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Comment by matz1 | Hacker News Reader

11th worst mortality without lockdown? that is a win for me.

There are 195 countries in the world. 11th worst is bad.

Isn’t the point that they didn’t close the country so that’s a massive up side.

Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway.

(For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)

The UK has been characteristically incompetent; missing PPE, incoherent advice, incoherent track and trace (somewhat substituted by local authorities actions), pushing people into old people's homes without testing, and the Barnard Castle incident.

How many cabinet ministers have you seen in masks?

Well, Boris and Hancock have no need - they just went and got coronavirus by being idiots.

Now if you started sooner and if people took it more seriously perhaps numbers would be different.

They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.

Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.

I saw some research the other day that they think the decrease in death rate is because everyone is wearing masks and social distancing. Therefore anyone getting sick is getting a very low viral load compared to before. If comparing to flu we should compare to pre-lockdown, pre-mask death rate.

No, The decrease of death rate is because more testing done on more people. The more you test, the larger the number of asymptomatic/mild symptom case you have, thus decrease the death rate.

I could see both, and likely both would need to be part of estimation. It's not binary, but likely, 20% due to mask lowering viral exposure loads, 50% due to more healthy people (hence asymptomatic) getting the virus.

However, that doesn't invalidate the overall comparisons. Countries like Sweden have a lowering death rate despite no broad mask wearing (https://fortune.com/2020/07/29/no-point-in-wearing-mask-swed...). You can see an example graph here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...

5th highest in europe is not that bad, considering they fucked their economy a lot less, and that more shit is coming (eg., most of the cancer detection programmes have stopped here in slovenia, so a bunch of people might die from undiagnosed, or treated-too-late illnesses due to lockdowns, and won't be counted anywhere).

Are we measuring properly in each country? I would assume that we have somewhat reliable numbers for much less than 195 countries.

About half of the wests population lives in countries with higher death rate than Sweden though. And if you count excess mortality which is a better measurement then Sweden is better than average in the west.

Not entirely without lockdown; gatherings are still limited. Allsang pa Skansen performed without an audience.

Top 10% for deaths? How is that a win?

>How is that a win?

They don't have lockdown

They don't have something they call "lockdown" but they imposed many, many restrictions, and even more than that were self-imposed by Swedes. Their economy contracted almost as much as forced-lockdown countries, so it seems like almost no different at all.

"Even though we let in 20 goals, we really won the game because we didn't have to defend."

The difference is the death doesn't cause chaos or total economy collapse. Pretty much life is still normal for most people over there, so that is win for me.

GDP of Sweden still shrank by 8.6% in Q2 (compared to 12.1% for the Eurozone or 10.1% for Germany). It's true that they did better economically, but on the flip side, their death toll is rather high.

> their death toll is rather high.

You will find that Sweden will still be near the top of the charts for lifespan 2020. 3.5% of GDP is 30-50% of the entire healthcare budget, you can buy a lot of extra lifespan for the population for that. Arguing that one way to increase lifespan (corona) is better than all other ways to increase lifespan without any proof is nonsense. As of now it looks like you would save more lives by mostly ignoring Corona and using that money to expand the healthcare sector or improving the diet of poor people or creating exercise programs etc.

> The difference is the death doesn't cause chaos or total economy collapse.

Citation needed.

Just look at sweeden right now, does it look like chaos or total economy collapse to you?

Sweden has a higher unemployment rate than the US.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

https://www.thelocal.se/20200713/new-stats-reveal-growing-un...

You can't win the argument for quality of life vs. quantity of lives on this forum. I am with you.

It is better to get back to life as usual than to deal with Australia's, Britain's, and other countries' response that drastically reduced quality of life for people en masse in the name of saving a life or two.

Somehow, brutal lockdowns effect on people's lives is incomprehensible to people who spend most of their time in one room on a computer--what a surprise!

"Oh, suck it up, wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart, stay in your home, buy online, don't leave the country, and wait for a vaccine that will come, eventually."

A significant number of people won't get back to life as usual, because they'll be dead, or have one of the sets of long term symptoms.

It is absolutely worth continuously assessing whether the measures are necessary and what is and is not working, but that requires not throwing a huge number of people under the bus

> A significant number of people won't get back to life as usual, because they'll be dead, or have one of the sets of long term symptoms.

People keep parroting this out of fear.

Go ahead and take your best guess about the percentage of people that this will happen to. Are you ok with lockdowns to save .001% of the population from this? I've asked questions like this before but never received a response. Any type of real debate is simple ignored and downvoted. All emotions, never any debate.

Fear brings more upvotes than facts. A scary story will get 100+ upvotes but this story only got 7:

Lungs damaged by coronavirus can repair themselves in three months (telegraph.co.uk)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/06/lungs-damaged-co...

The online fear factory is similar to the old school media fear factor but the online one is self perpetuating.

> Are you ok with lockdowns to save .001% of the population from this?

No. But that's a full 4 orders of magnitude off our best estimates of mortality which are around 1%. Do I support the limited lockdowns we've had, lasting only a few weeks, to allow breaking the exponential growth and not doubling our yearly mortality? Definitely yes.

There is absolutely no evidence of any long-term symptom of Covid that goes beyond what we know occurs for other viruses.

Stop spreading fear.

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