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Comment by toolz | Hacker News Reader

Why does it seem like both sides seem to be so sensationalist about Sweden. They have middle of the road all-cause mortality and most recently their sero studies suggest an extremely low IFR but that got pulled due to bad randomization of test subjects so that might go up to middle of the road for Europe for Sweden too. They haven't performed great and not poorly either. It's strange to see people so polarized over them.

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Unfortunately I think that in the US at least the decision to lock down or reopen has become very highly politicized and we are starting to see virtue signalling enter the equation. People now have a vested personal interest in seeing Sweden's approach fail or succeed, in order to reinforce their own political opinions and/or sense of morality.

I find it very frustrating to see the way it's being spun. Firstly, social distancing is not a binary thing that you either do or don't do. Sweden has certainly implemented some social distancing measures and will continue to make adjustments to their strategy as new data comes out. And second, what works for Sweden may or may not be applicable in other countries. The virus spreads differently in different places, and different cultures may have differing attitudes about what constitutes an acceptable risk. I suspect that if Stockholm saw the same sort of explosive growth that was seen in New York, they would have reacted with stronger social distancing policies.

It's certainly good to look at what other countries are doing in their response to covid-19 and ask if there are things that are worth adopting. But I think it's much more important for countries (and states and cities) to be paying attention to their own data... and that is what should be primarily driving their response.

Because they should be compared with the neighbouring Nordic countries.

  Norway 38 deaths/M
  Finland 37 deaths/M
  Denmark 76 deaths/M
  Sweden 244 deaths/M

It’s an order of magnitude more deaths per million than Norway or Finland.

But isn't that the point? They accepted more deaths up front, but over the long-run those countries should average out about the same per capita, while Sweden avoided immediate negative social/economic impacts.

Perhaps. Hopefully! It's too early to know the final counts, though, which is why there is still scope for controversy.

South Korea avoided negative social/economic impact and has 5 deaths/M, so we know for certain that it’s not impossible.

South Korea was extraordinarily well prepared, and it is yet to see if they'll be able to keep this up with international travel resumed.

I am extremely pessimistic about any country's ability to usefully maintain low infection rates while opening up international travel again. Sweden isn't close to being able to do this in terms of tech infrastructure or cultural mindset.

(That being said, if anyone is going to do it successfully long term, it's going to be south korea)

> South Korea was extraordinarily well prepared

As the western world could've been, too, but we just... weren't.

"It's not my fault I failed the exam, I didn't study!"

We actually don't know that. Korea has avoided it, for now. People were saying the same thing about Japan and Singapore. But both had outbreaks that flared up. They'll have to keep doing what is working until a vaccine occurs or the disease dies.

But even if its possible to prevent an massive outbreak that doesn't mean its possible to undo a massive outbreak. Korea has prevented large scale community spread by testing and tracing. That has been a successful and preventing an outbreak. But nobody has ever successfully used it to remove a virus from a population after it was already widely in the population.

That is blatantly not true. In the long term we'll have either a vaccine or antiviral drugs, and won't have that huge amount of unnecessary deaths.

We won’t get either before lockdowns become infeasible to continue.

Lockdowns are not binary, you can have partial lockdowns.

As stated by others, they are further along in the pandemic in terms of number of people infected. They also have rather large long term care homes and more than half their deaths are in those.

We won't know if that is a winning strategy until a year from now but there is a strong appeal in having not locked everything down. They will be resuming football games with fans and everything at their large stadiums come June.

Whether Sweden is doing well or badly is a big question for the overall debate about how to handle the virus. While I aim my discussion to always be calm, cool and collected as a general rule, who ever claims approach X for dealing with a deadly pandemic is good has to claim some other approach is bad and I don't see how that can avoid being a strong statement if not "sensationalist". Inded, if Sweden had just an average death rate without a lockdown, their approach would be a win, would be preferable. But they don't have an average death rate, they have a much higher rate than comparable countries and their deaths basically continue exponential growth whereas things in Norway seem relatively under control.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-mi...

-- Fair warning, Italy's death are higher still, of course but Italy isn't really comparable. Even more, Sweden's in the exponential phase and so we don't know how they will go - they providing a laboratory for the world but I don't think human beings should be volunteered for such experiments.

The death rate is clearly not growing exponentially. Try switching the scale to logarithmic in your link. It's basically linear right now based on some other graphs I've seen, but it's hard to tell due to reporting delays. Since the number of people in hospital has been stable for about two weeks now, I would be very surprised to see the daily deaths increase by a lot.

Is Netherlands comparable with Sweden and Denmark? If not, why not?

Netherlands has a much higher density than Sweden (densest country in Europe and one of the densest countries in the world, dense places don't do well once the virus is released, sadly), so it's clearly not as comparable as the countries in the chart (originally put together by Vox). Nonetheless, if you add Netherlands, you'll notice while it has a higher per-capita death rate, Sweden has been approaching it over time.

[1] https://www.holland.com/global/tourism/information/general/f...

What kind of density are you looking at? The majority of cases in Sweden are in the capital, so the whole area of the country doesn't matter for anything.

Because lockdowns aren’t sustainable, it’s unfair to compare Sweden’s short-term death rate to countries in full lockdown. Let’s see what happens once the lockdowns are lifted and the next wave of infection takes off.

Many (if not most) people have "picked a team" so to speak, and they want to be correct. If Sweden's way proves to be better in the long run, many of those people will have been wrong. Nobody wants to be proven wrong, hence the passion.

I think there is this and there is that.

First there is definitely propaganda from Sweden or from its sympathizers who see the failure in this crisis as being an example of being wrong in other issues like immigration.

Secondly there are people who try to use Sweden as an example to advance their local economical or political goals.

Third there are people who see this nonsense though and do not want to be in the chain of stupidity.

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