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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/architect-of-s...

> Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the architect of its light-touch approach to the coronavirus has acknowledged that the country has had too many deaths from Covid-19 and should have done more to curb the spread of the virus.

> Sweden’s death rate per capita was the highest in the world over the seven days to 2 June, figures suggest. This week the government bowed to mounting opposition pressure and promised to set up a commission to look into its Covid-19 strategy.

> Sweden’s 4,468 fatalities from Covid-19 represent a death toll of 449 per million inhabitants, compared with 45 in Norway, 100 in Denmark and 58 in Finland. Its per-million tally remains lower than the corresponding figures of 555, 581 and 593 in Italy, Spain and the UK respectively.

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That's a seven day death rate.

The specific shortcoming its government is looking into, according to the article, was inability to "protect care homes where half of all Sweden’s Covid-19 deaths have occurred."

Sorry, don't need a society-wide lockdown to protect nursing and group homes, which are highly regulated and often government-operated.

Lies, bad lies, and statistics.

10x the total per-capita deaths of Norway (third paragraph I quoted is not seven-day; seven-day rate has held consistently higher than their neighbors; it's not a short-term aberration, and it remains that high after locking down care homes etc.) is an issue you can't just handwave away.

But much lower per capita rate than Belgium which had full lockdown. So obviously a lockdown is not a magic fix. we do not even know how effective they are since there are many more differences than lockdown/no lockdown between Norway and Sweden.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...

> Belgium has surged to the top of the grim leaderboard because authorities decided to be radically transparent, if perhaps a bit speculative, about the toll from the novel coronavirus. They include not only deaths that are confirmed to be virus-related, but even those suspected of being linked, whether the victim was tested or not.

> As of Wednesday, Belgium, with a population of over 11.4 million, has counted a total 6,262 deaths from COVID-19 — roughly 540 per million citizens — and more than half of those deaths were in nursing homes. Of those 52%, just 4.5% were confirmed as having been infected, yet all are counted in the national tally.

ok but lockdowns don't make sick people get better so deaths aren't the best measure. The lockdowns are aimed at slowing the infection rate and reducing total number of infections.

I don't recall ever reading how Sweden's hospitals were overwhelmed so the injection rate never increased beyond what they could handle.

As for total infections, If you look at the graph of cases by country normalized by population, highlight Sweden, and then select show all, Sweden is about in the middle.

They're right there in the mix, it's not like the Swedish model was perfect but Sweden certainly didn't devolve into rivers choked with the dead either. They're having about the same problems as everyone else but didn't add to their misery by completely destroying their economy.

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