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Comment by askcvv | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, Sweden enjoys extremely low case numbers and fatalities.

Perhaps Sweden did the right thing? Unthinkable, let's repeat failed policies ad infinitum!

One interesting thing about Sweden that seems to fly over everyone's head is that they spend a significant amount of effort promoting health in public schools. So you have generations of people who are taught to focus on their well-being for the rest of their lives. This is likely one of the major reasons why socialized medical system works in Sweden. Soviets did the same thing and even promoted health at work places by instituting Sanatorium breaks for employees. So, with that said, we're probably talking about a sub-group of people with better natural immunity than some other surrounding countries in the area.

Sweden has already had more cases and more deaths than Austria, both in absolute and per capita numbers, and has a larger vaccination rate than Austria.

Sweden has lower excess deaths than Austria, so Austria just looks better since they under reported deaths.

Edit: Austria currently has more absolute excess deaths and lower population than Sweden according to Financial Times.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...

Freedom is worthless. Better live your life in lockdown, than stand a 1% chance of dying. Or actually, better for someone else to live their life in lockdown, than to have me stand a 1% chance of dying.

Please stop posting ideological flamebait to HN. We ban accounts that do that, and this thread is bad enough as it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

These threads invariably generate heat, and not light.

Yes, but there are degrees of heat as well as light. It makes a difference which circle of hell a thread ends up in, so comments that push things further in are a particular problem.

I can’t recall too many threads where I have left inspired rather than despondent, but maybe that is atypical. In general though, are these topical news-focused submissions in the spirit of the guidelines? They don’t satisfy too much intellectual curiosity, and are well-covered by the news, so it seems like “no”

Sweden's early response was really bad, and it still has bad stats. The saving grace has been the high vaccination rate, but the total death toll is still much worse than any of our neighbours.

... but total deaths per capita in Sweden is still below France, Spain, Italy, UK (and fwiw Belgium, Bulgaria, Russia, US ...)

Sweden is also suggesting that if you're vaccinated you do not need to get tested. "If you are vaccinated, you do not generally need to get tested when you experience symptoms." [1]

With ~69% [2] of the population fully vaccinated that is definitely going to skew the numbers a bit.

1. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency... 2. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

The influence of different testing rates can be avoided by looking at the number of fatalities. Sweden looks much better now than Austria and the overall picture is the same:

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

Looking at this, I also do not understand why Austria's ICUs are overloaded now but not in November 2020.

Sweden basically did soft lockdowns: capacity limits, mandated social distancing, masking, and closures of schools and universities.

No businesses were shut down, pubs and clubs were open and no masks were ever required to enter a business. They closed a few public buildings for a short time but nobody was ever locked down.

Perhaps it's just hard to die twice...?

Total deaths per million in Sweden so far: 1466 Total deaths per million in Denmark so far: 471

Sweden has vaccinated pretty much all elderly people

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