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Comment by kybernetikos | Hacker News Reader

It's so weird to see people still claiming this.

Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX

Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average.

The difference between them and their neighbors isn't small.

Counterfactuals are always hard, and there might be valid non-lockdown related excuses for why Sweden did so poorly, but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.

View on HN

Swede here:

It's complex. I'm extremely unhappy with the way the Swedish gov handled this.

I see two main failures:

1. Not reacting quickly enough. Denmark and Norway reacted quickly and strongly back in early March 2020. At this critical point, Sweden's "CDC" dropped the ball in a monumental manner, and the government didn't pick it up.

2. Not protecting municipal elderly homes in a competent way, early on. This is where most deaths happened. Norway in particular handled this so much better.

And of course we should compare ourselves to e.g. Denmark/Norway/Finland.

I think the root cause of all this is that Sweden has not been involved in a war in a very long time, unlike our neighbors. We're pretty good when things are stable, but apparently awful when things are dynamic/shit is going down.

Of course I have very specific opinions on what "actually" went wrong and why, but that would be too detailed to be useful here and also way too partisan.

The biggest problem with the discussions on most subject is that everyone cherrypicks their data or just don't have whole picture. And this picture is a realy big one.

For example Sweden already had a big spread because of the big traveling weeks of school holidays. People tend to cluster together in certain areas from different countries. The Finish people goes to this location in the alps, the Norwegians to this other, and the Swedes to this third place. Turns out the third place had a superspreader in the pub. Mystery solved?

I think you are forgetting two important facts that counter your arguments:

1. A significant number of Swedes were in Lombardy (northern Italy) at the time the European outbreak started there. Furthermore Sweden has at least two major companies with presence around Wuhan. So by the time government noticed the issue it was too late.

2. Elderly care employees in Sweden are basically gig workers, resulting in a huge rotation in care givers and further spreading of the virus. The Social Democrats (and the Left party V) have often been opposed to this.

Two more things to consider:

1. This difference between Sweden and its neighbours is also clearly visible in the flu pattern over the year. It is simply due to different living and travelling conditions.

2. The municipalities are somewhat independent of the central government. Some with the highest death numbers among the elders where controlled by the opposition (e.g. Stockholm).

So while the government could have done a MUCH better job, your comment is already fairly partisan by cherry picking or ignoring facts.

Why were so many Swedes in Lombardy?

Around February there's a whole week where schools are closed with the incentive to do sports - especially winter sports (given the time of the year). A lot of people go to ski resorts - the alps (or up north in Sweden - which got mountains but is far from the Alps).

I lived in a town of about 800 people during the onset and first year of the pandemic. More than a dozen people from my town alone were in Lombardy and a couple of the super early outbreak areas of Germany during 2020 sportlov (the break that stpe mentions in parent comment). I knew first-hand a lot of people who were really ill in March and April, though I don't know if it was covid for sure, since our testing was insufficient then. Anyway, yeah, lots of Swedes traveling to the wrong places at the wrong time right then.

There are counter arguments to your counter arguments: 1. If you are mentioning large amount of people over in outbreak territory, Taiwan had 700K white collars working in China and 150K passengers travel between China and Taiwan weekly. Taiwan took action fast enough to avoid any major outbreak. Flight screening started on the last day of 2019.

2. Huge employee rotation may be exactly why govt should step in?

This argument does not make sense.

1) +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area. (https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... )

2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image)

3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures.

As many have said, one of the major factor was how the elderly in home facilities had been protected and the state of the medical infrastructure (rate of intense care beds per capita to handle the peaks for exemple).

In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).

I’ve seen accusations in the US that people were being counted as Covid deaths that died “woth” Covid, and would have even without it - I have no idea if these accusations are true, just that probably-nonsense leads me to the question:

Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?

Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).

By that comparison Sweden has done very badly compared to its peers. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

As this very article says:

However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.

The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.

> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).

The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.

Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway:

> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper.

It may be that Sweden had more older people than Norway at the beginning of the pandemic, i.e. a more vulnerable population. Also they admitted to doing a poor job early on in nursing homes.

I think you are simplifying this too much, insisting that it is valid to come to a conclusion on lockdowns based on a comparison of Sweden to two nearby countries. That doesn't exactly explain why a bunch of countries like the U.K., France, Spain, and Portugal that did lockdown had more per-capita deaths than Sweden. It ends up looking like you cherry picked your data, ignoring contradictory data, and not really explaining anything.

About Dr. Bhatt, from the same article you quoted:

> Samir Bhatt, professor of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy.

It's too bad nobody asked him why the the U.K. with lockdowns had more deaths that Sweden without lockdowns.

[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...

> The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.

The excess mortality graph only goes back 19 months, because that's when COVID start. It uses excess mortality, so those numbers are based on numbers in the previous years.

It's like looking at a chart showing inflation over the past year and saying "this says nothing about the prices two years ago!" They're used to compute the numbers on the chart, not be shown on the chart.

Exactly. I don't really understand what they are thinking there.

I mentioned this because the comment I was responding to was factually incorrect when they states that Sweden mortality rate was worse than Norway over the past few years. It was not.

The article I linked to explains the significance, which I tried to sum up in my comment:

> In other words, excess mortality from COVID-19 may be less conspicuous than previously perceived in Sweden, while mortality displacement may be used to explain at least part of the observed findings.

> More specifically, mortality displacement implies temporarily increased mortality (i.e., excess mortality) in a certain population as a result of external events, which likely arises because individuals in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise – primarily due to the timing or severity of the unusual external event. The excess mortality is, thus, predated or followed by time periods of lower than expected mortality.

In other words, Sweden was better than Norway at keeping older people alive before the pandemic. Therefore during the pandemic there were more older people in Sweden. Older people are notably more vulnerable. This may be the explanation why more people died of covid in Sweden. It alludes to there being more factors involved than just the nearness of two countries and lockdown protocols.

Another way of saying this, exaggerated for clarity: More people will die of covid in a country of 80 year olds than in a country of 20 year olds.

Remember that only 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old [1]. This is consistent with the above information.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...

Determinants of pandemic performance has proven to be very multi-factorial, but from day one, urban density has not that been significant a factor, especially in richer countries. The initial wave just looked urban because the virus reached each _country_ via internationally-connected urban centers.

Given that pandemic spread has almost entirely played out indoor, a much more likely risk factor is multi-member (and especially multi-generational) households. As mentioned in the article, Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia have a small household size and especially high proportion of single-person households.

> This argument does not make sense.

The OP compares Sweden to its closest neighbours

> +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area

As do +83% +85% and +88% of the three closest neighbours OP compared Sweden.

In what way does that comparison not make sense?

“but a country with very low population density”

Wrong!

25 people per square kilometer is a low population density. Look at how they define urban area.

That's not an accurate figure for the density where a typical Swede lives. Most of the population lives in the southern part of the country, a quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area as well.

It's like using Canadian population density with the whole country when almost the entire population lives within a hundred miles of the US border.

> quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area

You've never been to Stockholm metro area. It's very sparsely populated compared to many big metro areas.

Stockholm is a small city (800k people or so) surrounded by villages (another 1.5 million people) spread over 6,519.3 km2. Density is 360/km2

And that's the biggest city in the country.

In comparison, Paris (as we were talking about France): 13 mln people over 18,940.7 km2 with a density of 690/km2. That's for metro area. Urban area alone is 10 mln people with density of 21,000/km2

But when you look at the average distance between two random people who live in the same town/city it would probably indicate that lack of contact doesn’t explain any success they’ve had with their numbers

Elsewhere people have already pointed this out: Swedes also have smaller families and a large proportion of people living alone, which (positively) contributed to numbers more than population density.

Which is why Tegnell had the gall to blame immigrants for the spread of Covid-19. Immigrants live in more densely populated areas.

And all this still doesn't explane a significantly larger mortality rate than immediate neighbors that have similar populations.

I was in Stockholm last week. My point is that 25/km^2 is an absurd figure to use because northern Sweden has more reindeer than people.

1. Not the main thrust of OPs point.

2. Sweden's population density is 200th on this list of 250 countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

If we look at the data Sweden is still one of the top countries in the world regarding health care.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthcare-access-and-qua...

https://www.ghsindex.org/

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/countries/country-details/...

The above was a direct reply to:

> In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).

While I don't doubt you have Swedish family, I would like to see your data for the French economy being "killed". Certainly the economy contracted somewhat, but they seem to be doing just fine now.

this comment shows how half of the West's population has entered a foreign dimension.

Do you really think the economy only "contracted somewhat"?

Can we trust any statistics from people that depend on them to be good?

We absolutely cannot trust anything claimed by the crooks in power.

At the cost of an enormous additional debt.

Also "just fine" is still not pre-pandemic levels so we'll have to see in a year or two.

France has increased its public debt enormously (100% to 120% of its GDP). Maintaining the economy had a cost which may have serious consequences.

Isn’t the interest rate close to 0%? If, like in 1918, they come back stronger than places which had more disruption due to deaths and prolonged closures that’s not anywhere near a crushing level of debt for a rich nation-state with a diverse economy.

The Telegraph leans strongly conservative just as the Guardian leans strongly left. This seems like a very slanted article; it buries the mortality impact of CVOID until near the end. I seriously doubt that Norway would prefer to swap its ~10x lower death rate for Sweden's GDP numbers. Further:

In a paper published last week in science journal Nature, Dr Bhatt, together with the UK's former government advisor Neil Ferguson and other researchers, estimated that if the UK had adopted Sweden’s policies, its death rate would have been between two and four times higher.

"What Sweden did was a pandemic response that involved large numbers of interventions, a considerable amount of reliance on population behaviour and population adherence, and a reliance on the intricacies of what makes Swedish culture Swedish culture,” Dr Bhatt said.

"If the UK had adopted what Sweden did, I have no doubt in my mind that it would have had an absolute disaster."

¯\(°_o)/¯

Notably, the Telegraph is not calling for people int he UK to be more like Swedes.

Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though?

They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding.

If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x.

And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in Norway and 10 people died in Sweden, I don't think we'd be debating much. Even in Sweden, they did not have as many deaths as most other countries, and a lot of them were very early on.

> Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes ...

If the data in the graph shared by kybernetikos is correct, the claim that 'it's all because of elder deaths in early 2020' seems to be misguided, given the 2021-01 peak, and the steady first-place position throughout the last ~18 months.

https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX

Considering the vast majority of Sweden is basically uninhabited - I'm not sure why everyone is so dead set on comparing Sweden only with Norway and Finland (I get it that they are similar in this way and many others).

Realistically, most of the people live in a few cities and the density is similar to Ireland, Croatia, Bulgaria, or even Greece.

Sweden after its first wave doesn't look much different than any of those countries.

Is it because a lot of the susceptible people already died? Maybe. But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.

> Considering the vast majority of Sweden is basically uninhabited ..

Okay then. Most of Australia is uninhabited, so let's compare those two (deaths per million).

> But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.

You can try, and that's what this story (and similar) tries to do, factoring in variables as best they can.

FWIW the fixation on morbidity, at the exclusion of long term health effects, including the mental and physical health of a society's medical professionals by either being overwhelmed or burned out, is similarly bewildering to me as comparing two countries with similar geographies, climate, and effective population density is to you.

What really scares the willies out of me is that someone will eventually BigData this pandemic, and spit out a number that reflects how many people a nation state should sacrifice per month to maximise the wealth acquisition of the elites. This number will inform how governments will operate during the next pandemic.

This petrifies me because I'm living in Australia, where we've adopted an elimination strategy (well, up until a few weeks ago), and it's worked really well for me, given I have no wish to involuntarily sacrifice myself in the name of a poorly architected and grossly corrupted economic system.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

What??!! What I'm hearing when you say "If you factor out all those deaths" is "Old people don't count". Economically they may not have as much impact as younger people, but they provide richness to family and community life that can't be replaced.

So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.

New York city had the same problems in nursing homes as Sweden.

As they learned more about the virus and adapted their death rate per capita dropped to be on par with Europe..while still maintaining looser restrictions.

I think the point is supposed to be that that figure can be traced to specific decisions regarding nursing homes. The supposed counter factual being that, if they had isolated sick patients from nursing homes, those deaths could have been greatly reduced.

I think it still begs the question that those patients could have been saved, but it is not trying to say that old people don't count. More, that the full lockdowns didn't really protect them, by themselves. As seen in NYC, where it is fairly heavily believed that any good the lockdown did was more than offset by sending patients back into nursing homes.

No - the point is that at first Sweden had a no-policy, basically, which didn't work out for old people. So that changed that a little, and it seems to have worked much better.

The idea is that since the first wave and them changing their stance slightly - Sweden is not performing an order of magnitude worse than Norway and Finland, and it's pretty average compared to the rest of Europe - and definitely doing better than Russia.

The guardian is left leaning culturally but actually fairly centrist economically.

They get stick from Tories who call them elitist Londoners (this is deeply ironic, but that's for another comment) and even more stick from proper lefties who don't believe they are on their side enough.

And the Guardian has been shifting inexorably to the neoliberal position as it has started to rely more and more on US and Australian readership. Their rampant bias against the only viable socialist, anti-imperialist party (Labour under Corbyn) was notable and they've followed this up with a disgusting lack of activism around the torture by imprisonment of Julian Assange. In short: the Guardian is anything but left-wing.

Yep. Their own columnists have said this, including Pilger:

https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/john-pilger-says-guardian-col...

I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life.

I know it's incredibly taboo to say something like this; but people are completely overvaluing the impact of the few absolute numbers of deaths, vs. the much harder to quantify widespread misery caused by these overreactions to the situation.

Scott Alexander has a great post on this

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

and a follow-up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writi...

The key takeaway I had from Scott's post was this stat:

>It takes people ~50 months of strict lockdown to save one month of someone's healthy life.

Or another way to look at it, it takes 50 people locking down for a month to save each one month of life expectancy for one person. 600 people locking down to save a single person's life expectancy by one year. 6000 people for 10 years of life expectancy for a single person.

Whether that's worth the misery is up to the reader. I have my own opinion here, but it's undeniably subjective. It's a trade-off.

Another way of looking at it: those telling us that we must lockdown seem to not even try to think about it from any perspective other than simply saving lives, regardless of consequences.

Every year my confidence and trust in politicians and any expert with a role in setting policies gets lower.

See Goodhart's law.

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Hey, you said it! I’ve been waiting for a comment like this. I always have to go back to Frederic Bastiat, the “seen and unseen”: Covid deaths are visible. Effects of lockdowns, not so much, especially as they play out over the ensuing years (observable effects on children can be particularly delayed).

At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat for saying it, I feel very much the same.

I'm consciously aware of how many (or how few) years I have left, and I would never have agreed to losing two of them by not being able to see my family (including 2 babies born) in that time).

I don't really have a problem with social distancing/masks/quarantine/etc, but locking people in their homes (and locking people out of their countries) was entirely too much. "Living" shouldn't have been treated as just a transmission vector for COVID.

Your higher death rate comes with these exciting free add-ons!

- significant loss in productivity due to varying levels of incapacitation from Covid19

- additional loss in productivity due to cautious people isolating anyway

- new strains due to more mutations of the virus

Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more. And I won't be suprised if we have an epidemic of early-onset Alzheimers in ten years time.

>>new strains due to more mutations of the virus

How much does one country having slightly more transmission affect the global mutation rate?

>>Also delta seems to be killing young people better, so we're not talking about "disposable" old people any more.

Do you have a source on this? In England, the data indicates otherwise:

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/29/who-is-most-at-risk-from...

>>Nonetheless, the data showed that there have been 117 deaths among people in England who had the delta variant with the majority being in the over-50 age group.

>>There have been eight fatalities among the under-50s with six of them in unvaccinated individuals and the other two in people who had received one dose.

Slatestar Codex did an interesting look at it. The entire thread is worth a read. It's taken a little out of context as he's just joking and playing around with numbers but still interesting to think about.

""" Suppose you reopened the economy tomorrow. You tried as hard as you could to put profits above people, squeezed every extra dollar out of the world regardless of human cost. And then you put a 1% tax on all that economic activity, and donated it to effective charity. Would that save more people than a strict lockdown? If a lockdown costs $5 trillion, then the 1% tax would make $50 billion. That’s about how much the Gates Foundation has spent, and they’ve saved about ten million lives. Ten million is higher than anyone expects US coronavirus deaths to be, so as far as I can tell this is a good deal. """"

https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-wh...

My biggest problem with all this is the thought that have got rid of this entire virus by being a little more strict.

Norway was down to 0-5 infections a day last summer even when the society was open.

Then we opened the door for foreign workers (and not a bad thing about them) and the industry who had promised to take care of quarantines etc failed so hard that all of a sudden wehad another wave.

I'm moderately conservative but disappointed with both conservative politicians and rhe industry for this.

It’s incredibly easy to trade statistical deaths for statistical happiness. Ask yourself instead if you would be willing to kill yourself and your family if you knew it would make your neighbors happy.

Sounds aggressive, I know. But it’s a solid way to illustrate that there are real people behind statistics.

If 10x more people die, “everyone” is not going to have 2 years of a non-miserable life. The people who lose their spouses, parents, friends, children, etc will be horrifically miserable. It’s easy to trade lives when you assume you won’t be one of those people (or worse, one of the prematurely deceased).

Actually, I do trade the statistical risk of killing myself for some statistically greater benefit pretty much every single day and every action I take, from driving a car, to traveling for work, to any number of recreational activities like surfing or skiing.

Your argument is the precise fallacy I'm arguing against — risks and benefits should be quantified and weighed. The fact that it takes 50 man-months of quarantine to avoid a single one-month earlier than expected death, to me, is absolutely not worth it.

Perhaps you think locking up 50 innocent people to give someone an extra month is worth it. I don't. But I do understand that it's a subjective assessment.

“… each life cut short by 10 years on average”

https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/news/1.5-million-...

Yes, lock up 6000 people for one month to save one life that had 10 years left.

Still not worth it to me.

Ok, how many years would be worth it?

Logically it has to be 600, no? Which makes no sense.

But doesn’t it place a reasonable scale upon what a trade might look like.

Comparing a virus that has an average age of death at or even above life expectancy with a suicide shows how weak your point actually is. Let's turn it around shall we? We can reduce the amount of deaths from car accidents by 1000 fold if we limit the speed of all vehicles to 10mph. Should we do it or not? Ask yourself if you would be willing to kill yourself and 999 close members of your family if you knew it would make your taxi driver be able to drive a little faster.

If the virus was as deadly as people pretended it was we wouldn't NEED lockdowns or any government measures at all. People would stay at home by themselves. Instead I see people going shopping 3 times a week.

People are simply unwilling to admit they were wrong and bought into an unwarranted hysteria. The sooner they admit this the sooner this farce can end. The flu is more dangerous to most people in here, so let's react proportionally to what we did for the flu every year

The Holocaust was highly profitable to non-Jewish German people.

"Hitlers Volksstaat", Aly, Götz

That's a really excellent, if depressing, book.

>> I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life.

1. I think you underestimate how much of that misery comes from the pandemic itself and not from the reaction to the pandemic. I live in a country that went back and forth between relatively strict lockdowns and almost complete opening up. Yet even during the opening up phase people were afraid it would inevitably cause another wave, many would not go to pubs or clubs, businesses were not thriving...

2. I think you might overestimate the misery, which depends on personality, details of the restrictions in a given country etc. I am sure many suffered under the restrictions and I do not want to diminish that. However, I live in a country where I could go out running or cycling and nobody would prohibit me from visiting my family or going for a walk with a friend even during the strictest lockdowns (I am actually surprised by some experiences mentioned here, like not being able to see new babies born in the family - I make a resolution to examine more carefully what people mean when they talk about "lockdowns"). And I could work from home, which greatly improved my quality of life. And I am not alone in this - we are saying with my introverted colleagues that the pandemic would be great if it was not for the illness.

For me, basically all the stress comes from the fear that my parents of my grandmother could catch it or that I will catch it and have the bad luck of some long term problems. Virtually none of the stress comes from the restrictions. Again, I don't doubt that many do suffer, I just wanted to balance your view by a counter-view.

You're not taking into account the misery caused by covid. Death is far from the only bad consequence of an unchecked pandemic

I don't think that choice was available. If you let the virus spread unchecked then people would have been locking themselves down.

Cafes and restaurants were emptying in my area before the official lockdowns started. Even now with our (UK) lockdown over and high vaccination rates many people are still wary. Use of public transport is still way down.

To be clear about this, you are saying that if you wrote down a list of 100 of your close relatives, friends and co-workers that are above 60 years of age, you would happily trade "2 years of having a non miserable life", for the high statistical chance that 10 randomly selected individuals from the list will die?

I think there is a cut-off at some point, but 10x more deaths is way above my threshold.

So, you're suggesting that 10% of all people over 60 years old died of Covid since this began? I would love to see you try to find me a source for this statistic.

I'll wait…

No, I am saying that roughly 1% of over-70s died of covid the last two years, then 10x that.

Then you should maybe look at the context of what's being said — I was replying to a comment about Norway trading it's "10x lower" covid death rate with Sweden — where 0.014% of people died of Covid.

Your numbers are beyond absurd. But let me quickly disprove it: this study[1] shows the infection fatality rate among patients 70 and older in Stockholm was 4.3%. So, even if every single person over 60 was infected and was actually 70+, then you'd still not have 10% of the people you know over 60 die.

But obviously, 60 year olds are not all 70+, so their rate is lower, and not everyone gets infected (in Sweden so far, only about 10% of the country got infected) — so in your ridiculous example, it's over 50% likely that not a single one of the 100 people you listed dies in this contrived scenario.

But please, show me the data that shows otherwise.

[1]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/53c0dc391b...

Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? It is a completely irrelevant metric, lets include the Canadian arctic when calculating the density of Toronto and the effects of Covid, makes a whole lot of sense! A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density.

"Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at which the average citizen lives. It is calculated by taking weighted average of the density of all parcels of land that make up a city, with each parcel weighted by its population" [0]

By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741. [1] Concluding that Denmark did amazingly well given the cards they were dealt and Sweden is at the average of Europe due to very a urbanised population compared to the size of the country.

[0]: https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-luisa-udp-pwd-ref2...

[1]: https://jeodpp.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ftp/jrc-opendata/LUISA/Secon...

I suggest the measure density is a single value based on housing units and not the right measure to care about in itself. Instead look at public and private hygiene, isolation practices and incident response profiles, per hundred thousand or so.. not hectares per hundred thousand.

Sure, there're a lot of factors that can affect how disease spreads, like demographics, genetics, climate, health system, sociability, temperature, cafe culture, saunas, wfh incidence, international travel, travel links, tourism...

I'm quite happy to accept that 'population density' is inadequate - I mention it only in passing in my comment, the point I'm making is that Sweden is not a country you would expect to perform at the european average, and given that, the most natural thing to do is to compare a country with its neighbors. Neighboring countries usually share many factors, and on top of that, they have a direct transmission effect too.

Sweden did much worse than its neighbors. The explanation for that is either in the ways that Sweden is different from its neighbors, or in the difference in public policy.

I certainly don't know which to blame, but I don't want to hear any more lionization of the Swedish approach that doesn't solidly get to grips with that question.

Over the last four years the all cause mortality has been the same for Sweden and Norway [0]. So it would appear more people died in Norway before the pandemic, and more people in Sweden since, equalling out over the last four years.

So maybe it's not geography we should be talking about, but instead the number of older vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic.

[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...

>Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021?

Because the effective Swedish population density is very low? The effective density is affected by household size, and about 40% of Swedes live alone without children[0]. Sweden had the biggest Corona infection vector neutered and still did horribly.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/526013/sweden-number-of-...

> A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density.

I thought your comment was going to be about the fact that urban density didn't end up being that useful a predictor of spread, except to the extent that it correlates with household size. In general, people were catching Covid from being inside with others, not from incidental contact with subway poles or passing people on the sidewalk.

>By that measure we get Sweden is at 2693, Denmark at 2399 and Finland at 1741.

Germany at 2651 did much better than Sweden. France is around 4800. Italy is just over 4000. Sweden is closer to Denmark than to either of those two.

I’m looking at those numbers and the worst was Peru - 0.5% excess deaths.

Am I the only one whos just thinking none of this matters?

The reality is Sweden is doing an amazing job if there’s no lockdowns. Those lockdowns led to a massive increase in suicides[1], economic damage[2], inflation[3], massive increase in drug abuse[4], lost years in education[5].

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this virus would cause more harm. Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths (almost exclusively from people near end of life). What’s the damage in years of education lost, the drug abuse, homelessness, inflation pricing out homes for those who can work...

long-term I expect Sweden will see lower deaths than any of the countries that locked down.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm

[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/

[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

[4] https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID...

[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-repor...

Your reference [1] does not talk about suicide, but suicide attempts, and to the extent it correlates with "lockdowns", it seems to directly contradict your claim:

> Among adolescents aged 12–17 years, the number of weekly ED visits for suspected suicide attempts DECREASED DURING SPRING 2020 compared with that during 2019 [...] mean weekly number of ED visits for suspected suicide attempts were 22.3% HIGHER DURING SUMMER 2020 and 39.1% HIGHER DURING WINTER 2021 than during the corresponding periods in 2019

(Emphasis mine). So, during three phases of the COVID-19 epidemic, suicide attempts decreased during one, increased during two. The US was in nationwide lockdown during only one of these phases, which happens to be exactly the one where suicide attempts DECREASED.

Source [2] talks about (indisputable) damage to the US economy, which you attribute to the (half assed) US lockdowns. But this is begging the question whether it was the lockdown rather than the epidemic which did the damage, and in fact, Sweden had a WORSE economic outcome than its neighbors.

> Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths

The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil...

And even athletes in top physical condition can suffer debilitating consequences for indeterminate periods of time: https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/31936050/lewis-hamilton-s...

>>The deaths have, naturally, dominated the headlines, but there are other disabilities. One acquaintance in her early 20s has yet to regain her sense of smell after 8 months, and that's not all that rare a phenomenon: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/when-wil...

Anecdotes should not be the basis for unprecedented forced quarantine policies that target not the sick, but the healthy majority. To demonstrate the unreliability of anecdotal evidence, see how a large study on heart inflammation in young athletes caused by covid have debunked earlier anecdotal evidence on the issue:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-...

It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries.

When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.

> It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries.

That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies, and the best test for those policies is to compare like with like (e.g. other Nordic countries).

When people compare US numbers to other countries, I feel that's from more of a "what did the US do wrong" angle, and those comparisons could surface differences that could be learned from.

> Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies

Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without left/right tinted glasses.

That is interesting.

I would point out though that the truth does not always fit between the 'left' and 'right' views. The migration of the Overton window, capture of major media, and increased acceptance of social media censorship sailed away from truth some time ago.

In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that.

Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the world with a very high variability (in particular in poorer areas where large family groups live together and were also disproportionally hit by COVID). That probably had an outsize effect as to why Sweden managed as well as they did. Social distancing and personal space is also pretty much the norm in Sweden even during non-pandemic times.

The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country. Looking at the excess mortality numbers for the last few years that does indeed seem to at least explain some of the difference (although the claim has been disputed by their Norwegian counterpart).

It's also notable that Sweden tends to do a little worse than their neighbours through every flu season when it comes to excess death. Maybe COVID also just exacerbated that effect somewhat?

I think that the factors influencing COVID spread are so complex that it is impossible to disentangle how effective any political measures were in all but the most general terms.

In the end I think it mostly came down to luck, where those countries that managed to avoid clusters and super spreader events or more infectious strands early on fared better.

>The Swedish CDC also says they believe they've fared worse than Norway and Denmark because the last few flu seasons were very mild in the country.

It's called the 'dry tinder' hypothesis, and it isn't born out when researchers look at the data, e.g.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34213362/

Thanks!

> In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators

As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same.

Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.

Thank you for pointing that out: 10x. An order of magnitude difference in deaths.

Plus, it just makes common-sense that if people cannot meet other people, that prevents the spread of the disease. No?

That makes common sense, and then we see 10x difference in deaths. The Occam's razor explanation for the reason of 10x bigger death rate then is .. lack of lockdown!

Anybody arguing otherwise seems suspect of political calculus, in my view.

That would make sense, except for the countries that did lock down and did worse. It would help a lot to have a satisfactory explanation for that, too. Geography by itself is not enough to eliminate the doubt sown by that contradiction.

Timing.

I sat in the UK for weeks looking at what was happening in Italy and wondering why we weren’t doing anything at all.

Yeah, the lockdowns in the UK were interesting, particularly were they would announce them ahead of time, giving everyone time to travel and/or bar hop.

I also thought it was interesting that the delta wave seemed to disappear in the UK without the benefit of lockdowns. The same in India. The same in India. I've been wondering if these waves of infections come and go without much regard for typical lockdown measures (outside of full-on communist China and New Zealand lockdowns, which may not be practical in most other places).

I’m not sure that it is disappearing - in Scotland today we have the highest number of recorded cases since the pandemic began. Schools just returned last week too so that won’t help.

The number of cases has never been less relevant than when the majority of the country has been vaccinated.

It’s relevant to people who haven’t been vaccinated yet. I’m 37 and I’m only just passed the 2 weeks cool-off of my second jab.

It's not over till it's over.

"U.S. (Civid-19) deaths in the week ending Monday totaled 7,225. By comparison, about 5,400 Americans died in the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks combined. "

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/delta-driven-surge-in-us-e...

Why limit the comparison to nordic countries?

We don't limit comparison of Italy to Mediterranean countries, or England to British Isle countries.

Sweden is a European country.

On a European scale Sweden was right in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita.

Limiting it to immediate neighbors leaves you with comparisons which have similar environment, socio-economic status, and culture/lifestyle. When doing statistical analysis you first try to control for as many potential confounding variables as possible. By limiting the comparisons to like vs like on many different variables you end up being able to make stronger claims about the consequences of active choices.

Sweden shares similar socio economic status and culture and lifestyle with other European countries I completely agree.

This analysis doesn't limit it to immediate neighbours. If it was doing that it'd need to include the Baltic states too and when you do that Sweden goes back to being average.

In reality this argument is a form of motivated reasoning. It boils down to, if you ignore all the countries that disprove the hypothesis behind lockdowns and take a tiny number that did better than Sweden, then search backwards for some justification as to why this cherry picking is legitimate, you get a 'neighbours hypothesis' that unfortunately has to ignore some of the neighbours.

It's just rationalizing by people who cannot accept that lockdowns failed, because if they accepted that they'd have to accept that academic expertise in general has failed. And not only failed. Failed in ways that were destructive and damaging.

If you think that Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania share the same socio-economic status, population distribution, and cultural/lifestyle factors as Sweden then I think you are the one who is engaging in motivated reasoning. The reason we keep looking at Sweden and comparing it to its neighbors is that they are a perfect example of the success of lockdowns in preventing high death rates at the start of Covid. Anyone who claims otherwise seems to be either delusional or deceptive.

He's calling out the fact that you compare all countries to each other except in the case of Sweden.

People compare other countries to Australia and New Zealand and Singapore all the time to justify covid lockdowns and restrictions.

But in the case of Sweden a country that outright disproves effectiveness of covid restrictions you require the frame of reference to only be the specific neighboring countries to cherry pick to fit your narrative.

It's either monstrously nightmarishly disingenuous or completely boneheaded and clueless.

They're fine with comparing countries all over the world with each other....

But when it comes to Sweden the one country that disproves their narrative it has to be just a neighboring countries.

It seems so disingenuous to me.

I have mostly changed my opinion on this matter after reading this blog post (linked elsewhere in the thread too) https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

The 1450 per million figure the article cites as the cost of covid to Sweden actually makes them look worse than your own data.

It's not an article about the cost of covid though, its about the benefits of not fighting it as hard as other countries. It's very light on that, not much of an attempt to quantify and compare to the cost, but still props to it for even acknowledging that those benefits exist and count for something.

The best write up I've seen so far on the topic is this [0] which concludes:

> So every 52 months of stricter lockdown in counterfactual Sweden would have saved one month of healthy life. You will have to decide whether you think this is worth it, but it seems pretty harsh to me.

> Might this be because these numbers are off, and the lockdown would have saved more lives than the model allows? I don’t think that could change things very much. Remember, our confidence interval included the scenario where strict lockdown has 100% efficacy and prevents every single COVID case. Even if this is true, that just means it’s 21 months of stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. Again, seems pretty harsh.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...

Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below:

* Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years.

* If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost.

If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct.

If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.

Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater.

I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.

On the other hand, you have to consider people who were single and dating. They had a way worse last 18 months than those in a committed, cohabitating relationship.

The larger point is that its impossible to objectively value other people's lives and any reasoning based on doing so is faulty.

I agree with that as precisely stated, but one can reasonably make subjective judgements (and indeed our politicians are doing so at the moment).

If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!”

It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.

Unless we make a judgement-call on value how can we balance taking away peoples freedoms over extending other peoples lives?

Consider the following questions:

* Would you accept 70 million people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?

* Would you accept 500 people staying inside for a year to extend a single persons life by 10 years?

* Would you accept 5,000 people staying inside for a year to extend 10 peoples life by 10 years?

* Would you stay inside for an hour to save another persons life by a year?

* Would you stay inside for a year to save another person life by 1 year?

These are the real questions that we have to answer, and they will absolutely (and unfortunately) need people to face into the question of the value of life.

My personal answer to these questions is (in sequence) No, No, No, Yes, No. A reasonable person could answer completely different - there is no absolute right answer in any of these!

We can pretend that the answer to these questions is impossible - but these are the real decisions that policy makers need to make. How much is someone's freedom worth compared to the life of a stranger?

> The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself

I didn't assign zero value - I assigned it as 90% value compared to a year with no restrictions.

It's nice you used the time to improve your relationship with your wife, but I'm single and wasn't able to see my friends or family for 6 months. I like that you managed to make the most of it - but my life was put on hold.

> The idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching Netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids.

This post assumes that me being inside for a year stops someone else being suffocated - but actually it's probably more like 100-500 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated (although they will still die of another cause instead, on average a few years later but sometimes many years later). Besides, it's the idea that my freedom (and that of hundreds of others per life saved) should be traded for someone else's health is my issue. Selfish? Sure, but we all are. Everyone on this forum could donate all their earnings this year to save tens of strangers lives in less developed countries but very few do in reality.

> Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic?

See the trolley dilemma - this is a different ethical decision (based on positive action, i.e. doing vs allowing harm).

There isn't much difference between active and passive harm. The most notable thing about the trolley problem is our inate resistance to thinking rationally about that.

People in their 30s and 40s are dying and losing decades of life. Kids Even. Slowing down the spread and then vaccination has saved so many millions from rolling that die.

For myself and my wife for example my wife would virtually certainly be dead if she had contracted it and I wouldn't have great odds either. My lungs don't work that well now without benefit of covid

Then there is the damage done by the disease how do you properly value ravaged lungs and damaged bodies that decrease quality of life for the remainder of a life and end it prematurely? Better than half of asymptomatic survivors have lung damage even!

Then every case as a trillion chances at a better covid. How do you value THAT in your equation? Do you try to assign probability to various future death rates and multiply by probability of being realized?

> but actually it's probably more like 100 people being inside for a year stops 1 person being suffocated.

Plus 12 from being hospitalized and having substantial damage done to their bodies that decreases their lifespan by 5 years. Plus 20 more who didn't feel serious symptoms but still sustained substantial lung or cardiovascular damage and lost a year.

Even playing the same game I think you are behind the 8 ball.

We are all selfish. It's true but it's a vice not a justification. We ought to strive for better. The life you save may be your own.

That comparison of life hours isn't valid though. There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects. And that's not to mention the potential overwhelming of the healthcare system, resulting in many other lives being lost or severely impacted.

People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.

Imperfect comparison but still valid. All lives are eventually lost causing some grief.

(If I may summarize what you've said) Saying that a large number of coincident deaths causes a collective grief that wouldn't have happened otherwise is rather subjective. I have felt nothing of the sort. I don't think it's enough of a concern to justify such an overreach of government power.

Quantifying the value of life as a number is icky but necessary if you're making decisions of this scale.

> There are additional effect that are wrought on a nation when it's experiencing mass death - mass grief and loss has effects.

1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old, 96% over 60 [1]. I would not call that mass death.

> People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.

I don't have a problem doing that for myself. I have a limited amount of time left in this world and some of the things I most enjoy are impossible to do with the restrictions that have been imposed over the last 18 months. Last I checked, before vaccines, was that I had a 1 in 15,000 chance of dying from covid. I personally don't think that's reason for me to curtail living my life. The numbers look even worse for younger people and those who have had more of their lives upended by lockdowns.

These are population decisions, involving millions of people, people dying all the time, suffering one way or the other. Lockdowns have costs and downsides, too. If you are not using math to look at this then what are you doing?

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...

If that's true, then lockdowns aren't a valid answer either.

And on the side of not having lockdowns you'll find things that are much worse than some assumed percentage loss of happiness: people dying in total isolation despite not being sick, people dying of medical care that was withheld because they were too afraid to go to the hospital, a generation whose growth was stunted by lack of education and simple lack of human contact (according to one study, babies during the pandemic had a 22% lower IQ than babies from other years [1]), etc. We have done incredible damage to ourselves.

At the beginning of the pandemic this was justified, since we didn't know if this was going to be a mild case of the sniffles or some kind of air-transmissible ebola. Once we knew it was much closer to the first than to the second, however, we should have adjusted our policies, and we never did. I'm terrified that in the coming months we might see a return to lockdowns, as cases will inevitably rise again, and our politicians know only one answer.

I know an elderly couple that literally hasn't left their house, nor received any visitors other than for things like grocery deliveries, since the beginning of the pandemic. Considering how terrified they now are of the outside world, they will live out their lives in a self-chosen prison cell. They are both fully vaccinated (doctor came to their house for it), but refuse to step outside. Is that life?

As another poster here put it so eloquently: life shouldn't be treated as nothing other than a transmission vector for the virus.

How would you feel about a government policy where people are killed two years before their estimated 'normal' date of death, in order to spare society the massive medical cost of the last few years of living? Evil, right?

How do you feel about a policy where those two years are also taken by the government, but in the middle of your life? Sure, we weren't actually killed; we were allowed to keep producing. The only thing that was taken from us were all the things that made life worth living...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...

> People can't be simply reduced down to a number and happiness isn't an 'x' that we can solve for in a mathematical calculation.

You can do it - although you can't calculate happiness completely, you can make models and reason about it in a mathematical/economic way. How much you believe the theory maps onto the real world is a valid criticism, however there are entire sections of the social sciences that attempt to do this to help inform policy and decisions (see: Happiness Economics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_economics).

In fact, the concept of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) is a very common healthcare economics concept which is used in the UK (NICE) to decide how to allocate drug funding and direct policy.

Notice the article doesn't mention countries where proper lockdown worked very well and took only around 100 days.

And what, pray tell is a “proper lockdown”?

I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.

Taiwan had only a few weeks of full lockdown last year, and then a few months of softer lockdown during the second outbreak this year. During the recent outbreak it was WFH and takeout from restaurants with certain businesses closed. About 100 days later most things are open again.

They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.

Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare.

Honestly, it all sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

Good point. Phew. Slowly being normalized.

Actually in terms of Orwellian nightmares, normalizing mask wearing in public is an incredibly significant blow you can strike against the surveillance state.

So comply with the government in order to get our freedoms?

Makes sense....

I mean, on the one hand, you're not wrong.

I suppose one "solution" is one of those fake masks that looks real, but does nothing. Technically compliant with the letter of the law, but still striking a blow, with the bonus of hiding your face.

> Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

George Orwell, who actually died of an infectious disease ( Tuberculosis ), being recruited posthumously to the "lets spread disease without restraint" brigade is quite low.

Don't understand how him dying of TB invalidates his ideas.

It’s been done for at least a hundred years, well before Orwell. Nice try though.

Not with this level of technology and with this big of scale.

Come to think of it when has contact tracing been done before?

All communicable diseases (measles, etc) in western countries, especially starting with smallpox eradication in the 1950s. Look it up!

Contact tracing is looking for people that came in contact with infected individuals. When a coworker gets covid they investigate where they went and who they came in contact with so that person can get tested. Not sure how that is Orwellian.

What people would consider Orwellian is the app you can use to scan in at places. That's voluntary, but almost everyone uses it and you still have to sign in on paper if you don't.

Personally, I don't mind. We all carry around GPS tracking devices every day, and it's silly to think that governments can't already track those. Even with GPS off you can be tracked if hitting wifi or different cell towers.

Why not NZ?

We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.

How has the NZ tourism sector been going - eg QT/Wanaka? Did domestic tourism pick up the slack?

I can't speak for NZ, but in AU domestic tourism has more than picked up the slack - domestic tourists have spent more money than international tourists

When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.

So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.

It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.

I guess I'd be worried about the rate of breakthrough infections amongst vaccinated people in Israel, the first good data we have (the reason for booster shots). That same data showed that natural immunity was much better. [0]

It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.

[0] https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

the states that do actual hard and fast lockdowns do well. See WA, QLD, NT, SA.

NZ and AU are faring pretty differently. AU is wracked with crisis and NZ has been business as usual for ages. The key difference as I understand it is that NZ sacrificed easy international travel for domestic wellbeing and AU didn't.

AU has certainly sacrificed international travel also - there are still Australians trying to get back. Aus outbreaks were mostly from escapes from hotel quarantines, and the quarantines were in the major cities.

And NZ is having outbreaks from hotel quarantine in the middle of major cities too, exactly like us.

Australia has far more restrictions on travel.

For outbound travel Australians are required to get a government exemption to leave the country. Australia also has far fewer inbound quarantine places per capita.

Also internally most states require entry/exit permits and frequently close thier borders to one another.

NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.

Agree that there's no guarantee of success. However, the political environment and compliance with lockdowns is very different between the two countries. For example, New Zealand is seeing nothing like the widespread protests in Melbourne and across Victoria.

Give it a month

The impression I get as an internet observer from the West Island is that on the whole the NZ government has done a much better job of public communications, maintaining social cohesion, and not trying to police their way out of a pandemic than Australia has. But we'll see whether that lasts. The political environment can change - see NSW - and if level 4 restrictions last more than a few weeks I think you might see the protests start up.

Australia sacrificed international travel too. It still leaked in which led to occasional limited lockdowns. Until Delta strain hit and spread too fast for the small lockdown strategy to contain it.

Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup plan.

But even the AZ rollout was a debacle with no one sure if they were eligible or how to get it. And the Prime Minster excusing it all by saying "it's not a race".

If Australia had the vaccination rate of the US or the UK (which was absolutely achievable) then Australia would still be the envy of the world.

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.

Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).

The issues with the non-AZ vaccines was that they didn't lock in early supply dates soon enough. For example, in June (which was already late for what was needed) Australia only had 1.7M Pfizer doses available[1] and now the PM is putting out press releases about obtaining extra supply from Poland[2].

Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/australia-to-get-pfiz...

[2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/vaccine-operations-centre-wee...

I'm not saying the Australian rollout has been good. I'm just saying it's been better than New Zealand.

Can you flesh that out? Emulating New Zealand's death rate in the USA would have saved at least 600k lives so far.

You mean Israel and nowhere else, yes? Because nowhere in Europe had lockdown so short. Australia managed to make all its work for nothing by comprehensively fucking up the vaccine rollout.

Victoria took 110 days of lockdown to get back to "normal" in lockdown number 2. We are now on lockdown number 6 and have spent over 200 days in lockdown. Can't go more than 5km at current have a 9pm curfew. I would not say it is working well.

It depends on the perspective. From government's perspective it's working as intended.

You mean places like Australia, that are still in strict lockdowns 18 months later and deploying soldiers to ensure people aren't leaving their house without government permission?

It boggles my mind that some people desire to live in a system like that.

I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high. I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk) than the long, drawn-out yo-yo lockdowns (where we lock down too late and open up too early - meaning community transmission remains high) we've been having. Better to rip the band-aid off quickly than slowly.

> I've been barely outside at all over the past 18 months because the risk of infection has been too high.

I'm truly sorry you've had to go through that. My mom has a compromised immune system so she went through much of the same until she was able to get vaccinated. I still worry about what would happen to her with a breakthrough infection.

> I would rather have a short, strict lockdown (followed by a period of being open with extremely low infection risk)

If that was a choice, I'd gladly take it. But Hong Kong, Australia, Vietnam, etc. have shown that even the best lockdown implementations fail eventually. New Zealand may be the single outlier, but I'm not sure what their end game is as it requires completely sealing their country from the rest of the world, which is also unsustainable.

> and it looks bad

Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures. This also fails to acknowledge that there might be a worthwhile set of cost:benefit ratios to compare your single data point against.

> but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.

People accuse the COVID situation of being political and dividing people. I think one of the major lines of division is in the expectations that one has about their daily life in a given society, and how few some people have about their own.

Each to their own, but the failure to acknowledge the validity of the opposing point of view, even in a polite tone, is a troubling development.

>Yet they did better than the US, UK and Spain which also engaged in lockdown measures.

I don't know about the US or Spain but the lockdown measures in the UK were halfhearted. Somehow we managed to have the worst of both worlds, the biggest economic hit in the OECD and the worst health outcomes.

A huge challenge in Norway, was that all our retired ethnic Pakistani people panicked and booked flights from Pakistan to Norway. They didn't trust that Pakistani hospitals would handle the pandemic. Sweden probably has a lot more foreign residents with swedish citizenship than Norway?

Even though we have relatively few immigrants, at times, more than 50% of all the covid-infected belonged to these groups. https://www.p4.no/nyheter/over-halvparten-av-innlagte-er-inn...

I firmly believe that to be part of the answer, our "CDC" also said as much in 2020. Lots of clusters of infection popping up in parts of the population that lives very tightly and in large family groups, and those are predominantly immigrants and their kids. Im not sure how it looks in the third wave though. That and the care homes for elders were a big problem early on, but lately it seems to be a more general spread which is probably even harder to stem.

I have not yet seen anyone try correlate socio-eoconomic status and/or overcrowding to infection in a nice way?

Actually it turns out our "CDC", folkhälsomyndigheten has a report on just these factors:

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...

Mostly in swedish.

I think only looking at number of deaths from covid is a huge mistake. What about the quality of life of all of those who survived?

A lockdown is no small thing. It's forcing millions of people into forced isolation, which has hard to forsee consequences for mental health and social development, means destroying innumerable small businesses, and with it, people's livelihoods, closing schools, with devastating effects to education [1], etc.

Also worth noting that the initial projections for covid deaths in Sweden vastly over-estimated the pandemic's eventual lethality:

https://fee.org/articles/sweden-s-actual-covid-19-results-co...

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...

To add to this, the linked article itself says:

The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.

The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios. On an average day you'll notice multiple anti-remote working articles parroted by Cabinet ministers. Why should they care how businesses conduct their business, especially if it's more convenient and can lead to a happier and more efficient workforce? Follow the money.

It used to be - many years ago - a stodgy and conservative yet reputable newspaper (they fired Boris Johnson for lying, now he moonlights as a columnist). As with other newspapers (e.g. WSJ) it went off the deep end a long time ago.

> The Telegraph is essentially the mouthpiece of the British commercial property landlord classes, who have a vested interest in getting people back into the offices and shops in their portfolios.

I'm curious, how does it work in reality? A boardroom meetings where landlord's representative decide what to publish in the next issue to get people into commercial property? A weekly reviews of editors where they have their KPI tied to how well they lure people into buildings? Phone calls from commercial union leaders to publishing houses asking for specific results? Do we have some good articles which would describe mechanics of that or is it all successful clandestine operations?

More like a boardroom full of landlords, I guess.

If you're part of a small group of people, it's easy to call your buddy when something bother you or a point of view you don't like gets published

Micromanging is not necessary. They just set the tone and don't hire people who would write anything opposed to their policy [1] which they rarely need to explicitly convey, although they do at times of course. People write things that they really like get rewarded.

"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explains how this work with a very large number of examples.

1. https://youtu.be/9RPKH6BVcoM

2. https://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Econo...

Exactly.

Internet commenters love to think their enemy's minions are stupid.

In reality they're just as smart as you are and don't need to be specifically told what the people in charge do and don't want published and/or what tone they should take.

Just imagine if academia were like this...

Marriage and friendship networks. Particularly those formed in the public school (“public” means paid in UK) system. I doubt it’s official meetings, but rather discussions outside work.

Yep, it’s the dinner after the committee meeting, the bar after that. The weekend adventures, etc. That’s where the politics are discovered. And then coordinated.

How are public schools paid in the UK? Does that mean private schools are the free schools? Or do they call free public schools something else?

It’s a historical thing.

In the olden days the only way to get an education was through privately tutoring.

So establishments where everyone was educated together were “public” - even though you paid to attend.

Nowadays “public meaning paid” implies one of these original public schools (Harrow, Eton and the like).

I went to a paid school, founded in 1513, but it wouldn’t be called “public” because it’s not one of those original schools and therefore not high enough in the class system. It would be called “private”.

“Public as in free to attend” schools are known as state schools.

Just on a detail, I discovered recently that there have been various official definitions of "public school" and lists of public schools, and FWIW your school probably counts as one according to those. But I agree with your main points and your explanation.

The public schools would say their role is to prepare the future rulers of the country. And my school produced two former Chancellors of the Exchequer so I guess that makes sense.

Mine wasn’t a boarding school though which probably counts for something.

The ones everyone else goes to are generally referred to as "state" schools.

"State" school are the free, government run schools. "Public" schools are typically fee-paying, and are named so because when they were founded, anyone who paid could send their children there, rather than it being restricted by class or religion. They were "public" because the general public could send their kids there.

You know in an interview loop where you consider "culture fit?" That's it. That's the conspiracy.

For a journalism job at the Telegraph you're going to need to have a resume where you've written the right kinds of articles with the right kind of tone. Have a bunch of articles that you've written sympathetic to Corbyn and those around him and you ain't getting the job.

They won't even need to police you that hard once you've gotten the job, because you've spent 20+ years being brought up a certain way and you're probably not going to massively deviate from your past all of a sudden, particularly not if you're clearly getting paid well based on your current trajectory. Once you get vetted in the interview process they know what they're getting based on the way you present yourself, the way you talk, your background, where you grew up, the schools you went to, etc. And when you've been there long enough you'll vet other candidates the same way.

And its largely the same kind of interpersonal mechanics that govern the formation of cliques in high school, enforced by interviews and performance reviews, with large incentives where if you conform you climb the ladder and gain more wealth and power. Nobody needs to write it all down just like there's no written rules that he art nerds tend to hang out with the art nerds (and I'm sure there's examples of people who you think you can point to who broke the molds there, but they're notable precisely because they broke the molds).

Excellent summary for people who think that there needs to be actual explicit indications for conspiracies (in the original sense of the word) to exist

>I'm curious, how does it work in reality?

the same way gravity works, you don't start floating through the room even if you don't actively believe in it. The financiers of these papers know the editors and managers they hire, they set the tone, they dine in the same circles, their kids go to the same schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, for ideology to proliferate there are no 'mechanics' required.

It was The Times that fired Boris Johnson for lying, The Telegraph hired him after that.

They have gone off the deep end though. Some good coverage of The Telegraph's fall in standards is Peter Oborne's resignation letter: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-i-have-...

It continues to astonish me how far the telegraph (and conservatism generally) has left people like Oborne behind. Really quite something to behold, and pretty deeply alarming.

Is there anyplace a conservative can find real news anymore?

Anywhere reputable.

For example, I read the guardian pretty much everyday, and various other papers, even though although culturally I am a proper grauniad-reader type, politically I am not - but by virtue of actually reading the articles text you can actually (believe it or not?) determine both the facts and the flavour separately.

Be careful. It takes conscious effort to read sceptically; whenever your attention slips you'll find yourself absorbing the views the writer wants you to.

Financial Times is pretty good, and definitely not liberal.

Yes, that's correct - by Max Hastings, who said of Johnson, "don't trust this man with your wife or your wallet".

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/boris-...

Where I live in Yorkshire we call it Tory Pravda. It seems to just be propelled ever onwards by contrarianism.

I'm glad to see someone call out the WSJ... I was a subscriber for many years and it was a conservative yet outstanding source of information. Today it's crap, yet still trades on its historic reputation. Really breaks my heart as I've not been able to find a replacement.

What about the Financial Times and Bloomberg?

Bloomberg has major problems; they have no proper separation between advertising and editorial (a high-profile article on corruption in the Chinese government, following up on an article that had narrowly missed out on the Pulitzer the year before, was spiked in what very much appeared to be a move to protect Bloomberg terminal sales in China), and they still haven't retracted (or clearly stated that they're standing behind) their dubious "hack chip" story.

> their dubious "hack chip" story

It shocks me that people believe manufacturer denials on this particular issue but still claim to be immune to commercial propaganda.

It's unlikely there will ever be undeniable proof available to the general public one way or the other on this. But the story was well sourced, was definitely technical credible and the parts that could be checked all checked out. Literally the only thing against it was manufacturer statements saying "nah".

But follow up articles have expanded that, and are starting to name people who say they have seen evidence now: https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/12/supermicro_bloomberg_...

In particular, check out page 71 of [1], where a former US Marine testifies under oath in a federal case about a similar things happening with Lenovo laptops in 2008 in Iraq. Quote:

A large amount of Lenovo laptops were sold to the US military that had a chip encrypted on the motherboard that would record all the data that was being inputted into that laptop and send it back to China.

[1] https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/r9dKMMM0...

I'm glad to hear that Bloomberg is still talking about this - there was a point where it looked like they were just going to wait for it to fade away.

If it's real, it really shouldn't be that hard to prove conclusively - find the chip, scan it, dump what's in it. The technical parts are possible but not that plausible - not just the manufacturer but large internet companies with the right expertise were sceptical, and most of the people who thought it was genuine seemed to be non-technical. E.g. "had a chip encrypted on the motherboard" does not inspire confidence that this is someone who knows what they're talking about.

I think the downhill started when Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought it. Anything they touch turns into ... bad things. Why is that? Because there are people who crave propagandists news. It is good business, tell us what we want to hear ..

So… par for the course among formerly reputable news outlets?

Meta related, but this so perfectly fits my previous comment on the trend these days in "political debate":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28250033

Sweden's neighbours have far less international travel, immigration, and urban population.

When you want to see how bad it can get, see the Czech Republic in the top ten. We are land locked, quite high density and with a lot of neighbors with a lot of regular cross border traffic. There were lockdowns though arguably too late, chaotic and often ignored.

End result ? 30000+ dead.

Well, at least it looks like the ammount of people who got infected was quite massive as with only 50% vaccination rate right now things are not going back to hell so far, with hardly any precautions still in place.

Your comment about counterfactuals reminds of a saying, or what I would call a more accurate version of a common saying - "Hindsight is 50/50". (Note, that doesn't make hindsight necessarily wrong, just difficult to have confidence in.)

"Hindsight is 20/20" because perfect eyesight is 20/20: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/what-does-20-...

20/20 is actually just normal vision, not perfect eyesight.

What is perfect vision? I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see. Would perfect vision being able to see everything in the electromagnetic spectrum? How big would one eyes need to be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Expression

> Some birds of prey, such as hawks, are believed to have an acuity of around 20/2; in this respect, their vision is much better than human eyesight.

The scale of how good vision can be keeps going and going indefinitely (presumably until you get into physical limitations to resolution related to wavelengths). While 20/20 is considered normal and not in need of correction, it doesn't mean it's the best vision observed among human beings, or the best that's physically possible (for human beings or other animals).

> What is perfect vision?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman#Powers,_abilities,_an...

> I thought 20/20 meant you don’t need glasses or any other aids to see.

No, of course not. Try looking at Saturn at night. Then try looking through a telescope. Odds are you'll see it better with the aid.

Yes, this just means you (first number) can see at 20 feet what the normal person (second number) can see at 20 feet. I don't know why 20 feet became the standard for comparison.

Yes, that is the point. The original saying is Hindsight is 20/20, implying it is very accurate. This version of the statement contradicts that, implying you can't really say what would have happened if things were different.

But 50/50 would be effectively the same meaning as 20/20.

(20/20 means "person being tested sees as well at 20 feet as standard vision at 20 feet.")

> But 50/50 would be effectively the same meaning as 20/20.

This isn't obvious; consider that having 3,000/3,000 vision ("I can't read text all that well when it's half a mile away") says pretty much nothing about how clearly you can see things that are 20 feet away.

Nearsightedness and farsightedness are both characterized by "normal vision" at certain distances which becomes markedly worse at certain other distances.

20 and 50 feet are both far beyond "nearsighted" range and into "normal distance," without being all that different from one another.

3,000 feet is quite different (for one thing, atmospheric effects start becoming relevant).

I should have been more clear. 20/20 refers to vision and is used in the traditional form of the expression and is supposed to mean "very good". 50/50 refers to percentages, meaning 50% chance of being correct and 50% chance of being wrong, which would be very bad.

I took "50/50" to mean like a coin flip odds.

> The original saying is Hindsight is 20/20, implying it is very accurate.

That is how the saying is used, but oddly enough it's pretty much the opposite of what 20/20 vision means.

Where is the chart stat from ?

Stockholm has the population density of San Diego or Phoenix.

Stockholm has over four times the density of Phoenix.

Thanks! My bad. I guess the point stands even stronger than before.

Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland, even though they are neighbors. Also, being low population density is irrelevant (you could have a huge country with everybody crammed in a city, actually Stockholm is much denser than Oslo for instance). Also, even within a single country, fatality rates vary greatly.

I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.

> Sweden is a different country than Norway or Finland

Pedantic “every country is a different country” aside; Norway and Finland are absolutely fine comparatives.

The population density (in the populated areas), culture and genetic make-up of these countries is so similar that they may as well be considered the same country socioeconomically.

Hell, they used to even _be_ the same country (the union of Kalmar).

I’ve lived in Finland and currently live in Sweden. As a British person I see more similarities than differences. (Language of Finland vs the Scandinavian languages not withstanding)

Your perception of a country doesn't make a scientific evidence on why Norway of Finland could be taken as reference point to assess Sweden strategy regarding Covid.

You're the one asserting they're not comparable here, so please trot out some factors where Sweden is measurably different from its neighbors then.

The pandemics is extremely complex. Fatality rates have looked very different in seemingly similar countries, and even within different areas of a single country.

Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong.

I do suspect Sweden would have had less fatality had they implemented a lockdown. Would it then be comparable to Norway? I wouldn't bet may life on it. France has almost twice as many covid death as Germany even though they implemented a much stricter lockdown.

It seems some people hate Sweden for choosing their way to deal with the pandemics. Could have they done better otherwise? maybe, but overall, no cataclysm happened there, they did ok in terms of fatality compared to rest of Europe, and much better for the other metrics, as stated in the article.

"Lockdown" is also an almost meaningless term. People adjusted behavior almost everywhere--including Sweden. Furthermore, very few places actually implemented a hard lockdown that largely prevented people from leaving their homes. Certainly no where (?) in the US did. Restaurants closed for indoor dining isn't really a lockdown.

It's very hard to correlate policies to outcomes.

> Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong.

Nobody has claimed that it is, and in fact in this very thread you've seen it correctly noted that Sweden's approach to old age homes was responsible for a significant part of the fatalities -- although here too there's a lot of debate about whether it's the percentage of % in age homes (a bit higher in Sweden), the Swedish tendency to have larger homes, or the Swedish COVID policy decision to treat people at the homes instead of hospitalizing them.

But, again, if you have alternative hypotheses or factors that you think differ greatly between the countries, let's hear them. Because as a native of the region, I'd struggle to find many, at least when it comes to factors a virus would care about (as opposed to, say, preferring sweeter jam with meatballs).

Maybe this explains the difference during the pandemic - Sweden had more old people.

[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...

> I don't think anybody knows how Sweden would have done with a different response to the Covid. In any case, on an objective scale, I think they've done quite well and they had a less miserable experience than the rest of us.

So first you claim we don't know. Then you claim they've "done quite well". Which is it? What was the purpose of the first sentence?

I'm claiming we don't know what would have happened under different policies (lockdown vs no lockdown) - and those who pretend otherwise don't have scientific evidence to back up their claims. Regardless, I'm claiming they've done quite well under all possible objective metrics compared to other European countries.

You should compare Sweden to its closest neighbors, not to all of Europe or all of the World).

Countries geographically close to each other are more similar than countries far apart. Therefore you can more readily attribute the difference in death-rates to differences in policy.

And use Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates is most probably the correct one: lack of lockdown. It just makes (common) sense.

What is your explanation for the 10x difference in death-rates between Sweden and its closest neighbors? Do you have a simpler explanation than the lack of lockdown?

Well, first of all it's 10x compared to Norway and 3X compared to Denmark.

There are huge differences in demographics between the Scandinavian countries. Over 20% of the Swedish population have been born outside of the country, mostly in the Middle East or Africa. This group has been hit disproportionately by Covid. The risk of needing intensive care for Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden is 6 times higher than for people with Swedish ancestry, and the risk of dying is 2.8 higher [0].

There are also pretty big differences in how elderly care is organized and run.

I'm not saying we did a good job in Sweden, but I definitely think that there are more factors than lockdown in play.

[0] https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/2dddee08a4...

Surely there are many contributing factors always. The question to ask is: "Would Sweden have done better had it implemented lockdown like its neighbors?

In hindsight, would they still make the same decision, if (and when) a new equally deadly pandemic rises again?

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