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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

I personally think something should have been done, but it's an open question if we went too far or not far enough and am willing to listen to the argument that we went too far. It's unlikely what was done was the absolute perfect policy prescription given all the trade offs involved.

Personally I'm looking to Sweden's data, a country that instituted some social distancing measures (no crowds above 50) but not all (Restaurant dine in still open) for some clarity. Their numbers are worse than Denmark's right now but not absurdly so (2x deaths per capita).

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> and am willing to listen to the argument that we went too far.

In all honesty I want to do the same. But upon reflecting, that's more to do with my desire for things to 'return to normal' than anything else.

There's so much we don't know yet. What if immunity isn't a thing (I'd say unlikely) or not as binary as we think (much more likely; multiple articles I've read indicate that having a mild version of this also provides mild inoculation)?

What if the hope of the 'iceberg' theory is untrue, or very selectively true?

What if allowing this thing to roam free and cause mass inoculation also leads to mutations that mess up our plans (unlikely, from what I've read about coronaviruses).

My point is that until we have a better grasp on these potentially game-changing issues, we should prioritize study, we should prioritize testing on mass scale, we should prioritize PPE for our health care workers, and we should prioritize finding ways to minimize the consequences of our possibly-too-careful aproach.

But we shouldn't let down on that 'over-careful' approach until we know more. Regardless of the economic impact.

Give it time. They're still in full exponential growth, whereas every place that enacted social distancing rules a couple weeks ago or more is now plateauing.

Possibly, their numbers the last 4 days are bizarre, potentially due to holiday effects.

My guess is what's going to happen is they will see more deaths, but not an unreasonable number and both sides of the debate will declare victory as they move the goal posts sufficiently.

My guess is that they'll end up having to do more stringent social distancing measures anyway, but that a lot of people will end up having unnecessarily died because they waited so long relative to other countries. Because currently they are on track for an unreasonable number of deaths, and it would reasonable to change the course of action so that that doesn't happen.

I'm not seeing a lot of subtlety in these outcomes, nor possibility of both sides (credibly) claiming that they were right. We'll know soon enough either way.

Sweden's number of confirmed cases is not in full exponential growth right now. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

They've fallen behind in testing capacity, like many others. You have to go by hospitalizations and confirmed deaths because those are the only stats likely not to be underreported too badly.

Exactly, look at the logarithmic curve of deaths and you see a clear flattening so no "exponential growth" as you where saying.

15% of deaths happened in the past 24 hours, that's not a flattening of the curve

Maybe you're being fooled by the lack of reported deaths in the weekends in Sweden? It does mess up the curve quite a bit. But it's been like that every weekend if you look at daily deaths. And it makes the log graph look less exponential than it is

Also the log graph is a day behind the reported numbers, so tomorrow you'll see a sharp rise as they're at 1200 deaths now, making it clear that it's indeed exponential

So last tuesday they reported 114 deaths yesterday they reported 114 deaths. You can't be seriously looking at the bar graph of daily deaths and see an exponential growth. If anything it seems to have stagnated. Yes we underreport during the weekend and overreport the first days after the weekend and monday was a holiday for us. But it is clear as day if you look at the logarithmic chart over deaths that our growth is slowing.

Similar cherry-picking leads to: Last wednesday 96 deaths happened, which was around 15% of total deaths at the time. And this wednesday 170 is reported, which is around 15% of total deaths now. That's exponential growth

You are right though, given the numbers there's decent likelihood that it's stagnating. But there's also a decent risk that it's still exponential

Again, 3 day weekend...

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