Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

I still want to see how Sweden ends up before we pat ourselves on the back.

And I know it’s quite the contrarian viewpoint but it remains to be seen if the cure is worse than the disease. How many small businesses and livelihoods have we lost? How many suicides? How much unemployment?

View on HN

The "cure" is absolutely worse than the disease. What we should be doing is old/high risk people stay home, everyone else wear masks. The problem is most of our politicians are old so they do what is best for themselves instead of what is best for the country.

I actually think it has nothing to do with them being old and realizing they're at risk. I would wager that, panic was at such absurd levels (and still is, and unfortunately this has become a partisan issue which is absolutely insane), that politicians did some napkin math and basically said "I'd rather be the one that shut the country down instead of the politician who was in office while millions of Americans died".

That's just speculation, of course. But if you look at someone like Trump, I don't claim to understand his thinking super well but he seems like the type of person that would be extremely opposed to a lockdown, not because of the economic impacts themselves but because the impact on the stock market. So, the fact that he accepted the recommendation to lockdown basically implies to me that he saw the level of panic and saw that, if he shutdown, very few would blame him for following advice of medical professionals, whereas if he didn't shutdown and we really did have 2 million deaths, that would absolutely be held against him. So really just some basic game theory.

Also, I totally agree that the cure is absolutely worse than the disease. (Or more accurately, I am not sure but am highly confident, and will be following the data over the next months)

This analysis won’t work well because people will compare the what happened to the what happened. “It wasn’t worth 100,000 deaths to kill the economy” will be the stupid refrain.

Never mind that what kind of economy would we have had with 2M deaths and bodies buried in Central Park?

I’m not following your logic. If Sweden ups up not being too bad it would seem to imply we wouldn’t have had two million deaths (especially in NYC alone. I don’t think anyone thinks a 25% IFR)

Sweden is already above the US deaths per capita rate, still growing where we have peaked, and much higher than their neighbor nations in both cases and deaths.

Also note that Sweden isn't exactly "not locked down" anyway. They didn't institute the hard rules in the same way that, say, Missouri did. Yet the population did it anyway, because they watch the news and see other areas shutting down. So restaurants are open, but empty. Theaters are closed. People are working from home. (Schools are open, which is one difference from most US states). Sweden is absolutely not unaffected economically.

Also recognize that Sweden, like other nations in scandanavia, had a much smaller and somewhat later outbreak vs. the ones we saw elsewhere in Europe. They had warning that the Italians didn't.

So it's a spectrum thing. They chose to accept some lessser economic impact (how much less isn't really measured yet) at the cost of some number of deaths vs. similar data in Norway and Finland. The policy you are arguing for via "open up the economy" almost certainly doesn't look like Sweden.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com