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Comment by jdub | Hacker News Reader

"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).

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> 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".

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.

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