Comment by doublesCs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doublesCs | Hacker News Reader

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> Combined with WHO fluctuating to the extremes with "you need, you don't need a mask", Sweden no quarantine results vs rest of Europe, in general numbers not making much sense even for one country over periods of time (not comparing numbers from different countries), it's not hard to make a case that the current response to covid is for making money primarily and not caring about general population welfare.

Are you suggesting that Sweden had good results by using no quarantine?

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Sorting by deaths per capita, and excluding tiny countries, the countries with the highest death rate in the world were:

- UK - Spain - Italy - Sweden - France - USA

UK did a SHIT job (incompetent government, uneducated population; I know, I live here). Spain and Italy were the first countries to get mass infections before the world realized that covid wasn't just a China problem, of course they're gonna rank high. Then you have Sweden.

Excluding the ones you mentioned we also have comparable numbers for Belgium, France, Netherlands, Ireland. I expected no quarantine to have disastrous order of magnitude difference in results. Does not seem so.

Ofc this is comparing data between countries, which is more often than not apples to oranges. But we can ignore the numbers and just see the bodies did not pile up in Sweden streets. From this I can not say with certainty any more that quarantine was worth it considering it does not come without serious downsides.

> But we can ignore the numbers and just see the bodies did not pile up in Sweden streets. From this I can not say with certainty any more that quarantine was worth it considering it does not come without serious downsides.

I agree with you that naive comparison of numbers is difficult. That said, Yes, you've just showed what's problematic in ignoring the numbers and focusing only on what is evident. If your mind can only comprehend either "all hunky dorey" or "bodies piling up on the street", then I indeed Sweden is closer to the former. Bodies would never be piling up on the street in any concievable scenario with this virus, as this virus has a case fatality rate of about 0.1% average for the population and our society's infrastructure can easily handle 0.1% of its population bodies spread over a period of years. I hoped that the people in charge could be a bit more sophisticated, but apparently that's not the case in many countries (e.g. Sweden, UK)

Manner of speaking with the bodies in the street. I mean it is not signifincantly worse.

Again, I think you're not really looking at the numbers. You're just going "the world didn't end, lets move on". I would say it's very significantly different from countries that did it well.

Deaths per 1M for similar size countries in europe:

Belgium - 844 [1]

Sweden - 543

Netherlands - 358

Ireland - 352

Switzerland - 227

Portugal - 160

Denmark - 105

Romania - 94

Austria - 78

Hungary - 61

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/in-defense-of-belgium-corona...

If you still think Sweden did a good job, I'm not sure I can help you any more.

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