Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rumanator | Hacker News Reader

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> Look at The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden or Norway where practically nobody is using masks.

I'm not sure you have a good grasp on what you're talking about. Sweden has one of the highest death rates per capita in Europe,and the absolute worse in nordic countries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133

The strategy followed by the Netherlands is to quarantine everyone who does a covid19 test, and get anyone feeling any symptoms to get immediately tested.

https://www.government.nl/topics/coronavirus-covid-19/tackli...

More importantly, the strategy followed in the countries you've mentioned was to intentionally let the disease spread in a way that didn't overwhelmed health services. While the rest of Europe is intentionally trying to completely contain the disease, the strategy followed by Sweden consists of letting it spread freely as long as they can claim their health services aren't overtaxed.

In my opinion that approach is idiotic because currently the best thing health services can do to a critical covid19 case is linger around while watching the patient die, thus what's the point of bothering about if a health service has enough beds to fill?

As mentioned below one must look at deaths per million to get any meaningful insight from the data per country. I probably should have left Sweden out to prevent you from jumping on that specific case. Anyway, the measures about quarantine you point out or only just in effect and have no bearing on the spread and then decline, without masks as seen from February/March. Looking at how masks are being used (reused, touched) one could argue they do more harm than good. As was the original story from experts.

> Looking at how masks are being used (reused, touched) one could argue they do more harm than good

One could argue that, but one would look like a moron without any proof, and with a lot of evidence showing the exact opposite.

Given the huge amount of evidence of transmission by cough droplets and the lack of evidence of even a single transmission out of millions by touching masks/surfaces, keeping droplets out of your mouth and nose is the only thing that helps and it definitely does more good than harm.

If the person wearing the mask is not using it properly then that's not good for them. The wearer is still protecting other people from contracting the virus, if they (maybe not knowingly) have it.

> As mentioned below one must look at deaths per million to get any meaningful insight from the data per country. I probably should have left Sweden out to prevent you from jumping on that specific case.

You're free to cherry-pick whatever data fits your prejudice if that makes you feel better.

However, I hope you understand that garbage in means garbage out, and if you feel desperate enough to grab onto garbage to try to rationalize your prejudice then you should seriously rethink what you're doing, because thinking ain't it.

> Anyway, the measures about quarantine you point out or only just in effect and have no bearing on the spread and then decline, without masks as seen from February/March.

I'm curious to see where you came up with that nonsense.

If you take a step back into reality and look at the facts, you'd eventually find out how Spain and Italy reigned in their daily death rates from 1k to single digits by enacting public health policies that included a mix of quarantines and mandatory masks.

"Sweden has one of the highest death rates per capita in Europe, and the absolute worse in nordic countries."

That is an incredibly misleading way of saying "Sweden is far better than Belgium, the UK and Spain in terms of death rate per 100k, and significantly better than Italy":

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

In fact, Sweden is ~mid pack for first-world countries. You really have to cherry pick the data to make it look bad. Yes, Finland is doing relatively well, but it is also beat out by world-renowned public health stalwarts like Afghanistan and Sudan, so...perhaps other factors are at play.

I don't get this obsession with comparing Sweden, a remote, sparsely-populated country, to more dense, well-connected, large population centers. If you really want to compare Sweden, please restrict your comparisons to its closely similar, equally remote and sparsely populated neighbors, namely, Norway and Finland. The 10X difference between them will be immediately obvious.

Finland and Norway have half the population of Sweden.

Sweden has about the same population as Belgium, Portugal and Greece...or Georgia (and Ohio, and Michigan, and...) in the US, none of which are places that people are shy about extrapolating from, when it suits their narrative.

You may not like the conclusions that can be drawn from Sweden, but you can't dismiss it based on population. Try again.

That’s an aggressive put-down for someone who is not omniscient himself...

Doctors do a lot for a critical Covid patients! “Proning”, anticoagulants, anti inflammatories, anti virals (E.g. remdesivir), CPAP, and, yeah, if all else fails, ventilation.

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