No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish | Hacker News Reader

No lockdown, please, we’re Swedish

spectator.co.uk

34 pointsalanfranz82 comments

These articles always give a sense that it's business as usual in Sweden. It isn't. I have been working from home for three weeks now, but I have had to go into central Stockholm a couple of times, and it is almost eerily empty. Restaurants and cafés have a handful of clients, spread out in the corners, at peak lunch time when they would normally be crammed full. Shops are open, but the client-to-staff ratio is close to 1:1, and most have reduced their opening hours. Some article mentioned that cinemas are open. This is technically true -- they haven't been ordered to close -- but the big chain that runs most of them has shut those down on their own initiative.

I don't claim that the level of restrictions is optimal, or that tighter restrictions would not be beneficial, but business as usual it isn't.

One of the reasons the government hasn't ordered a police-enforced lockdown here is that it probably wouldn't make much of a difference. Most businesses and people are already following the government's recommendations by staying at home as much as possible.

That said, there are some laws in place. Since three days ago you are no longer allowed to visit retirement homes for example.

https://www.krisinformation.se/en/news/2020/march/national-b...

According to Googles Mobility Report (https://www.blog.google/technology/health/covid-19-community...):

Sweden:

  Retail:  -24%
  Grocery: -10%
  Parks:   +43%
  Work:    -18%
  Resid.:  + 5%

So, apparently you'll have to look in the park for your compatriots.

For comparison:

Germany:

  Retail:  -77%
  Grocery: -51%
  Parks:   -49%
  Work:    -39%
  Resid.:  +11%

Spain:

  Retail:  -94%
  Grocery: -76%
  Parks:   -89%
  Work.:   -64%
  Resid.:  +22%

I have the feeling, each and every country has to go through the process that they think, they are unique snowflake.

Just to chime in, this has been my forth week working from home, and in that time I can probably count the number of people I've interacted with for any period of time on one hand. Literally every single person I know have been doing the same (my friend group and family is biased to people able to work from home of course, but still).

I met two friends last night for dinner at a restaurant (yes, perhaps irresponsible but I was going insane). Normally a very popular place requiring booking weeks in advance. Yesterday it was us, the owners and one couple in a place with like 30+ tables.

Of course you can get photographs on a sunny Sunday of people sitting outdoors at a café or something. However irresponsible that behaviour might be, it's not representative of the current situation.

True. It is definitely not business as usual. I haven’t been to the office for the last four weeks. I’ve only been to the supermarket one or two times during this period. And I won’t travel to my hometown to see my mom or grandma either until it is safe to do so. So business as usual it is definitely not.

[Edited to add/correct some more info.]

Your comment was far more informative than the article! Thank you.

This whole article was pretty...odd to me.

I felt like it spread disinformation to glorify Sweden's decision to not implement lockdown. The decision to not suspend civil liberties is a complicated one, so I don't want to go into it; but lines like, "Stay at home if you feel sick," are EXTREMELY dangerous because much of the danger of COVID-19 is due to people being asymptomatic for such a long time, meaning people potentially transfer the disease to others even though they don't feel sick.

It's the Spectator, every article there seems to be mega polarized and agenda pushing

Still, "Stay at home if you feel sick" is the opposite of dangerous. It is the negation of that phrase that's dangerous: "don't stay at home if you don't feel sick"

On one hand I wish nobody harm.

On the other hand I'm sick and tired of the highly polarized modern world where you see idiots opposing common sense things such as vaccination -- maybe those people really need to suffer the natural consequence of their stupidity; swedish people seem to have a lot of common sense built into their society, so maybe, hopefully this decision won't negatively affect them.

I hear what you are saying, but quite frequently it's not stupidity, just ignorance.

It is true that in a highly connected world anyone could educate themselves on the benefits of vaccines, but it can be hard to overcome long held beliefs (passed down through education) or peer pressure (in communities that reject certain scientific facts).

All that I'm saying is that while these people might now learn through pain and suffering, I don't really feel they all deserve it.

I find this paper very undesirable, outrageous and borderline conspirational.

> "There are many experts in epidemiology and virology who are highly critical of the lockdown strategy. Few are willing to talk on record."

I mean that's a pretty easy statement to make. Surely if nobody speaks those ideas can't be scientifically challenged.

> "This Swedish exceptionalism is about principle, not epidemiology."

The lockdown strategy is very country dependant, depends on how quickly the infection spread, how much the health system can cope with. There is no principle in that. Some countries are really struggling now and Sweden would do exactly the same in these situation.

There is a certain "show off" attitude in this article which is highly disrespectful in regard of the situation elsewhere.

And I don't think it reflects the sentiment here in Sweden either, there is a lot of internal critique and a lot of people want harsher methods (regardless if it actually does anything).

Sweden have rising deaths and will be hit hard like many countries and we have some of the lowest amount of ICU beds per million inhabitants in Europe, they are of course trying to build out but have problem staffing them as well.

I don't think Sweden will land on a low death toll but the question will be if a more complete shutdown would have helped.

“we have some of the lowest amount of ICU beds per million inhabitants in Europe”

Yep, that really sucks and for me that is more scary than the harshness (or lack of harsness if you will) in the imposed restrictions.

AFAIK, after the cold war we got rid of most of our field hospitals that we had.

[Edited to add comment about field hospitals]

This is such bullshit. As soon as the body count starts to rise all this nonsense is going to out the window and the "exceptional" Swedes will be ordered to cower in their homes just like everybody else.

The thing is, at least for now, they seem to be in line with other countries that took all the measures. Sweden has a very similar number of cases/deaths and population as Portugal which locked schools 3 weeks ago, and the rest of the country 2 weeks ago, but Sweden [1] had the initial reported cases many weeks before then Portugal [2] (for deaths [3]). (I couldn't find number of tests done in each country so that may be a variable there that may mess these values)

I guess the next couple weeks will show which approach is better.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102203/cumulative-coron... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107359/coronavirus[-cas... [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102203/cumulative-coron...

Yeah, I'm watching closely. There is no actual evidence supporting strict lockdowns, despite everyone talking about them as if they're proven to be the only solution. So far, Sweden is showing that perhaps a balanced approach that doesn't destroy your economy can work equally well. Hopefully soon there will be some evidence one way or another.

> There is no actual evidence supporting strict lockdowns

That's false. Aside from common sense, that restricting contact would decrease transmission, China and Italy both reduced their infections by employing a strict lockdown. These policies are being borrowed straight from China and Italy. They both had it really bad, and they managed to get on the other side of the peak.

No, it is not false. "Common sense" is not evidence, and neither is the experience of China and Italy, because both imposed strict lockdowns.

In order to say that these measures were supported by evidence, you would need a country that did not impose strict lockdowns in an otherwise-similar situation, but which had a worse outcome. Sweden may end up being that country, given time, or it may not. As a third possibility, Sweden may impose a strict lockdown, causing us to remain without evidence for the efficacy of strict lockdowns vs. softer measures.

Both China and Italy had major outbreaks, which were controlled by imposing lockdowns. That's sufficient evidence.

The problem is you can't be 100% if it was because of the lockdown or how the virus plays out.

We in HN and other science based forums always want double-blinded trials of just about anything, but for this lockdown, we just assume it is 100% right and nothing else. I believe a lockdown/travel restrictions would have been effective on case number 1. When you do it on case 1000 it is just ... well... useless I guess?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denying_the_antecedent

Sweden is quite different as a society and societal habits than the rest of the world, I don't think we can apply much of what they are doing to India or Iran, perhaps it's applicable to Norway or Finland.

I think Stockholm / Copenhagen would be a pretty good comparison.

Good point. Sweden is a small country and not very densely populated, even in the metro areas.

Just to be clear, even here in Sweden the economy has taken a big hit. People lose their jobs, companies go bankrupt. So the situation is still dire.

Understood - one would hopefully expect the impact to be somewhat lesser, but if people choose to impose the lockdown on themselves without the government enforcing it, I guess it could end up being much the same.

Looking at European flight statistics [1], Portugal looks to have ~3x as many passengers flying to/from Italy than Sweden does, with a similar population. From that, it seems reasonable to expect that Sweden would have an easier time of things, at least in the beginning stages.

[1] https://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?dataset=avi... (change Geopolitical entity to Italy)

It may be the reason, or even that in PT personal space is measured in cms vs meters (part jokingly), too many variables.

But taking in account the supposed 'exponential' growth of the virus, we should have seen a more aggressive curve in Sweden vs Portugal if the lockdowns were the solution.

(I am personally against the lockdowns as they were implemented as I think long term they ill do more harm than good, but I'm trying to keep my biases from these discussions and use impartial data sources)

100%

This was exactly UK / Boris Johnoson's approach. He flipped as soon as the updated models indicated that 100k+ people will die. No leader wants that as their legacy.

You get it wrong; the Swedes are permitted to do stuff and encouraged not to, Boris went around doing the stuff Swedes are encouraged not to, until he changed his mind.

The Swedes aren't a people who have to be forced to be careful and will look for every opportunity to cut corners. Non sono furbi.

Trump seems to be ok with it in so far as he’s telling people to accept it as a good outcome.

This virus has been circulating Europe for more than two months now and people keep parroting the same old "in two weeks time, expect 600K deaths because its exponential" line.

It's like some of you WANT this doomer scenario to play out. If anything, this crisis seems more like one of purpose than a sanitary one.

To everyone who's reading this: stay safe, spread positivity and most importantly find your purpose.

And to the Swedes: keep being awesome, I hope you come out of this stronger because we're definitely going to need new furniture when this whole thing blows over :)

I live here and this is the first time I've heard of it framed in terms of liberty.

When schools started closing across Europe, government officials started talking keeping the schools open so health care workers wouldn't have to take off work to care for their kids. This was also the rationale mentioned when the chief epidemiologist, Anders Tagnell, was interviewed by the BBC the other day.

Another point he made was about compliance: if you keep everything shut down and on lockdown for too long, people will eventually just not comply anymore, so you want to save it until it's necessary.

As cool as it would be to believe that we're just not doing it for liberty, it's pretty clear we're not doing it for practical reasons, and that we're not doing it yet.

As things escalate, it's pretty clear the same lockdown measures other countries have implemented will also come to Sweden.

This is an opinon piece by Fredrik Erixon, who is not epidemiologist. The article claim that "We can expect our Covid-19 death figures to rise faster than our neighbours". This a statement by the author and is not supported by facts, references presented in the article.

It is also the author that claim that the strategy taken by the Swedish goverernment is about Swedish exceptionalism. Again this is not supported by facts, for example references to actual statements.

What are you saying exactly? He's praising the Swedish strategy but you take the only counter-point out of context and make it sound like he's condemning it.

I'm saying that this is an opinon piece that among other things state things about how the epidemy will develop in Sweden without basing it on facts.

> The theory of lockdown, after all, is pretty niche, deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested. It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.

I don't buy that. China did a lockdown, and (at least officially) it has contained the disease. Also there are buckets of models and studies that support this course of action.

> We can expect our Covid-19 death figures to rise faster than our neighbours’ — still all within the confines of a bad winter flu, but these graphs can scare people.

Coronavirus is not 'like the flu'. There is so much data disproving this I won't even bother linking them. Do a Google search 'is coronavirus like the flu'.

> They publish their own models of the virus spread. It shows how many people will need hospital care: the system, they say, can cope. And when asked, they say they don’t think Imperial College has made a better call. > This Swedish exceptionalism is about principle, not epidemiology. > yes, they make us different to Italy and Spain

I feel like there is this narrative floating around that blames countries for their fate regarding Coronavirus. Sure, governments have done a better or worse job dealing with the outbreak, and different places were better or worse prepared. But the veiled message that I get is "Italy and Spain got so many deaths and their economy got wrecked because they are inferior".

Covid-19 and flu do have similar symptoms: https://i.insider.com/5e6a58fee4f9fe5dad7d0932 , so if you have one and are symptomatic, it wouldn't be hard to confuse it with the other.

Where they're wrong is:

1) The death rate. Seasonal flu is around 0.1%, while covid-19 is likely between 0.5% to 1% (many figures in the news are inflated by selection bias due to testing being a limited resource).

2) Contagion. We have vaccines for seasonal flu. Covid-19 spreads much faster and stays alive in the air and on surfaces for much longer.

3) Hospital capacity due to the fast spread.

> I don't buy that.

Well now you have a control group to compare against.

Control group analysis has been very problematic in this epidemic

A high % of people are asymptomatic or just has mild/moderate symptoms. People might not have known what hit them.

Hence people might be tested (now) if they fit the symptoms. Might be tested, and might or might not be classified as Covid-19 without the tests

And that's in countries with a good health system. Maybe some country with hundreds of official cases is already in the millions. Who knows?!

The impact of the pandemic varies from region to region and no one can explain why yet. Japan has a very low transmission rate despite minimal government action. Developing countries and/or areas with warmer climates seem to have a lower transmission rate as well. In Western Europe and the US, cases double every 2-3 days instead of every 5-6 days like in other regions. Except for Iran, which had one of the earliest outbreaks. And Brazil, where the central government has refused to take action.

There's a lot of unexplained variation and maybe the approach in Sweden will enlighten us. But I wish the article talked a little more about what people are doing, because it may be more subtle actions that make the difference. People talk about the lack of hand-shaking in Japan as a possible factor. What peculiarities of Swedish life might be at play? Their transmission rate is in line with similar nations (~doubling every 5 days) but their testing rate is on the low end of Europe. Are they lucky or doing something right?

Not shaking hands has been the norm for some weeks now in Sweden. I thought this was the case everywhere?

The US and much of Europe is practicing extreme social distancing. I haven't had the opportunity to shake someone's hand in weeks due to the lockdown. In fact, I haven't touched someone that is not a part of my household in at least three weeks.

But Japan has been avoiding handshakes naturally since the start of the outbreak, which may have helped suppress transmission rates before they even knew the virus was spreading.

Most people that I know have been WFH for some time, myself for 4 weeks. It's not like people are out and about like they used to -- the social distancing is self-imposed.

Wasn't Boris Johnson dismissing that advice only a couple of weeks ago and shaking hands of people?

We don't really know about transmission rates, since all we have is case counts, which are only a lower bound for infection counts (which are likely much higher).

You can't look at the growth in case numbers and infer much about transmission rate from that, because it is constrained by testing capacity and testing policy.

But we can look at hospitalization and deaths to get an actual idea of which areas are being hit the hardest. We generally know how long an outbreak has been occurring in a region. The differences between Spain and Japan, for example, are obvious when we look at the start of the outbreak and the results (in terms of death and hospitalizations) at different weekly intervals. If the virus spread uniformly through all populations, we would expect Japan to look a lot more like Italy and a lot less like South Korea, based on the nature of their respective government responses. There are discrepancies like this all over the world.

For asian countries, I think the answer is wearing masks.

Ah the convenience of a not-too-densely populated country of homogeneous like-minded people....

Yep, those factors probably explain a good part of why the Swedish authorities have decided on these policies and recommendations.

Our State Epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, has been pretty explicit in stating that these policies are not “one size fits all”, other countries will need to set their own policies in accordance with their situation and conditions.

PS. IMHO, the homogeneity of the Swedish society is sometimes a bit overstated. Believe or not but there is still some room left for having your own opinions and lifestyle here ;-) And our society is probably less conformist now than during the postwar/cold war era.

[Edited to add PS and fix spelling error.]

Exactly. Sweden is quite probably the least homogeneous country in northern Europe with huge changes in the population the last 10-15 years.

Yep. And we’ve also grown a bit. Norway/Finland/Denmark have ~5M inhabitants each, while Sweden has twice as many.

And the benefits of others taking action: you'd already get your imported cases conveniently stopped without lifting a finger yourself when everybody else does the dirty job of closing borders. Not a big difference once there is domestic spread, but every bit helps. (Sweden did implement the EU travel restrictions, but apparently that does not stop the "decisive inaction" narrative)

Sweden is not very homogeneous anymore and the first deaths were disproportionately foreign born from one of the worse place to live in Stockholm.

Oh, please, I get it swedish society is different, but saying you are the last free place in the world is too far fetched. I hope Swedens gamble works for them, but this will be way worse than any flu season, even with their master viking race immunity /s

You are responding to a claim by the author of the article, not something claimed by Sweden.

Absolutely, I don't think Sweden is a single person so it can make such claims.

The only worse thing than Sweden practically doing nothing (saying this as an insufferable swede myself) are the insufferable articles somehow touting the superiority of the approach, as some sort of underdog or challenger?

The mention of Swedish exceptionalism rings true and some self-awareness would be helpful, not sure can you use that term unironically here..

Sweden has imposed several restrictions and Sweden will have problems regardless of lock-down or not due to a very limited amount of ICU beds.

IMO all similar countries will have lots of deaths and tragedies during this pandemic. It's a really tough virus.

What I find absolutely moronic is that a lot of employers here in Sweden keep their employees at their workplaces even though their work could be basically 100% remote. They keep saying "stay home if you feel sick or show any symptom. If not, then it's business as usual from the office".

A friend of mine works for one of the big insurance companies and all he does is back office related work and according to him, all he needs is a VPN access and he can do all his work from home. But no, he needs a doctors notice saying that he belong to one of the risk groups before they let him work for home so he's considering getting some doctor to sign a notice even though he's not in a risk group because he doesn't want to risk getting infected at work or while commuting.

Wow. That’s quite bad indeed, especially since the Public Health Agency has strongly urged that anyone that can work from home ought to do so.

And do you know what their CEO and board said as their defense?

"We know and work with risk everyday. We know how to handle this"

Crazy.

With 558.7 people per million confirmed cases Sweden is not doing a great job [1]. I don't understand the tone of this article. What is there to feel "exceptional" about? Sweden has 5616 confirmed cases and 309 deaths which is a lot for its population [1]. Nothing "exceptional" except it is scary that it is so high for a small country with a small population. It is these kind of articles that cause slackness when you need to be extra vigilant. Lockdown works. Don't battle science with crazy, stupid logics.

[1]: https://google.com/covid19-map/?hl=en

Confirmed cases is difficult to measure as countries test so differently.

Sweden has a lot of deaths (though not exceptional if you look at per million inhabitants) and I believe it will rise; the question is how much lag there is and how much lock-downs work, what type you are talking about and how long you can keep it up.

There is also random chance I feel. For example in Sweden we have something called "sportlov", which is a week off from school (it is a different week for different parts of the country) and for Stockholm it was end of February and a many went to the Italian alps skiing for example.

How much did that affect the spread? So while one learning is that I think somewhere like South Korea is a role model, be more prepared and actually have protective gear in storage units instead of relying on global supply chains always working another thing is just how many with "just the flu" walked around in the biggest cities in your country before it was taken seriously.

I know a lot of people are speaking out of their ass about this virus thing but I do believe our temperature has been a bit too cold for it to spread from objects, clothing and skin so far.

Also we've had amazing weather.

This last weekend I was in a 40 person pile up on a walking bridge near the beach here. Because someone wanted to take a perfect Instagram picture with his three dogs in the middle of the bridge.

I do also believe this virus thing is going to blow up in our faces soon, in these two coming months when temperatures get closer to 10-12 C daily.

So in hindsight we shouldn't have gone into WFH mode until april-may. And in June I believe it's going to be real heavy.

I just hope that their stupidity doesn't cost them their grandparents, majority of people with cancer/heart disease/etc. Swedish are fine, positive, it will be a pitty.

Like on every pandemic, the game is over only when the cure/vaccine is distributed to the whole planet. Until then it is way to risky to relax.

I don’t really understand this argument. In the countries with lockdowns, are people not dying there from Covid-19? And as you can see from other comments in this thread, it is not business as usual in Sweden. There are lots of restrictions in place in order to attempt to flatten the curve.

Yes people are dying all over. But you have to check the ratios. If country A with 20mil population has 10 deaths, and country B with 1mil population has also 10 deaths, then country B is doing something far worse than country A because they got x20 deaths (per 1mil of population). Any leader who wanted to play 'mucho' has an accelerated infection rate in his country (Johnson, Trump, Bolsonaro). And we are still in the beginning of damn thing.

So the joyous spirit of "we're good meeting and having lunch with friends" will fade away with the funerals of old and sick. And I am 100% sure that nobody wants their elders to pass before the latest possible. Swedes too love their parents, their elderly, their sick. It is plain irresponsible.

From The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/catastrophe-sw...

> On the beach and surrounding parkland at Sibbarp there were picnics and barbecues this weekend; the adjoining skate park and playground were rammed. No one was wearing a mask.

I too enjoy a BBQ, trust me I do.. a nice steak, a nice burger, some grilled veggies.. but is this the best time to do this? Sweden is not an isolated country in the middle of the ocean where they got no travelers. Are they trying to win a race but helping the virus affect more?

I thought the purpose is to try (our) best to limit this exposure (flatten the curve and all that) so we can save anyone who can be save. Helping this speed up won't help them.

This is how socialism "works". One pays enormous taxes his whole life, but then, when it comes for government to protect one's health, they do nothing and name this even "liberal".

We'll see how it turns out for them. But so far, it doesn't look like they're about to be decimated anytime soon.

The case with Sweden is that the central government ("regeringen") cannot order people around; it's explicitly forbidden in the Swedish constitution ("ministerstyre"). This is different from many other countries, like Norway and Denmark, and might explain why there's no big leader that has felt the pressure to make people stay home.

Other Nordic countries such as Denmark, Norway, and Finland has more or less identical health-systems/tax-schemes and they have taken very different routes.

You mean like New York with its 40+% taxes?

Every similarly "socialist" country that is taking a more aggressive approach disproves your point.

> Isn’t the real question why other countries aren’t doing the same?

Perhaps because they are not willing to take a gamble? This is, to put it bluntly, idiotic - you do not play games with people's lives and hope it turns out well.

I'm not claiming anyone is right, but you aren't addressing the authors point that the gamble is actually the lockdown. No countries have ever done that before. The author accurately states that the repercussions of lockdown are unknown and that it is possible that more people could die from the lockdown than from the disease. However since nobody really knows, his point was that it was strange that the vast majority of the world chose the unknown path of lockdown.

I think his point is worth looking into. Most people are loosing money, which has a direct impact on health. And I for one had my Dr. Appointments canceled which were for testing. But the delay of those tests can potentially have lasting consequences.

Point is that it is important to analyze both the immediate and long term costs in any strategy fairly. But instead of that, the entire world went with lockdown with very little data to back it up, primarily based on the idea of flattening a curve in order to not overwhelm the health care system.

The downsides are of different characters - lockdowns will have a bad but generally predictable downside in the field of economy, whereas not locking things down will have an unpredictable downside where lots of people - how many we do not know - die.

During the Great Depression, death rates went down, so it doesn't seem very substantiated to claim that lockdowns are going to kill people.

There is no safe choice, all anybody can do is to set some policies and hope it turns out well.

As a fellow Swede I agree. Hospitals all over the world will be overwhelmed because of the pandemic. Even countries doing lockdowns will have a really hard time.

I sincerely believe that the Public Health Agency in Sweden are handling the situation in a good way. Will we fare better or worse than other, similar countries? We can’t know for sure, it’s only after it’s over that we can get a verdict.

> Will we fare better or worse than other, similar countries? We can’t know for sure, it’s only after it’s over that we can get a verdict.

That is the whole point - they're taking a gamble. You can draw up a matrix. If they don't do a lockdown, and it turns out to be not-very-dangerous, they will have saved the economy.

If they don't do a lockdown, and it turns out to be very dangerous, they will have the blood of hundreds of thousands on their hands. But the worst consequence that they can suffer is not getting re-elected.

Think of it like Russian roulette. If the payouts are [+10, +10, +10, +10, +10, -1000], your expected value is -158.3, but if your downside is limited to -20, your expected value is +5. It is not morally justified to take a 20% chance of killing 100'000 people for an 80% chance of raising GDP by 5% ($26 billion). That's 20'000 people for $21.2 billion, or $1.1 million per person.

But aren't some choices, while arguably no more safe, more ethical than others? If you know that your action will bring certain death to some category of people, shouldn't you choose to refrain from doing it?

The OP, dated Apr 4th, sounds like it is from 3 months ago. We learned a lot more since then about how reasonable people are in their behaviors and how inclined they are to understand sensible explanations.

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