Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnp314 | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone looked at the Johns Hopkins COVID map and considered Sweden? Last year they were the country all the lockdown experts vilified (and libertarians envied). Today, Aug 12 2021, among most all western nations they show essentially no delta-bump. How do all you experts blaming anti-vaxers and AstraZeneca scientists looking at Israel explain this data point? What has given Sweden this apparent immunity from delta? It's annoying when inconvenient reality gets in the way of our theoretical science.

View on HN

Sweden goes into a month-long vacation every July, most business will have 15% or less personnel, people are outside a lot more (and probably out of the cities) if they are in the country.

All of these also helped last year's summer, just look at the graphs, we had a very very normal summertime here, people were going to bars, some clubs, all the parks were crowded and we still got relatively very few infections. Now look at the fall-winter of 2020/2021, massive increase of infections when we aren't on vacations mode anymore and have to stay inside.

Sweden is starting to see an increase of delta-variant cases and by living here and seeing how much people just stopped caring we will definitely see a new wave of infections if delta and/or lambda spread and are really capable of evading the current vaccines.

Please, don't use us as an example if you don't have tacit knowledge of how this society and country works, there are seasonal effects in play that, it seems, you are completely unaware of...

I thought Swedish society was rather similar to that of Finland, Norway and Denmark. Yet they each show rather significant delta-bumps whereas Sweden does not. Good science would ask what distinguished Sweden's COVID response from that of the others and did that have any effect on the difference we're now seeing.

They had a ton of COVID cases (1M, in a population of 10M!) and have vaccinated heavily. They're also doing a lot of the social distancing things that they initially avoided.

Vaccination does reduce the chance of spreading the virus. Having 10% of the country get the natural variant and 45% fully immune, plus still doing the social distancing stuff, and requiring negative COVID tests for those entering the country, seems like a pretty good way of keeping delta under control.

As in every other country the case count is way lower than the actual number of infections. Most infected people never get tested or officially counted. They estimate that about 33% of Swedes had been infected by May 2021 and presumably the number is higher now.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210714/e2809cHerd-immuni...

As a comparison point the CDC estimates that about 36% of Americans have been infected.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

Yeah, that would be even more consistent with the idea that there's a combination of natural resistance (if not immunity) from the first form of the virus (I think you can get again) as well as resistance for vaccination. It's not going to be 33% + 45% because there'd be overlap in the categories, but that's probably a pretty high rate of resistance.

Couple that with the fact that the Swedes aren't acting completely stupid and are doing a pretty good job of voluntary distancing (not to mention border control) and it seems like the numbers are pretty easily explained. Quite the cost to get there...

Son of a gun, Finland and Norway are not enjoying any of that advantage that Sweden is enjoying. They show rather dramatic delta-bumps. How enlightened of only Sweden.

So, all you have to do is experience a 15x worse outcome in terms of deaths and illness early, in order to have a delta-bump that's half the size (per capita) now. I guess that passes for "enlightenment", at least among the people who are disposed to find that anything Sweden has done is wonderful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com