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Comment by lokl | Hacker News Reader

According to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, as of now, Sweden has had 15,145 deaths; Norway has had 1,050 deaths; Denmark 2,863; Finland 1,309. With populations from Wikipedia (10,402,070 for Sweden; 5,402,171 for Norway; 5,850,189 for Denmark; 5,536,146 for Finland), this yields deaths per 1,000 people of:

Sweden 1.456 Norway 0.194 Denmark 0.489 Finland 0.236

Saying Sweden has "just survived" doesn't capture these numbers well, I think. If this is "embarrassing" for anyone, it's Sweden, but I wouldn't use the word embarrassing. It's tragic.

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The aggregated over-mortality rate for Sweden at this point puts it in the lower part among the EU, at place 21 of 31 compared countries IIRC. The covid-related death-count at 15000 has been more or less constant since May even while it's surging now in the other countries.

Besides, people keep comparing Sweden to Norway, Denmark and Finland, which is a bad comparison as the demographies are very different.

And yet you just decided to compare it to a host of EU countries whose demographics are radically different from Sweden.

Rather surprised you don't think Norway and Denmark are appropriate peers against which to compare Sweden. So please provide better suggestions for peers, rather than comparing it as you are, apparently, against Greece.

That's a bizarre statement. Sweden is almost directly comparable to Norway and Denmark at the very least. Finland too.

Not saying it’s the reason, but Sweden has higher urbanization than its neighbors. The country also has more people who don’t speak the native language. Belgium has a similar population size but more deaths (27k).

Sweden does not have higher urbanization then Denmark (both at 88%). Also what has native language anything to do with the spread of the virus and its mortality rate? I fail to see a logical link between the two.

maybe some languages by their nature spread more virus into the air? i don't know..

> Not saying it’s the reason, but Sweden has higher urbanization than its neighbors.

The urbanization % for the four countries are: 82.9%, 87.9%, 85.5%, and 88.1%. Which one of those do you think is Sweden? Do you think it's at all plausible that such small differences could account for an order of magnitude more deaths?

> The country also has more people who don’t speak the native language

What are the numbers, and why would that be relevant?

> Saying Sweden has "just survived"

Europe "just survived" the black plague (1/3rd of Europe died). Life on Earth "just survived" the Chicxulub impactor (the Dinosaurs and 90% of species on Earth died). People who say flippant things like this are unserious and frankly, dangerous.

COVID does not have a death rate of 33%.

You're missing the forest from the trees here; no one's suggesting that. Instead, we're saying that perhaps you shouldn't use Sweden as evidence supporting non-intervention when their deaths per capita was an order of magnitude higher than similar countries with more aggressive policies.

Potentially you're also missing the forest from the trees: it may be an order of magnitude higher, but in relation to the population size, the number of deaths is minuscule regardless.

Your argument seems to approach that any measures against covid that significantly impact daily life are bad utilitarian policy, since even the most extreme outcomes where healthcare capacity has collapsed leads to less than 1 percent of the total population dying.

Could you post a clarifying remark on what you consider the correct place to draw the line where more inconvenient quarantine measures are warranted?

It's pretty obvious that this is a very contentious subject. But it's also very obvious that a considerable democratic majority in most Western countries seems to agree on where the line should be drawn for their community, and that this line is much more conservative (on the side of public health getting priority over business as usual) than with most earlier pandemics. This is an interesting policy development.

Well then I have to ask: what hypothetical rate of death could exceed your definition of minuscule? How many per capita deaths do we need to reach before you will agree that societal intervention is warranted? A number would be appreciated.

The simple answer is public policy always lags the public therefor is always a bad idea to implement NPIs. Public policy should be concentrating on increasing hospital capacity, therapeutic/prophylactic distribution. Presumably never on "lockdowns" or travel bans or masks. People will lock themselves down if it's bad enough, and more importantly at finer granularity and with more equity.

Right, but I could make the same argument about influenza. We had an order of magnitude of deaths higher in 2019 compared to 2020 due to influenza. That fact alone isn't enough to justify lockdowns for influenza, so it shouldn't alone be enough to justify lockdowns for COVID.

So Sweden had proportionately 5 times more deaths for not locking down with a death / population ratio of 0.00145? I don't think it's ridiculous to consider not locking down with those stats.

Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.

Are you going to tell those 12000 people: sorry, but you need to die for my exceptionally limited view of economy?

Yes.

How many people die in car accidents each year?

Will it increase exponentially if not cared about?

Yes, car deaths have decreased by multiple orders of magnitude in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

You can’t infer that from the graph. Yeah, they will go back to pre-pandemic levels, but they won’t increase exponentially from then on - which is not the case for COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

> COVID with no restrictions, which will only plateau at ridiculously high amount of infected (and dead).

I'm curious what you think of Florida, which has had almost no restrictions for a majority of the pandemic and yet is actually doing better than some other states. Seems to disprove your assertion?

Airborne transmission being heavily climate-dependent? We can’t make everything into Florida (and that would be a much bigger problem than any virus in itself :D)

I'd imagine we'd have studies on this by now if that were actually the case though, right? It's been almost 2 years... so it seems like there's something else going on.

No, the fatality rate has. Unhappily, every safety advance seems to lead to an increase in crashes IIRC. Which sounds about like how we in the US approach COVID too.

Of course. Most deaths prevented by strong safety laws.

This kind of logic is, more or less, why Trump lost -- people (rightly so) don't like being told they have to sacrifice themselves for the economy

And that's why I'm unironically for banning cars in the long term. They're a terrible mode of transport, trains and bikes are all we need.

Hmmm, I take it you live in a city? You may not need anything other than a train or bike but other people have different needs.

So I actually live in a small town of 800 people somewhere in Europe. I can take the train if i need to get anywhere further than is comfortable by bike.

I understand that's not currently the case in a lot of the world, which is why I think cars need to be banned eventually, not right now.

That's fair, although instead of banning them I'd prefer to just have better alternatives that people naturally transition to. Cars are certainly not a very efficient mode of transport.

An order of magnitude less than the covid deaths in a year. And yet automobile engineering and usage are heavily regulated in order to improve safety and reduce fatalities.

In Sweden? ~300 [1], so about 40 years worth of traffic accidents.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...

Why'd you leave out his mention of the impact on mental health?

No, I would tell: since you are at-risk, use the means provided to stay safe and take precautions to reduce the risk of getting infected.

What consequences do the lockdowns have on birth rates? In some western countries it has been shown that births have decreased by more than 10%. What are you going to tell those thousands of people who will remain childless because of these policies?

Strikes me how such a heartless comment comes from someone running a "community" business. Really sad.

Let's not get personal and connect his business and your expected social norms into some shaming activity.

I disagree with him but I wouldn't want to silence him. He needs to feel free to express his viewpoint and we should feel free to attack those views with other views and maybe throw in some facts to strength our case.

OP might have meant it as a personal attack and shaming, but it does point out a bias. The first benefit on the business's homepage is "Unlock the value of your community" and it's centered around jobs. Lockdowns (at least in the US) was tied with quite the wave of unemployment and continues to have lasting impact on that segment.

Of course, someone can also say everyone has bias what with it being a global pandemic, but it's still useful to be cognizant of said biases.

The problem with this line of argument - "if only the state didn't impose a lockdown, we could trade lives for life as it was before" - aside it from being kind of despicable, is that you can't get people to just continue previously normal activities once they know the danger. When Covid appeared in Seattle, the first US city, all the bars and restaurants downtown went out of the business before any restrictions went into place. Sweden had a lot of people working at home even with the supposed "no restrictions" policy. Indeed, see the list of policies that were, in fact, restrictive; https://sweden.se/life/society/sweden-and-corona-in-brief

There's no problem with people imposing their own restrictions on their movement and association. That's the whole point, and is what Swedish policy was predicated upon, that the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures without the state imposed lockdowns.

There's no problem with people imposing their own restrictions on their movement and association.

Which implies you have some problem with the ordinary state lockdowns. These were certainly poorly executed and yet we can Sweden with nearly ten times the casualties-per-capita of an equivalent nation (Norway). Where my actual point about people taking their own measures is that life was sucky in Sweden as well as the rest of the world.

So what you effectively saying is: "I don't care if things were not that different in practice, for my principle of freedom, I'll 10K deaths without quality of life that different."

Edit:

"the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures"

Trust is a pretty disingenuous term here. What's actually happened is that the people who took risks were the people who economically forced. Ironically, that include workers who took care of the elderly; poorly paid in Sweden and elsewhere, they then took their infections to the elderly concentrated in homes. Stopping this would have required more measures than any of the nations were will to do.

> Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it

The gorilla in the room that no one’s wants to acknowledge…we locked down to allow people who were likely to die within the next 3-5 years to maybe survive a couple of those years. The price of the lockdowns economically, physical health, mental health, and in education will be paid by folks who were probably never in much danger from this virus for decades.

I fully believe that historians will look back at this time and talk of the lopsided cost/benefit.

Harm the young to help the old... why are we doing this to ourselves?

The old are more reliable voters, while the youngest aren't even permitted to vote (even though they have more at stake, since they will have to live with the consequences longer.)

Japan is fascinating for me. Do they just not test people? https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

I think "high degree of social cooperation," pretty big strength when confronting a socially transmitted threat.

What are the _total deaths_? What is the total mortality rate?

You can view JHU's raw data sources at https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19. According to that, they are getting COVID death numbers for Sweden from the Swedish Public Health Agency via https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6.... I am not fluent in Swedish, but perhaps someone who is can tell you exactly how the Swedish Public Health Agency measures them. Likewise for the other countries cited.

Death per million inhabitants in these 4 countries: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

You can also compare with other neighbors and Europe: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Seems like a minuscule percentage.

Is that a pragmatic-enough reason to significantly deteriorate the economy and mental health of the enormous majority of people?

The GDP change in 2020 for Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland were -2.8%, -0.8%, -2.7% and -2.8%, respectively.

Sweden had no advantage over its neighbors on the economic outcome, and you'd need to cite real data in order to make an argument for mental health. Naïvely assuming a causal relationship with quarantine measures for both without considering positive effects of better health outcomes (and other factors) is fallacious.

Sweden kept its freedom and paid the price. Considering that Sweden is not now experiencing another wave while the other countries are, it remains to be seen what the price is the other countries ultimately will pay.

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