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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

The head of the strategy of Sweden, keep repeating that he is not sure masks are working, how you can be so sure that he is wrong, and decides that's others who are not listening ?

Of course it is clear that if someone has covid and wear a mask, the probability to transmit covid will decrease (I was actually encourage people to wear a mask 6 months ago), but will it stop ? no. people can still transmit it by touching you. So yeah this is decreasing the risk, but is it decreasing the risk high enough that it will prevent the virus to spread ? Nobody has answered the question yet.

In France the mask is mandatory almost everywhere and still the number of cases keep increasing

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The head of Sweden's response is quoted as saying:

> "If we were to run into the same disease, knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would end up doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done."

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

He's on record saying mask requirements will be needed if cases started going back up:

https://www.thelocal.se/20200804/tegnell-if-we-see-problems-...

and Sweden wound up with de-facto lockdowns anyways, as many people did it on their own without government instruction. The end result: Same economic damage as the other Nordic countries, but substantially higher deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...

> no. people can still transmit it by touching you.

That's an argument for "don't touch people", not "don't wear masks".

> He's on record saying mask requirements will be needed if cases started going back up:

So if cases started going back up, which is not the case for now, so this is not an argument

> The end result: Same economic damage as the other Nordic countries, but substantially higher deaths.

You compare the economic impact of one country which was hit by the virus (Sweden) and one which was not (Germany,Finland, ...). What is going to happen if the virus restart in Germany and Finland and not in Sweden ?

> You compare the economic impact of one country which was hit by the virus (Sweden) and one which was not (Germany,Finland, ...).

If you're going to make the "Sweden did things right" case, "Sweden got it bad and Germany didn't" is an odd position to support the argument with.

Back in mid-May, when the US was still behaving pretty well, the angry right-wing facebookers started talking about how great Sweden was. So I did a per-capita death calculation and Sweden's was 30% higher than the US's.

Of course, a lot of the US has lost patience with the difficulty of safety, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's worse now. But that's not because of lockdown not being effective. In fact, it's the opposite.

And let's not forget, in the US H1N1 infected 60M people and only killed 12K of them.

There's a common talking point that because masks aren't perfectly effective, they therefore aren't effective at all or worthy as a safety mechanism. It's a total farce of an argument.

Tegnell is a fucking idiot. Look at the numbers, look at how it spreads, look at the countries that were doing OK at first and why. That's Taiwan, South Korea, Iceland, Singapore. Look at what Sweden did (nothing). Look at Swedish GDP change compared to neighboring countries.

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