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Comment by cwhiz | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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

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