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Comment by torb-xyz | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK they didn't have very different resources from Norway, but Norway decided to be much more careful and lockdown more and earlier.

Norway: 237 deaths

Sweden: 4468 deaths

(Yes there are more people in Sweden than Norway, but not that much more).

My (personal, subjective, I'm not a doctor, etc…) impression is that Sweden authorities where afraid of overreacting and the economic fallout of that. The Norwegian government (despite currently being right-wing) still decided to be careful and eat the economic cost.

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Norway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden

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There are additional relevant aspects:

1. A main aspect of the response, i.e., the issuing of "recommendations" instead the implementation of outright restrictions seem to have been caused by legal concerns, which means this is probably not something that Tegnell and his team decided.

2. Norway can rely on its natural resources and on the resulting "oil fund" to mitigate an economic crisis, Sweden lacks such resources, at least to the Norwegian extent.

3. The Norwegian government is "right-wing" from a Scandinavian perspective. Many of its policies would be considered socialist in the US.

4. Most deaths in Sweden are related to elderly care and the lack of preemptive efforts to prevent covid-19 spread in elderly care homes, which was certainly a big mistake, but somewhat unrelated to many of the measures that Sweden is scrutinized for.

Regarding 2 the Swedish state economy probably hasn't been in a better shape to pump money into the system in the last 20 years. The whole talk about "spara i ladorna" (save in the barns) by the minister of finance has been widely criticized before 2020,but has left the government in a very favourable position compared to the rest of the EU.

Nr. 4 is spot on, though.

I agree, but both from a technical and a social perspective, a) Norway is in a stronger position to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis and b) Norwegian politicians will have a harder time to spin up an austerity narrative.

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