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

281–290 of 442 posts

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

#281

Post by nickthemagicman »

rapsacnz wrote: post #279
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

New York city had the same problems in nursing homes as Sweden.

As they learned more about the virus and adapted their death rate per capita dropped to be on par with Europe..while still maintaining looser restrictions.

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

#282

Post by dendriti »

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…

While I don't doubt you have Swedish family, I would like to see your data for the French economy being "killed". Certainly the economy contracted somewhat, but they seem to be doing just fine now.

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

#283

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#284

Post by Kye »

supperburg wrote: post #260
d_t_w wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This argument does not make sense. The OP compares Sweden to its closest neighbours > +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area As do +83% +85% and +88% of the three closest neighbours OP compared Sweden. In what way does that comparison not make sense?

“but a country with very low population density” Wrong!

25 people per square kilometer is a low population density. Look at how they define urban area.

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

#285

Post by nickthemagicman »

another_story wrote: post #137
spookthesunset wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what, pray tell is a “proper lockdown”? I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.

Taiwan had only a few weeks of full lockdown last year, and then a few months of softer lockdown during the second outbreak this year. During the recent outbreak it was WFH and takeout from restaurants with certain businesses closed. About 100 days later most things are open again. They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.

Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare.

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

#286

Post by kenneth »

emmelaich wrote: post #237
kenneth wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd happily trade a 10x higher death rate (to a high of 0.014%, mostly among people who weren't far off from dying anyways) in exchange for everyone having 2 years of having a non-miserable life. I know it's incredibly taboo to say something like this; but people are completely overvaluing the impact of the few absolute numbers of deaths, vs. the much harder to quantify widespread misery caused by these overreactions…

Scott Alexander has a great post on this https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness... and a follow-up: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/things-i-learned-writi...

The key takeaway I had from Scott's post was this stat:

>It takes people ~50 months of strict lockdown to save one month of someone's healthy life.

Or another way to look at it, it takes 50 people locking down for a month to save each one month of life expectancy for one person. 600 people locking down to save a single person's life expectancy by one year. 6000 people for 10 years of life expectancy for a single person.

Whether that's worth the misery is up to the reader. I have my own opinion here, but it's undeniably subjective. It's a trade-off.

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

#287

Post by heisenzombie »

ajdlinux wrote: post #266
hkt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NZ and AU are faring pretty differently. AU is wracked with crisis and NZ has been business as usual for ages. The key difference as I understand it is that NZ sacrificed easy international travel for domestic wellbeing and AU didn't.

NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.

Agree that there's no guarantee of success. However, the political environment and compliance with lockdowns is very different between the two countries. For example, New Zealand is seeing nothing like the widespread protests in Melbourne and across Victoria.

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

#288

Post by GuB-42 »

Compared to all the surrounding countries, Sweden had more deaths and did not do better when it comes to mental health and economy.

It did better than western Europe, but that's not because of the policy, it is because Sweden is Sweden and not Italy or Spain or France.

First is population density, much lower, and the countries are less connected.

And there is the population. The Swedish government and their people have a more trusting relationship than in many other countries, so, more recommendations than obligations. Scandinavian countries also have the highest level of content in the world (they are the "happiest" countries), which is likely to have a positive effect on mental health in the face of hardships. They are also not people who are know for hanging our in large groups and hugging strangers.

Scandinavia has advantages over the rest of Europe when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, and it shows. But out of all these countries, the one that did worst is Sweden, the country of no lockdowns.

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

#289

Post by lettergram »

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…

I’m looking at those numbers and the worst was Peru - 0.5% excess deaths.

Am I the only one whos just thinking none of this matters?

The reality is Sweden is doing an amazing job if there’s no lockdowns. Those lockdowns led to a massive increase in suicides[1], economic damage[2], inflation[3], massive increase in drug abuse[4], lost years in education[5].

Frankly, it’s hard to imagine this virus would cause more harm. Especially if the worst case is 0.5% excess deaths (almost exclusively from people near end of life). What’s the damage in years of education lost, the drug abuse, homelessness, inflation pricing out homes for those who can work...

long-term I expect Sweden will see lower deaths than any of the countries that locked down.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7024e1.htm

[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/29/our-lost-gdp-year/

[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

[4] https://mullin.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID...

[5] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9731039/Shock-repor...

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

#290

Post by nl »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #233
IdontRememberIt wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve seen accusations in the US that people were being counted as Covid deaths that died “woth” Covid, and would have even without it - I have no idea if these accusations are true, just that probably-nonsense leads me to the question: Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?

Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).

By that comparison Sweden has done very badly compared to its peers. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

As this very article says:

However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.

The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.

Post reply on HN