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Comment by ArkanExplorer | Hacker News Reader

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

Sweden, 2020 deaths only 6.2% higher than 2018, and following a weak 2019 flu season.

These are entirely acceptable death figures within the context of aging European societies.

COVID is basically a once-a-decade flu variant: like Swine Flu in 2009, which came and went without lockdown: https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

So COVID is dangerous enough to lock down entire societies, but not dangerous enough to justify continued vaccination when 1 in 166,666 have blood clotting? This is probably the background rate.

It seems like Europe and its bureaucrats just can't let go of lockdown. Or alternatively, they wish to push the vaccines and end of lockdown into Spring/Summer, where natural seasonality will take care of COVID and give the appearance that lockdown and vaccines were a success.

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Do you want to know how bad you can get at excess mortality - what about 53 percent ?

https://brnodaily.com/2020/12/16/news/excess-mortality-rate-...

And that's old numbers, since then the situation only got worse: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/15/czech-republic-what... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/28/europe/czech-republic-cor...

53% is nothing. Peru peaked at 260% excess mortality in February (2nd wave) and 230% in July (1st wave). My Facebook was (and is) a depressive mess of sad announcements.

Source: https://opencovid-peru.com/reportes/sinadef/ (1100 deaths per day, compared to 300 average for 2019)

> Or alternatively, they wish to push the vaccines and end of lockdown into Spring/Summer, where natural seasonality will take care of COVID and give the appearance that lockdown and vaccines were a success.

Did you somehow forget that this is the second year of Covid? We've already gone through the whole "natural seasonality" cycle and the disease is very much still here.

Take a look at this COVID daily trends graph from the CDC:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrends...

From an average of about 50k cases reported daily in April through October to about 200k cases reported daily in November, December, and January, then back down to 60k by March.

And there's a similar winter increase in the worldwide cases (some of which is from the US cases, but not all):

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#...

It's impossible to be sure after just one year, but that hill in the winter certainly suggests a seasonal illness to me.

yes, a certain seasonality is very probable. But with the variants we have right now (e.g. B1.1.7 from Kent), summer won't be enough to stem the tide. I'm saying this from a central european perspective (with not enough vaccinations either to help).

Winter also corresponds with holiday seasons.

Further, South American countries were some of the worst hit during the Nov - Feb timeline. South Africa was badly hit around this time. And all these are Southern Hemisphere countries that were experiencing summer around then.

Now, there’s clear evidence that warmer weather makes things easier, since the virus has lower survivability outside a host in the heat, so all things equal, the spread would be lower in warmer weather, but it’s not so much lower that it can be considered seasonal, like the flu.

It's not a surprise that an airborne virus spreads more during the time of year when people are spending more time indoors with their windows closed.

Same reason it was rampant in the US subtropical south during last summer, when it was uncomfortably hot and people stayed inside where there's AC.

This is what seasonality means. It doesn't mean "it'll be eliminated next season".

They're referring more to, success can be claimed for lockdowns/etc whether or not they had an effect, simply by waiting until the natural seasonality causes a drop in cases.

I mean, they explicitly said

> where natural seasonality will take care of COVID

I don't read that as your interpretation at all. It very much sounds like they are saying the spring/summer season will kill COVID.

There are several people in the conversation. Personally, I meant what Izkata said, and I don't think anything will completely kill COVID.

Did you seriously forget that we're a year until Covid and it didn't disappear last summer?

"Only" 6 5 higher mortality is huge excess mortality.

(In reality, in Sweden mortality is about 4.5 % higher than the average of 2015-2019, but that is still very significant; and of course, covid is not just that one either dies or is fine; there is the substantial but currently not very well known number of people with long-term health impact from the infection)

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