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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

In the case of a pandemic it is probably pretty good advice, unless you are of the opinion that your authorities are acting against your interest.

The problem with this pandemic is that a lot of people in places of power have made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones (for instance, such as pursuing herd immunity) rather than to follow the WHO expert advice. This could easily be construed as authorities acting against your best interests and in fact in quite a few places people have died that need not have died at all.

But there is a difference between 'political authorities' and 'medical authorities', the WHO has been fairly consistent and sensible in their advice to date, what political authorities locally do with that advice is another matter entirely, that runs the gamut of Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson to Jacinda Ardern and everything in between.

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Yeah, I agree, that in the case of a pandemic, the health authorities interests are pretty well aligned with a member of the general public. However, there are always issues in this kind of situation when the authorities got it wrong. In a political environment, changing course is seen as an admission of being wrong, and a loss of face. So we continue on with the initial policy. We are currently facing this problem as all experts seem to agree that covid will be endemic, but we are still flailing around with (increasingly half-assed) prevention measures as if we are still going to stop the virus. I disagree that pursuing herd immunity was a bad decision. With every day the pandemic drags on, Sweden's decision is looking better and better.

Agreed that there is a lot of ego involved, and that certainly doesn't help. In NL we have a couple of nice examples of that.

Pursuing herd immunity is a viable strategy only if you can actually achieve it.

Sweden has done far worse than their neighbors in this respect. But given the fact that it drags on all you can say is that as long as we don't treat this as a global problem your local measures matter less than you think.

Countries that did fantastically well early on showed it could be done, but because they were the exception eventually they too became overwhelmed through imported cases. If that had not happened, which would have required a more synchronized approach, then the total damage would be a fraction of what it is today.

And this isn't over yet, not by far and it is a much harder problem now than it was in March last year.

That's not correct that Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors. It's actually below the median for Europe.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

I said neighbors, not all of Europe.

Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland all did considerably better, and have demographics and local conditions that are closer together than comparing Sweden with the rest of Europe. It's a thinly populated Nordic country, so the comparison material should be countries that match those criteria, not the average of the EU, which runs the gamut of high density extremely interconnected countries with major airline hubs all the way to vast emptiness with the occasional city.

It's an easy mistake to make though.

In addition to that, it's worth pointing out that even the architect of the Swedish policy defending his strategy acknowledges it would have been dramatically worse if Swedes hadn't mostly worked from home and observed social distancing anyway (i.e. the exact opposite of what most anti-lockdown campaigners want). Also, they imposed strict external travel restrictions to ensure they never imported as many cases as the worse-performing European countries did, and deployed all sorts of restrictions short of lockdosn like banning gatherings of 8 people or more. It's really not the poster child for muh freedom

In 10 years, when most of the dust has settled, we'll be able to explain what we saw in Sweden and the surrounding countries as a combination of population density, interactions, medical policy, and randomness. It's hardly fair to consider only a small number of variables in cases like these.

That mirrors my expectation. Which by the way is a pet peeve of mine: the reliance on the 'R0' factor for reporting in the press, R0 is something you can at best establish when an epidemic has run its course, but it is being treated as this magic wheel that we can turn to ensure a desirable level of infections, which is complete madness, it's an output, and a delayed one at that, not an input.

I think many people have learned the limits of science, public health, and mainstream scientific reporting over the past few years. It has repeatedly exposed that the way people think about causality is not consistent with scientific thought. R0 is just one of many examples.

That particular bug has now infested the top levels of Dutch policy making entities with fairly disastrous consequences.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland...

Yeah, but here's my prediction for what we'll find: In one way it was pretty random that it was precisely Sweden that adopted such stupid medical policies versus covid; in another, given what we know of these countries' larger political environment and post-WW2 history, it was perhaps to be expected.

"You don't need to wear masks" was bad advice from well-meaning people who should've known better. The researchers who did know better couldn't push past deeply-entrenched anti-miasma attitudes quickly enough.

"Use social distancing and isolation to avoid COVID and get vaccinated as quickly as possible" is good advice from well-meaning people who do know better. Sorry it's unpleasant, but if the USA behaved rationally, there wouldn't be 750K+ dead today.

Sweden readily admits that its approach was a terrible mistake. It's just not as embarrassingly bad as other countries, particularly ones that, with sensible leaders, should have done much better (UK, USA).

Spot on. The developed world really has no excuses.

Mixed messaging by people in the media undercut a lot of support for the countermeasures, which was then further amplified using social media to pretend that scientists are divided in their opinions when in fact they weren't, except for a few lone holdouts, who - yay controversy - were given a disproportionate amount of airtime.

Nobody in their right mind would have predicted before the pandemic that some of the most developed countries in the world will have some of the highest death counts. I fear this will be deeply ingrained in the social consciousness and lead to further divisiveness down the line.

This is true, at least, it is for me. I never expected that my country (far down the list in population) would be in the top 30 countries for COVID cases. Disappointment doesn't begin to describe it.

> Sweden readily admits that its approach was a terrible mistake.

It does?!? Funny, how can I have totally missed something as big as that?

I'm a Swedish "expat"; I have now lived abroad for just a little longer than I lived in Sweden (26 vs 26.5 years), but I've always followed Swedish media and I still travel there regularly. All I've seen is some hemming and hawing about "Perhaps not totally optimal"; far from any flat-out admission of "terrible mistake". And when I spent a long weekend there three weeks ago, the populace at large certainly didn't seem aware of any such thing.

Got any handy links to this admission by Sweden?

Here a link about lockdowns:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientist-behind-swedens-no-loc...

> The epidemiologist behind Sweden’s controversial decision to forgo a mandatory lockdown conceded for the first time that more restrictions might have helped prevent a surge in coronavirus-related deaths.

But "might have helped prevent a surge" feels pretty far from "admits that its approach was a terrible mistake".

I think that actually the countries that have successfully fought covid (PRC, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand as you mention, Thailand, Singapore, Australia, Iceland, etc.) have done so in significant part by violating the WHO expert advice to, for example, permit unrestricted travel. Your country and mine have about 100 times more deaths per capita than any country in that list, perhaps because they followed the WHO's advice.

Throughout the pandemic the experts, including the WHO, have been very frequently wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean you'll be better off following advice from secret messages encoded for you in game show hosts, or, worse, Donald Trump's actual opinions. But blind faith in experts hardly seems to be justified.

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