Sweden During the Pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Sweden During the Pandemic

cato.org

34 pointsfortran7722 comments

Do not forget that what Sweden took action was accommodated to the general behaviour of the Swedes. They keep a reasonable distance at all. If any restriction is only a recommendation and not a strict rule, they comply anyway. They generally have better state of health than many - even European - country.

Did Sweden act much better than other countries, and got much better outcome? Yes.

Could the same work in other countries? Most likely not, except other Nordic states.

That's pretty dismissive. The article mainly addresses the premise that Sweden's actions produced a better outcome than other countries including ones which had a predilection for social distancing. This is by no means universally conceded.

It would be nice to think that other countries could learn something after accepting that Sweden actually had a better outcome.

I'm not sure it's really dismissive. It's more that, even given a lack of strict government policy actions, Sweden ended up having as good or relatively better outcomes than many/most other countries. But I'm not sure be more like Sweden makes a very useful playbook--except insofar as the policy recommendation is to take a few high impact actions (e.g. around nursing homes, almost certainly vaccines, etc.) and otherwise have a fairly light touch.

The challenge is that Swedes tend to be relatively healthy, antisocial, and sensible (as suggested by the paper) isn't either very actionable or quantifiable. Though there is an implication (which is a clear agenda in this paper) that explicit government policies didn't make a whole lot of difference in this case.

Indeed. A question we should be asking is what the Swedish government should have done if faced by mass non-compliance

And before we ask that question we should ask how non-compliance is affected by edicts versus presentation of the costs/benefits of actions and the rationale for any suggestions.

Soon people will be talking about Swedish exceptionalism.

The fact is, COViD is a problem for those at high risk, and those risk factors were well known in the early days. One response could have been to make just that subset take precautions.

But for some reason the vast majority of liberal societies went all totalitarian on their people. Why that was is as interesting as how Sweden did.

> the vast majority of liberal societies went all totalitarian on their people.

No stop this nonsense. China was sealing apartments in 2020 to enforce quarantine.

The worst that happened in the west was that we couldn't get dinner and beer at one of our many corporate restaurants that willingly shut down.

Absolutely wrong, stop trying to rewrite history. Look at what happened in Melbourne, Australia. 1 hour of state mandated "outside" time per day, restrictions on gatherings, 5KM restrictions, 9PM curfews, park and gym closures, restrictions on shopping, public transport shutdown to stop protests, get the jab or lose your job. All that to "help" us, and we're living with the consequences to this day. Groceries 50%+ in the last 3 years. House prices are off the charts. Inflation that the government will blame on Russia, COVID supply shocks, aliens, but never their actions. The policies you backed well and truly fucked us. Own up to it.

Nothing like that happened where I live and we still got groceries and rent doubled so the direct link is uhhh a little uncertain I think.

Australia had 22,000 deaths for these minor inconvenience imposed on them. Australians got to go shopping? There were rumors about people in China starving in their quarantined homes.

>Groceries 50%+ in the last 3 years. House prices are off the charts. Inflation that the government will blame on Russia, COVID supply shocks, aliens, but never their actions.

The cost of goods and housing and inflation have all gone up outside of Australia too. My US state did little Covid prevention besides allowing us to order alcoholic drinks to go; why are groceries and housing up in my little US city, not to mention the US Dollar inflation? Is it Australia's fault?

> Australia had 22,000 deaths for these minor inconvenience imposed on them.

Yeah the minor inconvenience of being a prisoner in your own home & the police beating the tar out of you "for your protection"

Oh, are you talking about China now?

> China was sealing apartments in 2020 to enforce quarantine.

This is whataboutism.

> The worst that happened in the west was that we couldn't get dinner and beer at one of our many corporate restaurants that willingly shut down.

Do you even remember 2020/2021? Schools, daycare, workplaces shut down, people not allowed to leave their apartments?

It's just an anecdote, but I can say that the two groups of people who I'm primarily connected to, are on one hand a bunch of academics and on the other a bunch of work from home writers and techie types. These two groups overwhelmingly favored policies of lockdowns and masking.

I am personally of the opinion that an ounce of prevention is well worrh a pound of cure, and so don't have any philosophical problem with either of these policies in the appropriate measure. But I can't imagine getting behind them in such an emphatic way as a lot of my colleagues and peers did. In hindsight is quite obvious that one of the causal factors for their enthusiasm was simply that they were not affected by the consequences to the degree that almost everyone else is.

Academics typically do not have a rigid nine to five schedule and often only go on campus for classes, or to work in theor lab where everyone's often wearing masks anyway. And work from home folks obviously are in a similar situation in terms of the impact these practices have on their productivity and lifestyle. So it was quite easy to support this stuff given their particular circumstances. I'm very disappointed in the inability of some these otherwise quite smart and seemingly perceptive people to take the place of others and understand why there could be legitimate non-ideological reasons for pushing back on the intensity of some of these policies.

My brother and father were stopped by the police when going for a walk outside together. (They had passports with them, and since they're family it was accepted.)

Mine too but since they're black we just call that tuesday.

Or the police forcing people from the healthiest possible location (beaches) to the unhealthiest possible location (apartments).

The nice thing about Nordic countries is that you got 4 of them that are quite comparable.

Denmark had a stricter approach compared to Sweden and arguably had better outcomes and faster economic recovery.

FYI. The article author has a political agenda.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Norberg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

(Edit, since I got downvotes. I am not saying he is wrong, but I still think the information is relevant to be aware of when reading the article. His bread and butter is not necessarily seeking the truth but to choose the narrative and facts that supports his political views. And of course getting views fornhisnarticle in a place like this is like hitting a home-run)

Even if studies like this one come from a particular political slant, it's really hard to look at the data and discern that there was some combination of specific/actionable conditions, policies, and population behaviors that could have served as magic bullets for better long-term outcomes.

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