Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 720 posts

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#211

Post by leto_ii »

jdminhbg wrote: post #190
leto_ii wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not explicitly specified, my comment was referring to deaths caused by the coronavirus. If you read past the first sentence you will also notice that I explicitly said that this is an unattainable standard and I have provided a number of countries that can be taken as reference for what an acceptable death rate might be.

> Any death is unacceptable. vs. > what an acceptable death rate might be Maybe you just misspoke?

I did not misspeak.

I will try to clarify this once more:

from an high level/abstract point of view, all deaths (I am now specifically referring to the coronavirus, but this works for deaths in general) should be avoided. This is obviously not possible in practice, hence some deaths have to be accepted. What can be considered acceptable is relative, but it helps to look at the countries that have managed to keep their deaths low and take their numbers as a yardstick for other societies.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#212

Post by gridlockd »

VectorLock wrote: post #176
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an argument you have to accept on some level, unless you propose to make more radical changes to society. How many thousands of people could we have saved from car accidents in 2019 by banning nonessential driving?

At a fundamental level, yes. By degree of magnitude not even in the same galaxy. If you take a 200 million mile road trip you might contribute to one death, vs. going to a party and risk contracting and spreading a pandemic that has has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

Remember, the game plan that virologists came up with for COVID acknowledged that most people will get it eventually. The point of the lockdowns was not to eliminate spread, which is impossible, but to not overwhelm the system.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#213

Post by [deleted] »

leto_ii wrote: post #166
jlmorton wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Containing and minimizing the effects of a pandemic is just one aspect of what we might call a civilized attitude towards human life. Conversely, not doing so is uncivilized and I might add immoral and irresponsible. The reality is that everyone is prepared to allow others to die for their own convenience. I intentionally phrased that harshly, but it is indisputably true. In the US, 70,000 people died from the infl…

All preventable deaths should be prevented - this is the gold standard. In reality, of course, things don't work out that way. The analogy with a flu season is deeply misleading. The coronavirus has, in half a year, killed more people than the worst flu seasons, with extraordinary measures in place all over the world. It's completely reasonable to assume that without lockdowns we would have had millions of deaths alr…

[deleted]

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#214

Post by mixmastamyk »

triceratops wrote: post #79
bhupy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA The USA does not have "no strategy", it just depends from State to State[1]. Every state has had some form of lockdown and school closure. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...

That is the same as "no strategy". Without coordination of the lockdowns, travel monitoring, national testing and contact tracing, you're just going to have shifting hotspots of infection. This also leaves behind an embittered population whose lockdown sacrifices were for nothing.

Coordination of lockdowns makes no sense past a county or small state. Do you believe NYC and rural Nebraska should be coordinating schedules when they have vastly different situations over time?

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#215

Post by dmurray »

Svip wrote: post #48
mettamage wrote: post #17

Edit: I'm letting my original comment stand as it shows how I was subtly misinformed regarding the situation of Sweden. I don't think I'd be the only one. Wait, with all due respect, 5420 deaths on 10 million people? On a country left completely unchecked? That doesn't sound like the impending doom I thought the virus would bring. I thought the novel corona virus had a death rate of about 1% to 2% and a bigger spread…

> Belgium seems to be way worse (9774 on 11,460,000 people, ~0.1% is getting truly uncomfortable) Belgium counts all suspected deaths as well, including those that have not been tested for COVID-19. Which means Belgium is the country closest matching their excess death with COVID-19 fatalities. The Netherlands, for example, leaves about 50% unexplained due to their counting.[0] [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/cor…

Belgium is the closest of the 8 countries/regions considered in that article - not of the EU or the world. Reported deaths there comprise 93% of excess deaths.

Overreporting is possible too. Ireland is at 150-160% according to recent reports [0].

[0] https://www.thejournal.ie/covid-19-deaths-ireland-hiqa-51404...

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#216

Post by h3ll0k4ll3 »

martindbp wrote: post #2

As a Swede that did not agree with the strategy at the time (it was hugely risky), given what we know now, I'm starting to think it was the right decisions (for the wrong reasons). The reason the economy is in trouble has more to do with that the rest of the word shut down, it being a highly export dependent economy. Sweden did not shut down, practically nobody wears a mask (still), social distancing is minimal (cram…

Dont fall for the numbers game. The numbers in Sweden are reported on with an expected delay of 7 - 10 days for some deaths. The other game is the break-point in time 1400 - each day when public health agency ( state run ) report their numbers. They reported no new dead in Stockholm and then later on tuesday afternoon Smittskydd Stockholm ( regionally run ) reported 7 new deaths in Stockholm since monday...

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#217

Post by bhupy »

_bxg1 wrote: post #87
bhupy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA The USA does not have "no strategy", it just depends from State to State[1]. Every state has had some form of lockdown and school closure. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...

It's all been reactionary. Individual states and even cities are opening up when people clamor for summertime fun, and then frantically closing back down when the inevitable spike hits a couple weeks later. There is no attempt at cohesion or long-term planning. There is no leadership. They're all just winging it.

It's been no more reactionary than most other nations in the world. There is absolutely long-term planning by the majority of states. To the extent that states are frantically changing their strategies, it's because we're learning more about the virus and how it spreads, and shifting our strategies.

Take New York, for example. Its high death rate can be largely attributed to Governor Cuomo's disastrous decision to force nursing homes to accept COVID patients from hospitals. He has since walked back that strategy, and New York continues to maintain a phased lockdown strategy with a structured re-opening plan with measurable criteria[1].

Governers Inslee, Newsom, and Kate Brown have been receiving (well deserved) praise by the media for their structured approach to handling the outbreak[2].

Governor DeSantis deliberately focused Florida's COVID strategy on nursing homes, deploying the National Guard to the nursing homes, and prioritizing testing resources in LTC facilities[3]. To this date, Florida has among the lowest deaths per capita in the Union, and lower deaths per capita than most of the EU[4]. As a result of this, even despite a recent increase in cases, their death rate remains mostly flat — especially relative to the same metrics in most other States[5].

Between March 16-23 (at the outset of the outbreak), every single US state ordered a state of emergency, 11 had stay-at-home orders, 30 activated the state national guard, and 48 closed their schools[6]. By as early as March 9th, the States were doing the VAST majority of COVID testing[7]

As of right now, 36 out of 50 US States have a lower per capita death rate[8] than France, Sweden, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland[9]. 15 States have a lower per capita death rate than Germany and Denmark, who have seen the best COVID outcomes in the EU. The US, to date, has administered more tests per capita[8] than Belgium, Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Sweden (to name a handful).

It would take the most uncharitable reading of the situation to conclude that the US member states have been any more "reactionary" than typical peer nation-states.

[1] https://forward.ny.gov/metrics-guide-reopening-new-york

[2] https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...

[3] https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-ro...

[4] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[5] https://twitter.com/paulnovosad/status/1279967210224705542

[6] https://twitter.com/COVID2019action/status/12421349564632268...

[7] https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1238574921346732032/photo...

[8] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

[9] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#218

Post by pritovido »

makomk wrote: post #61
frereubu wrote: post #5

One thing missing from this report is that a large proportion of the deaths were in care homes, and ministers have publicly stated that not entirely locking down care homes from the outset was a big mistake. If they had done this, the figures may well not look nearly as bad. Also, what will count is not the first few months but the entire lifetime of this pandemic. I'll be interested to see where countries are a year…

This. It's pretty obvious at this point that a general lockdown is worthless as a replacement for locking down care homes specifically - Spain had one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe but massively screwed up their handling of their care homes, and ended up with an even worse per-capital death toll than Sweden. Unfortunately, mainstream media publications have been spinning this instead as evidence that herd immu…

Spain had one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe AFTER doing almost nothing to stop spreading the virus for a long time. They only reacted when there was no alternative.

It is not just bigger than Sweden, official deaths in Spain are 27.000, the real number (taking seasonal death rate) is way over 43.000, making it the biggest per million deaths rate in the (Western) world, as Belgium (the one with the biggest number) did consider the seasonal rate.

By the way, in Spain the gobertment "resurrected" over a thousand people, going from 28.750 to 26.830 overnight.

Remember that Spain did nothing because the socialist-communist government did not want to cancel the women's day march the 8th of March and waited until 9th for starting to do something. They announced that and waited another week before implementing what they had announced.

While doing nothing, they minimized the problem, and told the people not to worry, they were in charge, only a couple of cases were expected. TVs joked about coronavirus and denounced other countries attitude against Spaniards, putting them on quarantine for staying in infected countries.

So Spain has the most deaths of the Western world because they waited almost 2 weeks letting more than a million people(100.000 positive PCRs test) get infected before doing something.

The lockdown made that million people only infect from 5 to 6 other million people(it could infect more than 40 million). If was extremely painful for the economy and made the country temporarily a dictatorship of the socialist-communist that put them in that position in the first place.

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#219

Post by m0zg »

bjourne wrote: post #68

You have to look at the excess deaths figures. That is, how many usually dies from January to June in a normal year and compare that to how many extra that died in 2020. For Sweden the excess deaths almost exactly matches the number of Covid deaths, give or take 10%. That is not the case for many other countries. For example, the UK had almost twice the number of excess deaths as Covid deaths in a few weeks in April.…

FYI also, using CDC data the number of US excess deaths (all causes) nearly exactly matches the number of COVID fatalities (excluding periods where "excess deaths" turned out to be negative).

Would be cool to tally this up for all countries, to see who's lying about their COVID numbers.

Source of data: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Re: Sweden: higher Covid-19 death rate while failing to collect on economic gains

#220

Post by leto_ii »

revnode wrote: post #191
leto_ii wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the lock down. State aid targeted directly towards individuals (and not corporations) is a good idea, I think. The same goes for a freeze on mortgage payments, rents, evictions etc. These are all measures that a modern state can take to prevent people from suffering economically.

> There are many ways of mitigating the harmful effects of the lock down. State aid targeted directly towards individuals (and not corporations) is a good idea, I think. The same goes for a freeze on mortgage payments, rents, evictions etc. I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence. Poli…

> I think it's a bad idea to have people with little understanding of economics, but a high sense of moral superiority, fix the problems they create through their incompetence.

Not sure who you're referring to here.

> Freeze evictions? Landlords go bust. Freeze mortgages? Mortgage servicers go bust.

Corporations are legal fictions that do not have a right to life. Let them go bust and save the individuals working for those corporations. Once the crisis passes, they will re-create the legal fictions and continue their work.

> Mortgages when created are aggregated into securities with guaranteed contractual payments.

This should probably not have been allowed to happen in the first place.

In general valid replies to your comments are easily available. Your condescension is, however, tiresome, so I will not pursue this thread any further.

Post reply on HN