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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

People keep moving the goal posts on this.

Unless Sweden's health system implodes because the pandemic overwhelms it, their approach has obviously not been a total failure.

The rationale for the brute force lock-downs, AIUI, has always been to preserve the ability to treat patients. i.e. to not have all hospitals resembling the early scenes coming out of Lombardy Italy or Wuhan China.

Sweden didn't institute draconian lock-downs, and never lost the ability to treat patients, never devolved into the utter chaos many predicted.

We can't meaningfully compare other statistics like total deaths and economic impacts until the pandemic has run its course.

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How is it goal post moving? They have one of the highest death per capita in the world from Coronavirus. It's roughly equal to Italy's. To say it hasn't been a total failure doesn't mean it's something to emulate.

>We can't meaningfully compare other statistics like total deaths and economic impacts until the pandemic has run its course.

We can. Otherwise you wouldn't do anything differently at any time.

He means the goal posts moved from "flattening the curve" to "save every last life". Maybe the goal shouldn't be to save every last life but to strike a better balance between living our lives freely and containing COVID to some extent.

They also have the highest unemployment rate among neighboring countries, so it doesn't seem like they continued living their lives freely, either.

In some places, like Sweden, many people have voluntarily adopted policies much more strict than required by law. In other places, like the US, many people have chosen to live lives much less strict than required by law. Government mandates alone don't make as good a basis for comparison as actual activity.

The unemployment rate has been higher in Sweden than in Denmark before Covid-19 though, and similar to Norway (which it is today as well). It doesn't seem to have moved very differently from the neighboring countries.

Useful statistics will hardly be available until the pandemic has come to a hold. It's too early to tell if e.g. Germany's approach of avoiding unemployment by massively increasing public debt is successful in the long run.

Deaths above median will tell the actual story. There are too many bad incentives on covid death reporting.

Please tell me the story of deaths above median. I'm dying to know.

In March/April many said Sweden was heading for disaster

Sweden flattened the curve and did it without authoritarian lockdowns. So of course lockdown proponents are upset.

This desire to have the government force people and businesses to shut down is unnerving. Are people seriously this susceptible to authoritarianism when they are scared?

The goal is to flatten the curve. We did it. Sweden did it. Why are people so happy to dunk on Sweden because Sweden didn’t follow authoritarian ideas?

Your interpretation of the world is fascinating.

I find it fascinating that people are happy to dunk on Sweden for NOT imposing authoritarian rules on their citizens. Are we not free people?

We are. Free people that consent to laws in the interest of the public good. Ideally anyway.

In the US, most of rules have been propagated by fiat, not lawmaking.

>We are. Free people that consent to laws in the interest of the public good. Ideally anyway.

Not necessarily. Optimizing the for the public good is a social utilitarian argument[1]. Absolute utilitarian is incompatible with personal freedom and justice, so most people put limits on it.

Reasonable and moral people can differ on where this limit should be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

"Mission Accomplished" - The banner behind George W. Bush in 2003. There are still US troops in Iraq to this day, 17 years later.

This just seems like an extreme case of premature celebration. We have the winter ahead, and are still many many months from a widely available vaccine. Sweden's methodology has yet to be fully tested, and they also don't live in an isolated vacuum, immune from actions taken by their neighbors and the world. Let's wait until Spring 2021 before we start handing out trophies.

Perhaps, in the end, it will turn out that Sweden made an unwise choice from a medical perspective. As of today, the USA and UK have more deaths per million than Sweden.

Even in some unknown future where it is determined that Sweden took the "wrong" path, it will always be true that Sweden allowed the citizens the freedom to make their own decisions instead of imposing decisions on them through force of law.

I am sure the dead will value their freedom.

A common defense of authoritarianism. It's for your benefit, silly!

We know the risks of Covid. We know who the at-risk population is. Adults can make their own decisions. If you don't think free people deserve their freedom, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

These are generally the same people that call Trump a fascist/say democracy is dead.

Paternalism and authoritarianism is alive and well on the left too.

And it's generally worse cause they act like they have the certainty of science, academia, etc. to justify however they abuse power.

See how that played out in the Progressive era...eugenics, central planning, corporations...the list goes on.

The common question is where do your freedoms end and mine begin? Are you free to drive drunk and put others at risk? What about smoking in restaurants?

COVID appears to be fairly contagious, and spreadable by asymptomatic people. If you are out being 'free' while asymptomatic and giving X number of people COVID, you are infringing on their freedoms. It's not as simple as you wanting to be free to make your own choices, when your choices can impact someone else's freedom.

If you feel that you are in a risk pool where covid could be deadly to you, then you should stay home. That is a true statement whether there is a lockdown, or not.

Doesn't answer the drunk driving or smoking issue. "Your Freedoms" always have limits. Without a strong safety net and worker protection, some at risk people are being forced outside to survive. Sweden at least has a strong safety net, some would even consider it relatively socialist. That can't be said for everywhere.

Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.

You can choose to, or to not, go outside or into a restaurant. If you feel that your life is at risk due to covid then you should choose to not. Whether or not I go into a restaurant is of no consequence to you.

A lot of people have sacrificed their life for freedom, especially in America. It’s literally one of our few uniting values

Maybe your goal was to "just" flatten the curve which, even if you don't overwhelm hospitals, still leaves a lot of people dead or with permanent damage. Others think the best strategy is (and some other countries' stated goal was) to push cases down to a number where containment strategies (tracing contacts and wiping out infection chains) work again. Some countries got too lax after the lockdown and let cases rise above tracing capabilities again, in other countries that still works.

But you’re pretending like all people are equally vulnerable to the virus. What if Sweden had not ducked up their nursing home response?

A lot of illnesses leave people dead or with serious damage. Why Lockdown for only COVID then?

Sweden's problem was not "ducking" up its nursing home response, this has been debunked over and over. The problem was wide-scale community spread, making spread to nursing homes inevitable. As a data point, Norway's nursing homes were actually hit harder proportional to the total number of deaths, but as a country they got away with 1/10 per capita deaths of Sweden thanks to limiting community spread.

Spreading to nursing home doesn't have to be inevitable. Swedish government has admitted they could have handled this a lot better. I think this time around they will not duck it up again, making the strategy look even better

Social distancing and masks only slow the spread, so unless these measures prevent healthcare system overload, they have only delayed and not prevented deaths. So yeah, since Sweden's healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, their approach has not been a failure.

The Swedish healthcare system was not overwhelmed in part because they only offered palliative to the elderly.

>People keep moving the goal posts on this.

I think it's because the story is being politicized. People who want to reopen everything are saying it's a success. Whereas people who want to keep things closed are saying it's a failure.

My understanding is that Sweden did not attempt to treat elderly patients; it only provided palliative care. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-is-taking-a-high-to..., for example)

Then there's this, from back in May: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/86256

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