Sweden’s coronavirus experiment: Whistling past a graveyard | Hacker News Reader

Sweden’s coronavirus experiment: Whistling past a graveyard

boulderweekly.com

12 pointsimartin2k7 comments

The criticism of Sweden’s model, pointing to the slightly higher death toll than other countries, assumes that all those lives must have been saved through lockdowns. But is to institute strict lockdown measures for the sake of those elderly victims, effectively not to claim that that 1% or less of the population should be able to dictate the lifestyles of the rest of the population? If the median age of death is well over 70 with multiple comorbidities, I’m not sure there is a real democratic mandate (among a population familiar with the hard statistics) for shutting down society so drastically that it prevents, for example, young people from doing their ordinary socializing and courtship rituals.

Yes, Sweden could have done more to protect care homes, but I don’t find its eschewing of a lockdown to be objectionable.

As for this bit in the article. “‘We usually have tourists coming to Sweden in the summer,’ Isaksson says. ‘Who the heck is going to come to Sweden? No one wants to come to Sweden’” On some outdoors forums I participate in, people under lockdown often expressed envy of members from Sweden who were free to trek or cycle all this time, and some younger people reasonably unconcerned with COVID-19 are now keen to see that country’s impressive nature for themselves as soon as borders reopen.

"...removing 67% of the total deaths in Sweden still leaves more than 1,400 people dead who were not in elderly care facilities. Compared to the 236 deaths in Norway, that’s still six orders of magnitude more death in Sweden than in Norway.
...

Sweden’s lead epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, seems to have a bit of a problem with math."

I couldn't help but chuckle at an author misunderstanding orders of magnitude in one paragraph and accusing others of misunderstanding maths in the next.

This article appears to be an attempt to paint the Sweden model in a negative light rather than honestly compare it to alternatives.

"""An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually ten, interpreted as the base of the logarithm and the representative of values of magnitude one."""

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=order+of+magnitude

> This article appears to be an attempt to paint the Sweden model in a negative light rather than honestly compare it to alternatives.

you're absolutely correct... it reads like thought-control. i often wonder how frequently HN is subject to coordinated information operations, and how frequently they're asked to share information about browsing habits

> a sort of social-distancing lite where most businesses, including schools, stay open

Not true. Schools and buisinesses have not been open as usal. High school is closed and many, all people i know, work from home. There are restrictions in travelling and not to meet people.

> The Swedish model is often described as a plan to develop herd immunity, wherein a large enough portion of the population has developed resistance to an infection,

Not true. I don't know how many times this has been denied by the government. The plan is not, ans have never been herd immunity. The government does not even believe it is possible to achieve that.

> The government does not even believe it is possible to achieve that.

That's weird, when Tegnell has stated numerous times that Sweden may be get close to herd immunity by the end of May. I assume you're not making a semantic distinction between Anders Tegnell and the government here.

Sweden is not doing an experiment. They are taking the conventional approach. It is the rest of us who are undertaking a massive experiment. In the end, we will have to account for the collateral damage as well as any net lives saved.

Thank you for saying this.

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