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Comment by jeofken | Hacker News Reader

Uncountable seeds of friendship and love never take root, due to meeting people being banned. Untold numbers of ideas and plans never made between entrepreneurs. All due to people with power over government arms or mass media being caught up in a mass hysteria. Governments will print money Weimar-style to fund their debts and liabilities in the 2020s, as they kill commerce and free life.

In my country we were spared from lockdowns or restrictions until recently - and compared to how friends in Germany, Hungary, Denmark, etc live it’s such a relief. Still no more people have died here last year than on average - 90k deaths/year as usual [0] [1]

[0] http://www.scb.se/om-scb/nyheter-och-pressmeddelanden/overdo...

[1] http://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisko...

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The citations do not support what you say. Citation [0] says only that excess mortality in specifically the third quarter of 2020 was not higher than previous years. It says nothing about the excess deaths for all of 2020.

Citation [1] is data for 2019, before COVID-19.

Why did you cite these articles and pretend they say something they don't?

In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths, but only writes exact numbers for different quarters. In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up.

I’m getting HTTP error 500 (iOS safari from a Swedish domestic IP) when going to the statistics database - idk if it’s just me or if they deployed something buggy recently. Can therefore only find articles atm, but they are still from the government statistics bureau source.

The first paragraph of [0] says “Den ökande spridningen av coronaviruset i samhället syns ännu inte i antalet dödsfall i Sverige, visar preliminär statistik från SCB” which is English is “The growing spread of Coronavirus in the community is not yet showing any change in the number of deaths in Sweden, shows preliminary statistics from the (government) central bureau of statistics” and I think that states it rather clear.

I do believe you argue in good faith though and welcome corrections - although I still believe in principle it is not right to hinder free people from living free.

> In [0] it states that 2020 is an average year in deaths

It does not.

> In [1] it shows averages for the previous years in numbers summing while years up.

This still has no relation to deaths in the year 2020. You cannot tell anything about deaths caused by coronavirus from data that only goes up to 2019.

> "The growing spread of Coronavirus in the community is not year showed any change in the number of deaths in Sweden"

My translation is "The increasing spread of the coronavirus in society is not yet visible in the number of deaths in Sweden", meaning, "there may be more coronavirus cases than we can tell from just looking at deaths". A significantly different meaning to "coronavirus did not cause any change in number of deaths", which is in any case flatly contradicted by the same article which describes increases in excess deaths in the second quarter.

For what it's worth, I am willing to believe that despite the massive increase in excess deaths in the second quarter, it could be offset by reductions in excess deaths in other quarters. So if you do have data that specifically compares excess deaths for the last few years feel free to share it. Currently you haven't got anything to support your statement.

Is the part we are disagreeing about what “not _yet_ showing any change” means? I doubt hospitals have ten thousand deaths which they procrastinated reporting.

More likely the author meant that November and December is not yet counted, and therefore must add the “yet” to the sentence.

As you say, [0] states that a slightly larger than average number of deaths occurred during Q2, and a smaller number during Q3. It may be a tragedy to die in spring and not in fall, and miss one last summer. Please keep in mind though that the claim you’re responding to was that 2020 the year didn’t see a significant increase in deaths - it was a very average year to die as a Swede.

> Is the part we are disagreeing about what “not _yet_ showing any change” means?

No, it's the meaning of the entire statement. Your translation means "coronavirus did not result in an increase in deaths in 2020", whereas my translation means "the spread of coronavirus may be wider than the number of excess deaths in 2020 indicates". The meaning is wholly different, it is saying something orthogonal to the point you want to make. It says nothing about whether the number of excess deaths is higher or lower than usual, just that you cannot take the number of excess deaths and determine the spread of coronavirus from it.

> Please keep in mind though that the claim you’re responding to was that 2020 the year didn’t see a significant increase in deaths - it was a very average year to die as a Swede.

I am keeping this in mind because I'm trying to point out to you that you have no data for excess deaths in 2020 so you cannot make this claim.

> Your translation means "coronavirus did not result in an increase in deaths in 2020"

That’s simply a lie - you are deliberately taking the “yet” out and replacing “showing” with “result”, which indicates total certainty, from my translation. I am not editing comments earlier in this thread FYI, you know I translated it correctly. “Ännu” means “yet” and “visar” means “showing/shows”. I encourage non-Scandinavians to Deepl translate it; language barriers don’t exist in our age due to machine translation.

Look at the data directly: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country

Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons.

New lockdowns also seem to be coordinated across the global right now, independent of local conditions. This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achieve some kind of strategic aim.

> Difficult to see much excess death in the UK in the past few months beyond levels seen in the 2018 and 2017 flu seasons.

Excess mortality is only just starting to creep back up. It's easy to see that UK excess deaths peaked in early April at a weekly rate nearly 4 times that of the highest pre-2020 peak (2018-01). Ideally, we'd avoid a repeat of that.

> This absolutely seems like a coordinated global action to achieve some kind of strategic aim.

Could said aim by any chance be to avoid running out of hospital beds?

Do you have a source for the claim that hospitals are running out of beds?

Plenty! Here's one specific news article from mid-December for the UK, with a link to the NHS data source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/17/nhs-hospitals-...

Thanks for sharing. Sad to see the central planned economic model failing to provide in this sector

By closing businesses and shutting down the means of people to provide for themselves, governments are also forcing people to depend on handouts. Printing money without increasing value will not last. It has already damaged our economy and made us dependent on states that have not shutdown (some with terrible human rights violations like the CCP government).

It should be clear it's a means of control, used as an excuse by World Economics Form to continue with their plans for debt reset (only for certain people of course; Bezos and Gates won't have their wealth affected to devalued, just everyone under a certain income range).

I agree. This is insane and it bothers me few people on HN see it as such. There is no room for discussion on this forum for the true weight and reality of what we are seeing unfold.

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