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Comment by whiddershins | Hacker News Reader

While many people might point out that Sweden did in fact have more deaths, the verdict on that is still out.

They are getting far fewer cases and deaths than many other areas now, and have been for many weeks.

Couple that with the not-lost social interactions and economy etc, and the fact that this was always (more or less) every country’s pandemic plan before we changed our mind for covid, and it becomes a troubling indicator that our entire response may have been irrational.

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> While many people might point out that Sweden did in fact have more deaths, the verdict on that is still out

Other people would point out that Sweden experienced economic effects and other indicia of behavioral changes roughly equivalent to places that notionally, at least, had lockdowns.

A lot of people think what we did was part of some plan but nope. If you go back and read various pandemic plans you’ll see we did basically the exact opposite of what they recommended.

What was recommended? AFAIK pandemic plans were always social distancing at their core right?

When Sweden decided for no lock-downs, we knew very little about the virus. It was effectively a jump into the unknown.

Even if the decision proves beneficial, it was an error, in the knowledge context of March 2020.

Assuming that in any give situation, the only correct decision in the absence of any knowledge is the most conservative one. Which this would disprove and thus the argument is provably false.

Except that being wrong about how bad a virus is can be catastrophic, especially when nearly every nation was woefully underprepared. You can easily do math to demonstrate how small changes in the variables of a virus can lead to more dire outcomes.

What if China had taken the most conservative policy in response to the appearance of covid-19? Maybe we would have been spared the turmoil and disruption of this pandemic. You're way too confident declaring this as "provably false".

Hopefully our knowledge is greater and our preparedness will be better such that we don't have to always take such an aggressive policy position when faced with a novel virus.

The job of Governing is not solely to minimise loss of life, or to utterly avoid tail risks irrespective of cost. (imo)

Focussing so myopically on the above has had unmeasurable consequences on a huge variety of fronts. My prime fury is reserved for closing schools. Extraordinary damage done, gulfs in opportunity and experience widened. Nobody cares much. Death stats are, after all, the only thing that matters to the media at large

This isn't what my comment is arguing. This is about the outbreak phase when we don't know much. I appreciate some of the points you're making but it's also not a binary choice.

As we acquire more information, policy should evolve with it. Limits on individual freedoms are blunt policy tools that should be used only when necessary, because they aren't zero cost.

I don't think we should have forever lockdowns at all. I'm in the camp of "get vaccinated and move on with your life" and that we should be more upfront about how covid-19 isn't going to be eradicated anytime soon.

You're pro having 30 people breathing in a small room with bad airflow for multiple hours when there's a pandemic?

If you don't know how it's transmitted, then try various things and see if they help. We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it, if it didn't change the situation we would have tried other things instead.

Yup. I think that fucking up the education of children, especially those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, is worse than the deaths not doing it causes.

It is not that lockdown is bad or wrong. It is that I do not agree with all the things which were hit. I acknowledge there is a price to keeping education open but I believe it would have been worthwhile.

Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.

> Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive.

Actually I believe that’s table stakes for good governance. Trading known deaths for possible impact to development of children isn’t even in the realm of equal, which is why most places didn’t do it.

But we’ll trade thousands of lives to secure some nice minerals in Afghanistan. Cmon.

And, early on it was not sure how Covid would affect children. Their lives and health are still more important than their education. Better be conservative in hazardous circumstances. Better safe than sorry

How has their development been impacted? I mean apart from the ones who died.

Why is their education fucked up?

What about the children who infected their parents and now they're orphans?

We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it

No, we tried lockdowns, they did not work well, then extended them, then again. In my country some school children did not go to school for a whole year because people with anxiety disorder thought opening schools would kill children, parents and grand parents.

There is very little proof that lockdowns worked. We had no clue if they worked going in and we still can’t prove they worked, let alone well enough to justify their immense societal costs.

Do we have proof that the "societal costs" were immense, compared to what they could have been if more people died?

I mean, I made a chart, seems pretty obvious https://imgur.com/a/mI8OdpW

Here is an interview with Prof Johan Giesecke from April 2020. In hindsight one can call his statements prophetic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY

They had a clear plan, unlike other governments like Germany, who still do not have a plan how to get out of this mess.

> Even if the decision proves beneficial, it was an error

That's subjective: It depends on how much risk you're willing to take on. People here were pretty supportive of the policy, so presumably willing to take on more risk than you. Like you, I wasn't but that's just how it goes.

Except if the risk is unknown you don't know how much risk are you taking, and hence if it is above our below your threshold.

When faced with a cataclysmic, albeit low probability, event, the only course of action is the cautious one.

I don't know what model you're using in order to be able to say that and I don't have any way to quantify it either but clearly some people are willing to jump off cliffs without knowing whether there's spikes or a mattress below and it's obvious that they're willing to take more risk than people who aren't, so your quantification point is moot.

> When faced with a cataclysmic, albeit low probability, event, the only course of action is the cautious one.

This is nothing but extreme risk aversion. Some people, most, do not share it with you.

Not sending kids to school, eliminating social interactions, shutting down businesses, this was the drastic unknown experiment not the other way around. The effects are becoming more apparent now and I'm sure there will be a lot written about the subject in the future. Gloating doesn't seem appropriate at this point but sure after a year of the world screaming how bad we handled it maybe a Swedish moderate amount of national pride is warranted.

One interesting, and quite unexpected, effect was on the suicide rate in the United States. Specifically, the fact that it has declined slightly. This is especially surprising given the seemingly inexorable rise on that same rate for decades. We are only now starting to see analysis of this data, and while I hardly think that this is enough to make any sizable statements about lockdowns, it's also certainly not the case that we know they were more harmful than unchecked covid.

https://healthfeedback.org/what-has-been-the-effect-of-the-p...

Drug overdoses were up like 20%.

Wow, looks like closer to 30% in the US. Interesting that suicides went down and overdoses went up, I wonder how you would go about disentangling those numbers.

> When Sweden decided for no lock-downs, we knew very little about the virus. It was effectively a jump into the unknown.

And lockdowns were a jump into an economic unknown, which also had very unpredictable effects. There's no way you can say it was an error given the evidence available at the time. We'll see how it works out in the end.

Lockdowns are a jump into the unknown. They have never been done in the history of humanity before. Not just cities, not just nations, but entire civilizations locking down has never been done before. The risk groups were already well known by then end of March 2020. People at the end of their life with an average of 2.7 comorbidities.

Please make no mistake, lockdowns will go down in history as the biggest mistake of the modern human history. The only reason why we're still arguing in here is because it's damn near impossible to admit one made the biggest mistake in modern human history.

We’re done with the death comparisons over distancing measures — we’ve been past the point where that was in the running for most effective intervention for months now. If Sweden fared poorly during the time it was true, that’s the conclusion. We’re in the phase where the comparisons are basically about social/logistic/resource issues for vaccine uptake.

Also, the idea that the playbook has always been low-distance intervention for pathogens of similar impact is wrong.

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