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

The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

telegraph.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 442 posts

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#271

Post by cinntaile »

IdontRememberIt wrote: post #221
kybernetikos wrote: post #60

It's so weird to see people still claiming this. Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average. The diffe…

This argument does not make sense. 1) +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area. ( https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... ) 2) Switzerland which is higher density has almost the same excess death rate (on your image) 3) France which had very strict and long lockdown (and killed/subsidized heavily its economy) has also almost the same figures. As many have said, one of the major factor…

If we look at the data Sweden is still one of the top countries in the world regarding health care.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthcare-access-and-qua...

https://www.ghsindex.org/

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/countries/country-details/...

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#272

Post by Clewza313 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #243
Clewza313 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the one asserting they're not comparable here, so please trot out some factors where Sweden is measurably different from its neighbors then.

The pandemics is extremely complex. Fatality rates have looked very different in seemingly similar countries, and even within different areas of a single country. Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong. I do suspect Sweden would have had less fatality had they implemented a lockdown. Would it then be comparable t…

> Saying Covid response is the only thing that could possibly explain the observed differences between Sweden and (let say) Norway is simply wrong.

Nobody has claimed that it is, and in fact in this very thread you've seen it correctly noted that Sweden's approach to old age homes was responsible for a significant part of the fatalities -- although here too there's a lot of debate about whether it's the percentage of % in age homes (a bit higher in Sweden), the Swedish tendency to have larger homes, or the Swedish COVID policy decision to treat people at the homes instead of hospitalizing them.

But, again, if you have alternative hypotheses or factors that you think differ greatly between the countries, let's hear them. Because as a native of the region, I'd struggle to find many, at least when it comes to factors a virus would care about (as opposed to, say, preferring sweeter jam with meatballs).

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#273

Post by sokoloff »

michaelmrose wrote: post #267
sokoloff wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, you have to consider people who were single and dating. They had a way worse last 18 months than those in a committed, cohabitating relationship.

The larger point is that its impossible to objectively value other people's lives and any reasoning based on doing so is faulty.

I agree with that as precisely stated, but one can reasonably make subjective judgements (and indeed our politicians are doing so at the moment).

If we could live on average 6 months longer if we permanently stopped all gatherings, closed all restaurants/bars, and wore masks all the time we were outside our house, I think most people would say “screw that; it’s not worth it!”

It’s a subjective judgement rather than an objective calculation, but it’s still valid.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#274

Post by keerthiko »

spookthesunset wrote: post #34
tpmx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Swedish. I think the most important difference is that ~50% of the population here thought the government was being incompetent/paralyzed and then performed a voluntary lockdown, much harsher than the government-mandated restrictions. Since lots of those people who disagreed with the government (in)actions work as "knowledge workers", it was also relatively easy to make the switch to work from home, and they did,…

That doesn’t prove the people doing these voluntary lockdowns had any different of an outcome than if they did nothing at all. Way to many people just blindly assume these interventions worked. The fact is we have zero clue if they did anything or the outcomes experienced by different regions was a result of a bunch of stuff that is completely out of our control. If I was gonna bet, my money would be on the lockdowns…

All disasters have physical parameters. Fires need flammable materials and a level of dryness. Tornadoes and hurricanes need atmospheric pressure differences to propagate in a given direction. Earthquakes happen near fault lines. COVID has to be transmitted (somehow, physically, whether through air, aerosols, water, contact, but something).

There is almost no way that lockdowns did nothing. It may have been overkill, there may have been a single aspect of lockdowns that far outperformed everything else, and we could have just practiced that. But this fatalistic view is lazy, unscientific and reductive, and in a societally harmful way.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#275

Post by wraptile »

spookthesunset wrote: post #12
whiddershins wrote: post #9

While many people might point out that Sweden did in fact have more deaths, the verdict on that is still out. They are getting far fewer cases and deaths than many other areas now, and have been for many weeks. Couple that with the not-lost social interactions and economy etc, and the fact that this was always (more or less) every country’s pandemic plan before we changed our mind for covid, and it becomes a troublin…

A lot of people think what we did was part of some plan but nope. If you go back and read various pandemic plans you’ll see we did basically the exact opposite of what they recommended.

What was recommended? AFAIK pandemic plans were always social distancing at their core right?

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#276

Post by SeanLuke »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #256
kybernetikos wrote: post #60

It's so weird to see people still claiming this. Sweden has relatively few neighbors, but compare it with any of them, and it looks bad https://imgur.com/a/BlaU2SX Yes, Sweden did well compared to the EU average, but a country with very low population density, surrounded by very few neighbors that all got the virus under control very quickly has a lot of things going for it compared to the European average. The diffe…

Stockholm has the population density of San Diego or Phoenix.

Stockholm has over four times the density of Phoenix.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#277

Post by foxylad »

basisword wrote: post #206
benjilb wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not NZ? We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.

It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#278

Post by sorenjan »

Just because there were no government mandated lockdown doesn't mean that everyone was living as usual. There are plenty of people that are still working from home today, and have been since spring 2020. I don't have any numbers, but my impression was that pretty much everyone that could worked from home most of 2020 and the first half of 2021. There were (and still are to a certain extent) heavy regulation on restaurants. Cell phone network data showed a marked difference in people's mobility [0]. Grocery stores ask people to shop alone and have separated entry and exits. Universities and highschools have had distance learning for months at a time. Etc. Swedes were not unaffected by the pandemic, but they weren't fined by police if they left their home more than once per day, or other ridiculous rules that way too many seems to be ok with.

One thing to note in the near time is how the infection rate is low at the moment [1] (the data for spring 2020 is inaccurate due to lack of testing). This is not because of some government initiative or similar, in fact it was very low last summer as well before it got really high during winter. This shows the enormous difference it makes when people are spending less time indoor, and pretty much everyone has a month off work. The infection rate is currently rising, mainly among young people that has chose not to get vaccinated. My attitude about it is that in about a months time everyone will have had the chance to have had two vaccine shots, so if people want to put themselves at risk we should let them, and not force the rest of us to protect them by limiting ourselves. At least as long as the hospitals can manage.

[0] https://www.telia.se/privat/aktuellt/hemma-i-folknatet/covid...

[1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#279

Post by rapsacnz »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #171
anigbrowl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Telegraph leans strongly conservative just as the Guardian leans strongly left. This seems like a very slanted article; it buries the mortality impact of CVOID until near the end. I seriously doubt that Norway would prefer to swap its ~10x lower death rate for Sweden's GDP numbers. Further: In a paper published last week in science journal Nature, Dr Bhatt, together with the UK's former government advisor Neil Fe…

Weren't a lot of Sweden's deaths very early and from nursing homes specifically because they were taking literally no preventative measures, though? They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding. If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x. And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in…

What??!! What I'm hearing when you say "If you factor out all those deaths" is "Old people don't count". Economically they may not have as much impact as younger people, but they provide richness to family and community life that can't be replaced.

So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.

Re: The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy

#280

Post by nickthemagicman »

user-the-name wrote: post #179
eckesicle wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators. Population density has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Large swaths of the country is empty with the populace being very urbanised. Stockholm has a population density on par with London, and Oslo is about half of that. Also households look very different in Sweden compared to it's neighbours. The average household size is among the lowest in the…

> In this case the neighbouring countries arent great comparators As someone living in a neighbouring country, this is bullshit. They are perfect comparators. Basically exactly the same. Sweden didn't lock down. Everyone else did. Ten times more people died in Sweden. End of story.

Why limit the comparison to nordic countries?

We don't limit comparison of Italy to Mediterranean countries, or England to British Isle countries.

Sweden is a European country.

On a European scale Sweden was right in the middle of the pack in deaths per capita.

Post reply on HN