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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I think you need to wait a little longer to make these comparison. Given the demographics of Covid victims, it may only have accelerated deaths by a few months.

But to me it's not even the relevant comparison. Being partisan of Sweden's approach doesn't mean believing Covid doesn't exist. Even a bad flu season will have an impact on year-end mortality stats. The question is rather how much worse did Sweden do vs countries that enforced severe restriction of civil liberties. And not only Sweden didn't do particularly bad, but it's done better than many major European countries like France, Italy, Spain or the UK.

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I agree with you. It is a bit too early for this kind of analysis. Let's just hope the new infection surge is mitigated before the death charts have time to follow.

The most interesting stat to me though that I only see mentioned briefly in this post is the fact that over 90% of the deaths was over 60 years old. I think that gives us very clear signs of how to focus the prevention of further deaths.

>And not only Sweden didn't do particularly bad, but it's done better than many major European countries like France, Italy, Spain or the UK.

It also still had people social distancing, wearing masks and disinfecting, a very low population density, a robust healthcare system which at no point in time got overwhelmed unlike let's say northern Italy.

Covid just never really blew up there but at the same time one can't exactly argue that the lack of certain policies contributed to that.

> a very low population density

This fact is brought up a lot. Isn't nation-wide population density a bad measurement? If a country, like Sweden, has huge areas where nobody lives, it says nothing about the density relevant for a virus spreading. While Stockholm's underground transport is nothing like Tokyo's, it's not different to other medium cities in the world.

> wearing masks

not true at least in Stockholm

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