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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

The places which tried to keep things open ended up having to lock down harder and longer, and managed to suffer both worse fatality rates and worse economic impacts.

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? In what way Florida and Texas barely did anything and have better or comparable numbers to the rest of the country.

Florida and Texas are #1 and #2 in number of cases over the past 7 days.

https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

Number of cases is irrelevant to lockdowns, though - what's relevant is whether the hospitals are filling up and having to turn away patients, which we don't see happening.

This is more of an "in spite of" rather than "because of". The openness may be causing more infections, but the medical system can handle the load due to the rate of vaccinations present now that weren't present when Texas disastrously tried to open up last summer.

This is demonstrably false. I'm not saying any state did particularly well, but there is no clear line between "states that tried to stay open" and "suffering both worse fatality rates and worse economic impacts".

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-coronavirus-restrictions/73...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/unemploymen...

https://carsey.unh.edu/COVID-19-Economic-Impact-By-State#:~:...).

This is a global pandemic, and like 95% of humans, I’m not American.

Personally, I’m mainly thinking of Sweden and pre-post-Brexit-transition UK (because post-post-Brexit-transition is a confounding variable), vs New Zealand, the other (non-Swedish) Nordic counties, and China.

America — despite the economic and cultural hegemony and media coverage — is not actually that significant one way or the other in this particular event.

American states are still "places" and each had a different response and thus we can use it to measure effectiveness. Doesn't much matter if you are talking about Illinois or Sweden in this case.

Since you were thinking of Sweden as you specified in another comment... Sweden isn't locked down and has never been locked down during the pandemic. The covid patients in Sweden don't have a higher death rate than other countries [0], its health care system never failed so that would be surprising. Economic impact no idea, the stock market in Sweden is doing great but that doesn't tell us much.

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

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