Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

Why was anyone talking about Sweden in the first place?

Because it was the only example of a developed nation whose health officials came out and said "given our circumstances, we think our country will be ok without anti-covid measures."

People who wanted (for a variety of reasons) to denounce anti-covid measures took those statements, stripped out the "given our circumstances" and said "see, Sweden thinks everyone will be ok without anti-covid measures."

The anti-covid groups, recognizing that nuance is doomed, did not respond by saying "Sweden might be ok, but we won't" and instead said "Sweden is wrong."

So why did people stop talking about it? Because the policy decisions have already been made. The political tool that is "Sweden says otherwise" isn't useful anymore.

Now obviously the academics and public policy experts have not stopped talking about Sweden (and the verdict is not even close to rendered), but since they are doing so out of the public eye it doesn't so much count.

So why should we have more public discussion about Sweden? It looks to me like this author believes it is evidence for the assertion "if the experts are struggling, the amateurs must be right." It is not. This kind of reasoning is virtually always the kind of justification someone comes up with when they need an explanation for why someone should trust a fringe conspiratorial theory of events over a mainstream expert-endorsed one.

There were no Sweden-specific cirumstances that mattered. The belief that Sweden is somehow uniquely special or that it can only be compared to its neighbours is a tired, unconvincing talking point that must surely come mostly from people who have never actually been there.

Swedes are normal Europeans who live in normal cities in a normal western country, and the virus is tiny. To the extent Sweden is "different" to its neighbours it's only in things like the proportion of non-Swedes who live there, which it seems inherently raises their numbers relative to their more anti-immigration neighbours (given that COVID seems to hurt African immigrants more in all regions of the world including the USA).

"obviously the academics and public policy experts have not stopped talking about Sweden (and the verdict is not even close to rendered), but since they are doing so out of the public eye it doesn't so much count."

The academics and policy experts are refusing to talk about Sweden, because it reveals that they aren't really experts at all - just playing at being experts. It is easy to see this. Here's one of the only recent academic pronouncements on Sweden, published in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95699-9

Except it's not really recent at all. Despite being published in August the first sentence of the article is a false claim about public statistics and it goes downhill from there. The reason is, to build its argument it has to simply ignore all data from after July 2020. If it didn't then it couldn't possibly make the arguments it's trying to make. Also, it cherry picks its countries and its calculations aren't even consistent with each other. It's not science. It's policy advocacy pretending to be science. These people deserve to be raked over the coals in public because their credibility is zero.

...You do know that Sweden implemented more "mainstream" anti-covid measures as 2020 went on, right? A decision in July 2020 gave Swedish local authorities the right to shut down bars/restaurants. By Dec. 2020, the government was shutting down public facilities, putting mask mandates on public transportation, encouraging remote education/work, and further limiting groups in bars/restaurants.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03003930.2021.1...

So if the goal is to compare "no restrictions" to "restrictions", only amateurs would think you could use "all" the data from Sweden.

Ah yes, you're right: professionals simply ignore any data that contradicts them. Only the amateurs are doing any actual science in epidemiology these days.

Sweden was never at any point as tough as most other countries, and even if they had adopted e.g. UK style measures afterwards (which they didn't), it wouldn't matter: they should have still ended up worse than other countries due to their early stance.

What actually happened is that Sweden has significantly lower per-capita COVID mortality than the EU average.

Seeing how desperately people try to rationalize this is fundamentally very depressing. Lockdowns do not work. Masks do not work. They have never worked. Swedes are not biologically different to Brits or the French. You don't actually need Sweden to see this, there are many other examples from the USA, e.g. the differences between North and South Dakota (no outcome differences, very different policies). Or just look at graphs of case curves. You cannot figure out from looking at cases when policies were changed, even though being able to do so was the only goal of the changes. These policies directly failed on their own terms, and no studies or inter-country comparisons are even needed to prove that.

>What actually happened is that Sweden has significantly lower per-capita COVID mortality than the EU average.

Sweden is also significantly higher than all its immediate neighbors who have 1/3rd to 1/10th the mortality.

>These policies directly failed on their own terms, and no studies or inter-country comparisons are even needed to prove that.

...So we don't need to talk about Sweden after all?

>e.g. the differences between North and South Dakota (no outcome differences, very different policies).

North Dakota (with late lockdowns) beat South Dakota (no lockdowns) by about the same margin that Sweden beat the EU average (10~15%). Why is the difference "significant" for Sweden, but "nonexistent" for the Dakotas?

We can talk about specific countries all day even though it's unnecessary (indeed, you can see the policies don't work just by examining case curves individually, without comparisons between them). But it's pointless. Everyone who claims Sweden doesn't disprove the scientific basis for lockdowns just comes up with a random new justification as each one is shot down. First it was "Sweden is different because of population density". That was dealt with. Then it was "Swedes don't like to be physically close to each other" (lol). That was dealt with. Then it was "actually Sweden was locked down even though everyone said they weren't". Now it's "but you can't compare Sweden to anywhere except Denmark and Norway". Etc.

The justifications here are based on working backwards from a desired conclusion, yet there's no rational way to do it. For instance, is this talking point "all its immediate neighbours", as you put it? Or just some of its neighbours? Because Sweden is also neighboured by some Baltic states, and if you include those, Sweden is no longer the worst in that little group. So the usual construct is "Scandinavian neighbours", not "all immediate". The incoherency of this claim is a good sign it's made up on the spot - data cherry picking, exactly what people aren't meant to do.

So. "Experts" said Sweden would suffer mass death from not locking down: 90,000 deaths predicted by the ICL model alone. There was no postulated Scandinavian Exception in any model or scenario. Nor has anyone presented any sort of mechanistic or biological explanation for how such an Exception should work. Instead, once their data disproved the underlying theory, people started desperately trying to retrofit the narrative to claim it actually a success rather than accept the truth that epidemiology is, as a field, so incompetent as to be fraudulent. Reality came nowhere near the predictions.

But, if you wish, just ignore Sweden (or Texas, or Florida, or the Dakotas) and present a methodology that reliably selects from case curve data alone the dates of policy changes. It cannot be done. But case data is ground truth: policy was justified on the grounds it would change the rate of infections. Because policy changed for everyone in a country on a single day, there should be very clear artificial changes in infection numbers a few days after that (it takes a few days for symptoms to develop and people to get tested). If you cannot reliably find such changes from the data, then the policies have failed by their own logic. Comparisons are irrelevant at that point because they weren't justified that way.

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