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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Sweet spot being 3-5x as many deaths as Norway/Denmark/Finland?

Every country had to find some balance between freedom and health. I don't think Sweden is to blame more than anyone else. They had less death than most European countries.

Following you reasoning, how many more death did the US have compared to China? would you advocate to lock up people like China did?

Did china get less freedom because of covid lockdowns? That is, surely people faced absurd restrictions, but given the length of the restrictions, which is better for people?

I know that I would prefer 1 month hard lockdown than 1 year soft. But idk how it actually went there (curious to know!)

Talking to friends in China, they've been mostly open since the initial lockdowns. Every once in a while there are hard localized lockdowns, but majority of people majority of the time is life as normal.

And not just freedom, but more important things such as a functioning society in general with regards to childrens education, babies being born, the economy doing well etc etc. It's not like lockdowns are only affecting some dude's ability to go and drink beer. And they are actively harmful to people's health too, so actually it's about finding a balance between everyone and everything, and the immune compromised people at risk from cold viruses.

Please check out this data, section "z-score by country": https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Sweden indeed has a worse z-score compared to Norway or Denmark, but better compared to France, Netherlands or Belgium (or Germany, for that matter). And much better than Italy or Spain. I say they indeed found a sweet spot and escaped lockdowns.

People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter. I think that has a big impact on how sick people get

> People in scandinavia live in warm houses, in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter

huh?

Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, north of France and Germany had a closer climate (and more accustomed to heating), that's why I looked up their z-score first.

> [People] in continental europe people live in cold and damp houses in the winter.

Really?

I live in the UK and have spent some time in Sweden and I would agree with this. Swedish homes are amazingly warm and cozy in the winter.

Yeah, and in germany using the heating in your home is basically considered an unnecessary luxury, while in Sweden it's always included in the rent, and always on.

The death rate in Sweden is more like 2x higher (1.3% vs 0.6% for the other countries) [1], since its population is double the other countries. Still signficantly worse than its Nordic neighbors, though.

1. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

EDIT: I stand corrected - I confused the case-fatality-rate number with the mortality rate, which is much worse for Sweden than its neighbors.

Why would the rate be higher in higher population countries?

That's not what I said. I just said that the rate more like 2x higher in Sweden when considering population - but I was incorrectly reading the case-fatality rate. The actual mortality rate is much worse in Sweden.

The GP was comparing raw mortality counts, which isn't meaningful without dividing by population.

The difference in mortality rates is complex, but public policy around masking and gathering in groups has a significant effect. Sweden's relatively lax restrictions probably play a big role in their higher mortality rates and case fatality rates

That's a CFR study, it reports how likely a detected infection is to result in death. It's intended to measure how effectively a nation's health care system treated infections.

Total per-capita covid deaths in Sweden covid are indeed about 3x those in Denmark, and closer to 5-6x those in Norwan & Finland. Sweden did a little bit better than the USA (about 50% higher still), but not relative to its neighbors:

https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

You're absolutely right. I should have looked at the deaths per 100k population column.

Where do you think these deaths come from? Do you think the health services in Sweden were overwhelmed?

At times, yeah. The closer you get to capacity the more the staff are overworked, the more likely you are to be attached to the old/cranky/unreliable ventilator, the more likely you are to be seen by fill-in staff pulled from other departments, the more likely it is that your hospital will run out of some medication and have to substitute, etc...

So all other things being equal, you'd expect CFRs to rise with case load. Probably not linearly, but measurably.

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