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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

Yes, here's a Norwegian site comparing the different Nordic countries per capita[1]. Other than Iceland being an outlier due to it being tiny, Sweden outstrips all other countries on pretty much any measure by a wide margin.

It seems like the number of patients under intensive care is slowly falling for Sweden but they're not anywhere close to where the other Nordics were months ago.

[1] https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/norden/

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You can't quite compare countries like that and claim that Sweden would have had the same rate as the other. The world is full of examples where neighboring countries have radically different caseloads. I don't know enough to meaningfully discuss the details but I suspect you can't just claim Norway is the same as Sweden.

What is most remarkable is the trajectory the epidemic took within Sweden. No comparison is necessary to another country. That they have achieved a substantial reduction of their caseload without any of the invasive measures. Nobody would have ever believed that to be possible!

Other countries should learn from Sweden rather than being in denial - it demonstrates that other measures can be just as effective, and we need to understand how that was possible and whether the measures are transferable.

But if their economy did worse than their neighbour, what was the point of avoiding invasive measures? They have more deaths, more cases, and worse economic output, what exactly is successful here?

You should visit Scandinavia sometime. The Swedish and Norwegian economies cannot be compared easily.

because it simply not true,

their economy did not do worse their people are happier and pretty much looks like they would agree to do it again the same way

that is the real test of measures, would you do the exact same thing again?

which country would want to take the same type of measures once more

That's a nice example of survivor bias: you can't ask the dead.

Sweden has a population of ten million people and an economy very tightly tied to the rest of the EU, so exactly what measures we did I don’t think made a huge difference for the economy.

Quality of life. Additionally "our neighbours are doing something wrong and bad so we should too" is not a justification.

Lockdowns cannot stop COVID deaths and in the beginning nobody claimed they could. The idea that Sweden has performed worse than Norway is a massive goalpost shift that is rightly being called out as nonsense. Especially because it's clear how much corruption there is in these figures. Did the UK really do so badly compared to its neighbours, or is that a result of the health body defining a COVID death as anyone who ever tested positive and then died at any later point, of anything at all (i.e. all COVID infections are fatal according to UK stats).

Of course it's possible.

Flu and basically all other airway-transmissible diseases always mostly disappear during the summer months in Sweden.

Now to see if infection rates can be kept low when autumn comes.

If transmission is from cough and sneeze droplets this would make sense, as it spreads fastest when transmitter has covid and they have a cold or the onset of the flu.

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