impact on risk for kids and teachers/8

If we look on their other data they claim support their decision to keep schools open, they are comparing reported cases. It is well known that in Sweden for the whole semester, you could only get tested if you were very ill, like needing healthcare. /9

So the data about reported cases among kids is not really good information to draw conclusions on, given the effect that our limited testing on kids had on the reported cases. Yet they use this data, together with the irrelevant Finnish data, to conclude schools should be open/10

Something that's kinda strange though in terms of assumed intent of wanting to investigate impact on School closings, is that they totally ignore the fact that Finland had no kids at all that required intensive care, school closing country had _NONE_/11

Kids seem to have a lower risk of death and becoming very ill within the short-term, and Sweden's number of kids in intensive care has not been very high in numbers either, but the 8 reported below 15 years old are higher than 0. /12

We also had a lot more kids that needed hospitalization than ICU. Looking at the group of people under 20 as share of total ICU cases, it's 0,6% in Swe, but only 0.34%* in Finland(based on the only case they had someone 16-19 old)

*Number in report of 0.003% is miscalculated /13

If we look at kids as share of ICU in Finland for below 15 years old, it's 0%, no kid needed ICU. In Sweden it's 0,34%. This would indicate that kids in the country that kept schools open are at a higher risk, but it's totally ignored when they draw their conclusions /14

I think it's safe to say that kids in Sweden have been at higher risk than kids in Finland this spring. Other factors of course have an impact on this, but to draw the conclusion based on the mentioned data that there is no risk associated with open schools would be a lie /15

The other datapoint they looked at, was risk for teachers. For some reason they didn't look at teachers in Finland...Perhaps the data didn't exist, or was unfavorable for the desired conclusions, who knows. /16

So, does the data show that no teachers was put at risk because of the schools being opened? It's proposed this is the case in this report, but the data they present seem to indicate something else. /17

They claim that teachers was at no higher risk than other professions for getting the virus, I think the way they frame it can be misleading when evaluating risk for teachers with opening schools, it appear like it would be associated with significant risk based on the stats/18

So what they do is they try to compare risk for teachers with other professions, they claim there is no proof that teachers are at higher risk. The right question would probably be "Are teachers at higher risk if schools are open?". The answer seems to be yes/19

I'm not sure what jobs they compared to, but I would assume that it's mainly other high-risk jobs that involves a lot of contacts with people, like healthcare, service jobs etc.

No matter the comparison, the data they present show that teachers were at higher risk!/20

The only group of teachers that had less reported cases than groups compared with, was upper secondary school teachers(16-19 years old students), these were the only schools that was closed!/21

As seen in their chart. 1 was average for compared occupations, indicating risk. Upper secondary school teachers, for whom the schools were closed, had 0.7(0.5-1 confidence interval). The upper 0.9 group is for kindergartens,where it's fewer kids and they mostly played outside/22

For teachers in regular schools that remained opened following some precautions but pretty much going on with their usual stuff, it's clear that the risk for these teachers was higher than compared groups at 1.1(0.9-1.3 confidence interval). /23

So teachers in regular schools that was open was at higher risk than compared occupations. If we compared to the teachers working at schools that were closed, the associated risk with open school's for teachers is even clearer.

Closed schools= 0.7
Open schools= 1.1

/24

I feel it is kind of dishonest to propose that open schools would not put kids and teachers at risk. This is not what the data indicate. The insufficient data to draw big conclusions would if anything indicate clear risk associated with open schools.

/25

I'm pretty tired of the disinformation that is getting spread from people that are payed by the Swedish people to do their fucking job, which is not to keep up their own prestige. This fixation about saving face appears to undermine proper pandemic response in other countries/26

I hear people talking about the swedish model, like it was some kind of brilliant plan that worked out fine. It was a stupid plan, and it didn't work out fine, no matter what those responsible for it is trying to claim. It could have gone a lot worse as well./27

It's very simple, it's just not a good idea to let a deadly novel virus roam a population in a pandemic. It feels absurd to have to state that. The outcome has been bad, but it has better than what should have been assumed at the time it was decided on. /28

I'm glad that we don't have the magnitudes of higher deaths than what could have been assumed in early spring. That we ended up in a scenario with less spread, don't make the actual strategic decisions taken at that point in time any better. /29

You can't just decide to impose the kinds of risks associated with a novel virus in a pandemic on other people. That risk is not some bureaucrat getting payed by the swedish people to take. /30

The deaths could have been 10x higher. Many of the infected kids and teachers will likely have chronic injuries from their infection they caught in school. Swedish parents was not allowed to protect their kids and keep them home, it's against some bullshit law/30

Parents that kept their kids at home got repercussions for this. Many parents was basically forced to send their kids to school in a pandemic, even though they might have felt it was putting their children in danger. It's absurd. /31

Of course the fucking clowns that made the decision to keep schools open and involve everyone living in Sweden in some stupid and unethical herd-immunity experiment is gonna conclude that they made the right decision when they "research" the issue. It's a re-occurring pattern /32

Everything failed with Sweden's approach. We are the village idiot of Europe, people fucking died, our economy was not saved. The only advantage our strategy had was that people who didn't get severely ill had a few months of more freedom for enjoyable activities. /33

We are in a pandemic, and somehow it feels like most of the efforts right now is on some kind of absurd fixation on trying to keep up some prestige for a couple of people that have clearly not been doing what's best for the country. /34

Even the effort to save their individual prestige, or if I'm to be generous with their ambition, to save the Swedish "Brand", is totally failing. I'm just thinking that perhaps the reputation Sweden has built, was not built on lies and false claims about how good we are. /35

Perhaps Sweden's reputation wasn't built on some shitty marketing campaign to keep prestige.

Perhaps it was built by my people doing good stuff and being honorable. Perhaps it was built by people who were big enough to admit when they make mistakes.

Perhaps Sweden and Sweden's good reputation was built by the very same people that have been turned away from getting the healthcare that would have saved their lives this spring?

Old people was triaged and turned down on ICU. Then we see these clowns prance around bragging about how we managed to "keep the curve down". It makes me sick to my stomach.

There actually was an English version of the report as well. Looks like similar content. The method and data don't support being able to make the claims made based on this report I have seen people make when promoting opening of schools.

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbfde4a7899eb0d8ffdb57b09/covid-19-school-aged-children.pdf

Oh, this just got interesting...So I actually looked up some statistics. Looks like the actual number of primary school teachers(the school which was open), is a lot lower than the report says(which is the number the estimated relative risk from).

If this is true, then the actual estimated risk for teachers in the schools that where open would be a lot higher!

They claim it's 105 418 teachers, but I'm reading statistics from Swedish school authority that says it's just 88 459, 68 699 if you count licensed teachers.

The official statistics from Sweden's school authority says we should probably not have counted more than 88 459 at maximum. If we run the same numbers the relative risk would be a lot higher given the same number of infected.

https://siris.skolverket.se/reports/rwservlet?cmdkey=common&geo=1&report=personal_amne3&p_flik=G&p_verksform=11&p_hman=&p_niva=S&p_amne=&P_VERKSAMHETSAR=2019&P_KOMMUNKOD=&P_LANKOD=&p_skolkod=&p_hmankod=

I also found it that apparently no new teachers are claimed to have been confirmed having Covid-19 since at least May, as they are using the same number (160) for primary school teachers as they did in a report released on 27th of May. The semesters wasn't over then.