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Comment by DuskStar | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough, I've seen other people say that Sweden's strategy succeeded and that no one will admit it...

Everyone trying to put the blame on their government response will say that Sweden is a success.

Everyone in Sweden disliking the government response or supporting their own government response will say that Sweden's approach has failed.

Because it's the truth? Let me tell you why from a perspective of "major" vaning power that is UK. The lockdown was a huge mistake with catastrophic economic consequences for a densely populated country like UK. The conservative government did it to save their voting base which is mostly old people who are in the risk group. It was supposed to last a few weeks, but instead went on for 6 months and is still effectively not over. They keep coming up with rules that are more retarded than the previous ones. Right now I can spend the whole day in the office without a mask, but I can't go out to lunch with my coworkers. It gets worse - in my gym I have to wear a mask for those 20 meters between the door and the gym floor where the receptionist sits who is walled off with glass better than a bank teller. They keep millions of people on furlough like chinese government keeps lights on in empty factories to cover up shrinking economy. Most of those jobs are not coming back. Admitting all those incredibly stupid mistakes for the government would mean an instant political suicide.

Also, nobody will probably read this, because I noticed this post has been flagged into oblivion.

My take is that the western world pursued the lockdown purely out of the will of its people, rather than that of its governments.

There's a great post (which I'll look for) that highlights that, no matter which US state you were in, you entered lockdown roughly within the same 2 week period as everyone else, regardless of what measures the state enacted. People in Florida, where the government was very slow, locked down roughly the same time as the people in New York, where the government was very quick.

Under this lens, you can look at the government's response to COVID 19 as not a response to the pandemic, but a response to people's response to the pandemic.

It was similar for us in Germany. The government started issuing (partial) lockdown policies in the second half of March, but a later analysis of mobility data (e.g. statistics from mobile phone network operators) showed that people had already reduced their mobility voluntarily in the first half of March, which helped make the first wave much smaller than most feared.

There is a running joke how people queue for buses in Scandinavian countries - they are all spaced out 1m away.

And there are photos in real life of it. And thats before Covid.

So people care about their personal space. And the population density is low. And people trust the government and are not actively doing the opposite when told to try to self isolate.

Obviously that will have better results than densely populated countries with people protesting that covid is fake and government trying to kill them.

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