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Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

One of the bits of good news recently has been that vaccination apparently helps with long COVID too. But I agree with the idea of not being blasé about COVID due to the long-term morbidity effects. It will be interesting to see what sort of hangover Sweden has from their frankly idiotic policies.

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Sweden have had fewer infections than a lot of other regions. If longcovid is a problem, I would be more worried about places like New York and London.

Metropolitan areas might not be the best comparison for a territorial state like Sweden. The actual effect of policies might be more visible when viewed next to comparable countries, like their nordic neighbours.

Here are the case numbers per inhabitant from the Johns Hopkins university dataset plotted against time (moving average with a window of seven days):

https://mackuba.eu/corona/#compare.daily?pop=1&c=no,fi,dk,se...

Cases are not the same thing as infections. Comparing cases between countries doesn't work, even when corrected for positivity rate. Deaths should be a more fair comparison. Then there are a lot more countries with higher death rate.

I didn't mean that it is fair to compare a metropolis to Sweden when it comes to "who did the right thing". But it is a fair comparison when considering the effects of longcovid.

Sweden only stands out when compared to Nordic countries, not when compared to the rest of the world. Thus bad effects from longcovid should be more visible in harder hit places.

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