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Comment by emj | Hacker News Reader

As a Swede I do not agree with a lot of what was said in this paper, much seems to be more of an opion than fact. This is a clear poltical subject, as you often see when this is discussed on American forums, it's very hard to talk about these ideas without getting into us vs. them. The hardest part of all this pandemic was that it was so easy to say the wrong thing and getting judged unless you were among people that actually cared about what you were saying.

EDIT removed opinions that still can not be discussed in a sane manner.

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Well, this is a peer reviewed paper, arguing quite coherently that the handling of the pandemic in Sweden did not follow scientific methods, and they have a ton of references to back up that opinion. If you are aware of similar papers arguing against this opinion, please provide links.

Expect that this Hacker News thread will be overrun by Swedish patriots who will, with tooth and nail, argue for Swedish exceptionalism and downvote all criticism. War is Peace and all that.

I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.

I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.

I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.

> the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.

I always thought this was an American thing, but turns out just about every nation has this to some extent.

I've never met a group of people who did not see themselves as special, this view is common in all countries I've lived in. I wonder if someone has tried to measure it objectively.

> I always thought this was an American thing, but turns out just about every nation has this to some extent.

There's a deep irony in this sentence.

I am a Swede and I think most of my peers are delusional fans of our institutions and leaders. The leaders tries to cover up everything, and holds no accountability. People are such fans of Anders Tegnell - the man who uses an extreme amount of words to say almost nothing, in addition to almost never admitting to failure or being wrong. They go hand in hand with the politicians on this part.

I seem to remember that he did publicly admit certain policies were poor in retrospect - a bit of googling e.g. finds this, just months after the start of the pandemic: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52903717

It’s a bit like reverse Jantelagen. You're not to think Sweden isn’t better than the rest.

> this is a peer reviewed paper

Note that this paper is published in "Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications" journal, not in the plain "Nature" journal that is a totally different journal published by the same editorial. I'd also thrust more a pare published in one of the many journals of Nature that has something about medicine or biology in the title, because the reviewers and editors are more specialized in this subject. https://www.nature.com/siteindex

I didn't say it's plain "Nature", as I'm perfectly aware that a paper of that length and subject would never be published there.

It's still peer reviewed, and I'm still waiting for the links to papers which say that Sweden did an exceptional job.

Science and policy are only weakly related. Especially when it comes to things like acting out of caution (assuming the worst given scientific knowledge) and how to weigh personal freedoms and so on.

The discussion of the science of childrens psychological health for example was curiously absent in countries that argued that science demanded swift lockdowns. Is a life-year in lockdown for a school aged child as “lost” as a year shorter lifespan for an elderly person? Or less? Or more?

These are ethical and political questions more than they are scientific.

These ethical problems and differences in how they are handled are present even absent a pandemic. Who’s given intensive care over a certain age for example is likely very different in the US and Sweden. That’s not because the medical facts differ or doctors in either end act on bad science or in bad faith. Medicine isn’t just science, it’s ethics, politics, economics too.

Which science? The science that said masks aren’t needed, then needed and any mask will do, then no, clothe masks don’t work, then oh, it should have been N95 masks all along?

The science remains the same, until we learn new facts and adjust our knowledge. The political pressures and decisions that shaped public decisions and speeches are a different thing, please don't conflate those.

science, absolute truth, lived experience, and public health policies are often times disjoint sets.

Succinct way of putting it

Yes, that science. The one that looks at available data and reassesses, rather than taking a potentially incorrect stance and sticking with it for no reason other than to save face.

"The science" never made a reassessment on masks though, we didn't learn anything new about how masks work and how effective cloth vs N95 etc. All of the posturing on masks was political. So "Trust the science" really became "trust our politicians bro".

Sure, there was and is political posturing with regard to pandemic countermeasures.

The reassessments haven't been about learning how masks work but about how a particular virus spreads and the efficacy of various types of masks in various settings between parties of varying contagion levels. The advice also has to be grounded in practicality given current circumstances (supply constraints, rate of asymptomatic spread among vaccinated populations, etc)

False. Science may be consistent, but governments don’t enact science they enact policy that involves trade offs and risk taking.

That’s why “you don’t need a mask” was just a lie to conserve masks for healthcare workers.

Is that following the science?

I don't think it was a deliberate lie.

Many conventional wisdoms we're overturned during these last couple of years. Saving mask for the health care services might have been a reasonable thing to do 20 years ago. But today with Chinese extreme mass production it is entirely feasible in rich states to equip their populations with sofisticated face masks and test for virus infection with anti-gen tests several times every week.

It's a new world.

The perspectives that are used to give a picture of the situation are certainly chosen to make a point.

You could probably make a counter article using other perspectives to argue for a counter point.

Given that the paper is published in Nature you should certainly write the editor if you found any clear factual errors.

Just because something is published does not make it fact. There is a definite bias at publishing houses to “be on the right side of history” and so some opinions will get squashed or not published.

Look at: The mask paper that was talked about but was never published because the results were inconvenient. Anytime statistics blow up a narrative.

The Swedes actually followed the science by listening to all the recommendations prior to the pandemic. The best example of this is the WHO or the CDC prior to the outbreak having published and peer reviewed papers that said lockdowns do not work.

Now the next comparison to do is that the approaches of all the other countries followed lockdown. Sweden did not. They then proceeded to have no significant death differences between countries. Seeing that, there will be significant mental differences and knock on effects from the different reactions.

Ultimately, the Swedes got it right by not panicking, followed the non politicized science, and keeping calm and carrying on.

Sweden did get things right, however it also got things wrong.

Lockdowns and masks are both largely non-effective, Sweden got that right, however what Sweden got wrong was the care for the elderly, many deaths that could have been prevented with proper care, but many of them never got to a hospital.

Huh. I wonder why the B/Yamagata strain of flu, one of the four major strains, has gone extinct, and there’s a possibility that another has has well.

Not effective against a virus like this. It might be effective against something else, but at this point SARS-CoV-2 is the second fastest spreading pathogen in human history.

The paper argues that Sweden didn't get it right but could have easily gotten a better result by incorporating scientific methods better into their public health approach.

Just by advocating masks more and having better policy on trying to save people from dying via hospital care, they could likely have saved maybe a quarter of their total deaths.

>By scientific evidence, in the context of this paper, we refer to the advice of international authorities in infection control (including the World Health Organisation, (European) Centres for Disease Control and Prevention), and the body of peer-reviewed scientific papers.

The paper literally refers to WHO and CDC advice as "scientific evidence".

It's ludicrous. The whole thing is thinly veiled opinion piece.

It boggles my mind how far "science" as a term has been degraded and driven 8 feet under.

Lockdowns were never an option because the Swedish constitution guarantees free movement for citizens; the government cannot legally enforce a lockdown. The lack of lockdowns was not a result of "following the science", but rather a non-decision dictated by existing policy.

That is true in quite a few other countries as well, yet that did not stop politicians there. Enforcement and legislation are two different things.

Constitutional courts probably have a bit of work cut out for them the coming years to be better prepared for another situation like this.

As others mentioned, this wasn't actually published in Nature.

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