Hacker News Reader

Comment by greendave | Hacker News Reader

I'd be happy to believe that Sweden has found a better way to deal with things, but at the moment they have 5x the number of deaths per population of California (2150/10.1 million vs. 1500/40.0 million). That's not great.

I also think there's unacknowledged element of luck in a lot of these outcomes. A few infected individuals a month or so back in the wrong time/place makes a huge difference in the progression of the disease. Likewise when testing is relatively sparse, it's easy to get a mistaken view on where things stand.

View on HN

Sweden is very efficient at attributing the cause of death, so that's probably why it stands out in CFR rankings: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

A recent study by the Public Health Agency of Sweden came to a similar conclusion.

Their gamble is that it will come out in the wash - in the first period they will have scary, unpleasant numbers. But as the disease progresses through every community will have the same scary, unpleasant numbers - but in Sweden the economy will be able to reopen fully and finally in a month or two after everyone is recovered. But for the rest of us, it'll take an extra six months or a year; the same amount of people will die[] it's just a matter of how fast or slow.

[] in the non trivial sense, since obviously we'll all die; but presumably we won't all die from this pandemic.

That's only true if the hospitals don't overload. If they overload, many more will die because they could have been saved with treatment.

They're definitely stressed but not overloaded. Still we don't know how long the medical personnel will find this stress tolerable. Right now they are using a emergency provision that enables them to order workers to work 48 h a week but for much higher pay.

Also, a lot of people with _other_ issues will die because the hospitals are full of COVID patients.

This assumes conditions don't change. With enough time, a treatment or cure can be found. In the future, hindsight will be 20/20 but right now the wisest is to buy time to understand the spread and disease better.

Don't expect a miracle cure soon. Covid-19 is very similar to other coronavirus, in particular the one that caused the SARS outbreak a few years ago. If there is a better treatment, we probably would have discovered it a few years ago to treat SARS.

There might be something to that element of (bad) luck: a large number of people in the Stockholm region seemingly timed their ski trips to Italy at just the wrong time: plenty of infectious people but before social distancing / quarantine measures.

Yes, and about 4-5x the death per population of their Nordic neighbours, which may be a more relevant comparison while the epidemic is growing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com