Denmark Declares Covid No Longer Poses Threat to Society | Hacker News Reader

Denmark Declares Covid No Longer Poses Threat to Society

bloomberg.com

24 pointssteelstraw10 comments

From a basic science perspective, this seem irresponsible. We're just barely turning the corner on the second major mutation wave, and in many countries deaths are still coming in at peak rates.

I don't think anyone can say with assurance that we're out of the woods, or that we won't still be slogging it out in the mud with this thing 3 or 8 years from now. Certainly not on the basis of current numbers in their population of 5 million so.

We just don't know.

If we don't know, this means there's no legal basis for far-reaching restrictions of constitutional rights such as lockdowns, curfews, contact restrictions, contact tracing, compulsory vaccination, and restrictions of freedom of assembly. We do know, though, that current hospitalization and IC rates are relatively low, and that most of the above measures turned out to be pretty ineffective for highly infectious strains, making their justification even weaker.

I take no position on those restrictions - or Denmark's recent decision to lift its restrictions.

I just don't see any benefit to the empty, unscientific declaration that it is "no longer a threat to society" (which may or may not be what the Danish PM actually said) -- other than for the sake of political posturing.

It has legal implications in Denmark. If it is officially no longer a threat to society, there is no basis for restrictions.

You could say the same about lockdowns' effects on children, development, mental issues, and overall social stability: We don't know.

Does the graph of excess mortality in Denmark at https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps make you feel better? It looks like they have been at the historical norm for a while.

The article I saw said the UK is removing or has removed most restrictions.

It went on to say that by contrast, we're far from out of the woods in the US.

When I look up the last week's cases per capita, the US is 57th from the top and the UK is 64th.

So at least they are in the right order, but it seems a bit like spin to ignore the first 50+ countries.

Notably, Germany, Australia(!), France, Italy, Spain, Sweden(!), Netherlands, Switzerland, Portugal, and...Denmark.

Denmark and France are near the top, seeing several times the number of cases per capita as the US.

cases ! People aren't getting seriously ill. How many cases of colds do countries get every year? It's probably not even registered.

At my workplace (a school) almost everyone has had it. Over the two years of the pandemic there has not been even one hospitalization.

We've just witnessed the first global mass hysteria.

The US hasn't decoupled cases from ICU cases and deaths to the same extent as some other countries.

Denmark's deaths are about half the US's per cap, but that's a lagging indicator; its ICU rate collapsed over January and is now less than 10% of the US's. And that's at a much higher covid prevalence than the US (about five times, though at such high levels data is dubious; lots of people are undoubtedly being missed).

Generally the calculus here is that if ICU rates at very high covid prevalence are sustainable, then there's no further point to restrictions (that was the rationale explicitly used for ending restrictions in Ireland, say). The US is a bit off that yet; US ICU rates are falling off a little bit, but still at very high rates.

It's likely that a big part of this is that the US only has about 80% elderly vaccination; many European countries would be virtually 100%. That makes things a lot easier.

Specifically, Denmark had about 51K cases per million in the past week and the US ~9.4K.

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