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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Compared to other Nordic countries Sweden went horribly wrong. On EU-level, about average.

Finland did much better without strict lockdowns. Just limit group events limit restaurants open hours, shut down schools for the worst times etc. Sweden could have saved thousand of people with just slightly more restrictions.

Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 as of 6 April 2021. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

  Iceland      8.20
  Norway      12.72 
  Finland     15.33 
  Denmark     41.93 
  Canada      62.29 
  Germany     93.02
  Netherlands 97.50
  Sweden     132.55 
  France     144.81
  UK         191.17 
  US         169.82 
  Belgium    203.13
  Hungary    224.47 
  Czech Rep. 254.64

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What that list indicates, along with a huge amount of literature about the subject [0], is that arguments for lockdowns likely have zero validity.

Certainly, with Sweden faring much better than other countries that employed far more restrictive measures suggests that the virus doesn't care about such measures. Economies, livelihoods, rights, and those waiting for treatments for other things were all harmed unnecessarily.

At best this has all been a giant, failed experiment. At worst it's the predictable result of panic and listening to self-appointed "authorities" who happen to be able to reach large audiences instantly, instead of lesser-known actual experts without such privilege, and who therefore take longer to be heard.

Doing what is ordinarily done in pandemics - isolating only those at risk until cures are found, would obviously have saved more lives and resulted in almost no disruption nor any trillions in wasted money.

[0] - 32 studies: https://www.aier.org/article/lockdowns-do-not-control-the-co...

I don't know about other countries but here in the UK imposing a lockdown seems to result in an eventual reduction of numbers of lifting of lockdowns results in them growing again - even to the point where a seemingly inevitable "third wave" is being predicted for later this year even with the success of the vaccination program here.

Indeed, the main criticism of the government(s) here is usually that lockdowns weren't introduced soon enough and lifted too early.

Interesting, but given it contradicts volumes of research suggests that if based on real data (rather than the hand-waving it sounds like), it's probably anomaly.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Cases going down after a lockdown (which happens when cases go up) doesn't imply the lockdown actually caused the cases to go back down. It's a classic mistake in medicine - "patient got better after treatment, therefore the treatment is effective" and the reason we have double blind trials.

So what do you suggest is causing the fairly dramatic reduction in cases when we have lockdowns and them rising again when lockdowns lifted (at they were last summer and at Xmas)?

While everyone is staying at home and distancing, fewer people are being tested, resulting in fewer cases.

I don't see any sign of that in the UK statistics:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

And what explains the deaths?

Ok, I looked a bit closer at the cases and the lockdown dates [0], there does seem to have been a repeating pattern there of case numbers changing about 14 days after a lockdown is enacted/lifted. With the repeating pattern, I'm more convinced it did have an effect on the case numbers at least. I still think the cost: benefit is way unfavorable, though. We'll have a better picture in years to come once the dust has settled.

[0] https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/file...

Absolutely - I have no idea whether lockdowns were the best possible approach and they have been incredibly expensive and disruptive in all kinds of ways - but it did seem odd to me to argue that they don't work.

It will definitely be interesting to see, once this is all done, which approaches worked the best and why there were such huge variations between different countries.

I never understood the strict lockdown measures in most countries. Maybe it's useful in very dense cities?

In Finland the idea was don't mingle and meet people. Old people should avoid contact, but going outside is OK. When gyms were closed, all parks were full of people running and exercising. They just kept the distance. Even without a mask it's very hard to get viral dose that causes infection if you keep enough distance when outside.

A better metric is probably excess mortality for 2020. The covid deaths per capita metric will vary immensely depending on exactly how it is measured. Here are the numbers for Sweden and some other countries:

> Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.

> Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden. However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...

Can someone fill in the numbers for the US and Canada?

Sure!

[1] shows the Excess Mortality across Countries in 2020, very convenient to compare.

In particular:

Canada: 6%

USA: 12.9%

South Korea, interestingly: -2.9%

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/excess-mortality-across-countr...

Also - [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210310/dq210...

Huh, that's interesting. How come your link claims the increase was 1.5% while mine claims it was 7.7%?

Good question, I am not sure. The numbers from my link do match the official numbers from Canada (link [2]) though.

Or it wouldn't have mattered - it can be a lot of different reasons (including randomness) that caused the situation in Sweden and I've yet heard anyone do any kind of proper scientific research and argument about it, so most likely we just don't know.

"Lies, damn lies, statistics"...

The numbers here go from 8 to 254. Couldn't you make most of the countries on this list look good or bad by just adjusting the comparison set?

Not sure, Finland is experiencing massive layoffs.

I don't know. 6000 covid unemployed in Finland compared to 13,000 deaths in Sweden does not seem so bad.

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