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Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

Sweden has more deaths per capita from coronavirus than the US, has an exponentially increasing death rate (i.e. they haven't turned the corner yet), and a very high case fatality rate of 9.4% indicating that they're severely under-testing. This is not what a successful disease prevention strategy looks like.

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Sweden's deaths per capita is neck and neck with the United States and following approximately the same trajectory with no lockdown. It's neither appreciably better nor appreciably worse.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

The US, like the UK, did a terrible job early on when containment was most critical. Several states are in lockdown now but arguably, the reason for our awful current new cases/death rate is due to the resistance to taking action in February when it first hit. There are also many places in the US that are not in lockdown. From another comment: “Approximately 44 of 50 states have lower per capita death rates than Sweden.“ The US cannot be compared directly to Sweden because it doesn’t have a single policy like Sweden. It’s also worth noting that Sweden has taken some lockdown measures ie your comment about “no lockdown” isn’t accurate. Finally, it’s early days and time will tell. The UK changed their policy because there is no credible evidence that herd immunity is effective. I believe Sweden will as well once the disease spirals out of control. And hopefully less people will die as a result. Unfortunately, there will also be the insufferable few that claim we could have survived without being cautious because you can’t prove that those measures were responsible for saving lives. Don’t be that person.

> the reason for our awful current new cases/death rate is due to the resistance to taking action in February when it first hit.

The reason is actually NYC, specifically Cuomo and DiBlasio passing the buck back and forth and doing nothing. If you remove just NYC, the rest of the country is for the most part doing a lot better than Europe.

It's even worse than that, de Blasio was basically in denial and wasn't doing anything, even through mid-March when cases were exponentially skyrocketing here. It took all the heads of his public health department threatening to resign for him to actually start doing things, and the idiot even went to his gym on the last day that gyms were even open.

Both he and Cuomo took way too late to act, and now we're all suffering for it. Cuomo has since at least gotten better, but de Blasio has been terrible throughout.

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