The Sweden experiment: how no lockdowns led to mental health, healthier economy • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by galaxyLogic » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

ctvo wrote: post #110

Ntrails wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I think that fucking up the education of children, especially those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, is worse than the deaths not doing it causes. It is not that lockdown is bad or wrong. It is that I do not agree with all the things which were hit. I acknowledge there is a price to keeping education open but I believe it would have been worthwhile. Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more…

> Perhaps you missed my point? Governing is about more than keeping the most people alive. Actually I believe that’s table stakes for good governance. Trading known deaths for possible impact to development of children isn’t even in the realm of equal, which is why most places didn’t do it.

And, early on it was not sure how Covid would affect children. Their lives and health are still more important than their education. Better be conservative in hazardous circumstances. Better safe than sorry

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

#242

Post by galaxyLogic » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:22 AM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #214

mavhc wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pro having 30 people breathing in a small room with bad airflow for multiple hours when there's a pandemic? If you don't know how it's transmitted, then try various things and see if they help. We tried lockdown, and it worked. So we kept doing it, if it didn't change the situation we would have tried other things instead.

There is very little proof that lockdowns worked. We had no clue if they worked going in and we still can’t prove they worked, let alone well enough to justify their immense societal costs.

Do we have proof that the "societal costs" were immense, compared to what they could have been if more people died?

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

#243

Post by yodsanklai » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:23 AM UTC

Clewza313 wrote: post #231

yodsanklai wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perception of a country doesn't make a scientific evidence on why Norway of Finland could be taken as reference point to assess Sweden strategy regarding Covid.

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 to Norway? I wouldn't bet may life on it. France has almost twice as many covid death as Germany even though they implemented a much stricter lockdown.

It seems some people hate Sweden for choosing their way to deal with the pandemics. Could have they done better otherwise? maybe, but overall, no cataclysm happened there, they did ok in terms of fatality compared to rest of Europe, and much better for the other metrics, as stated in the article.

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

#244

Post by HNPoliticalBias » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:26 AM UTC

benjilb wrote: post #161

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.

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.

Because your country:

1. doesn't have any cities, and

2. is an island in the middle of the Pacific, thousands of miles from the next

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

#245

Post by HNPoliticalBias » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

hkt wrote: post #193

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.

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 doesn't have any cities. Australia's outbreaks have both occurred in Sydney and Melbourne, each with a population exceeding the entirety of NZ.

Density is the primary precursor.

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

#246

Post by timClicks » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #126

jchook wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice the article doesn't mention countries where proper lockdown worked very well and took only around 100 days.

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

Can you flesh that out? Emulating New Zealand's death rate in the USA would have saved at least 600k lives so far.

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

#247

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

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…

Determinants of pandemic performance has proven to be very multi-factorial, but from day one, urban density has not that been significant a factor, especially in richer countries. The initial wave just looked urban because the virus reached each _country_ via internationally-connected urban centers.

Given that pandemic spread has almost entirely played out indoor, a much more likely risk factor is multi-member (and especially multi-generational) households. As mentioned in the article, Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia have a small household size and especially high proportion of single-person households.

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

#248

Post by wutbrodo » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

Gwypaas wrote: post #103

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…

Why are people still arguing about a countries population density in late 2021? It is a completely irrelevant metric, lets include the Canadian arctic when calculating the density of Toronto and the effects of Covid, makes a whole lot of sense! A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density. "Population weighted density refers to a metric which measures the density at whic…

> A measure which actually has some relevance on country scale is population weighted density.

I thought your comment was going to be about the fact that urban density didn't end up being that useful a predictor of spread, except to the extent that it correlates with household size. In general, people were catching Covid from being inside with others, not from incidental contact with subway poles or passing people on the sidewalk.

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

#249

Post by belltaco » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #113

duskwuff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any direct source for that statistic? The article that you've linked to is the Babylon Bee -- a site best known for their satire and fake articles -- lifting some infographics from an (uncited) article in the Daily Mail. Neither of these sources inspires confidence.

Sorry I saw this circulate a few days ago and linked the first thing I found on DDG. I have no reason to think it's fake news.

Everything in Babylon Bee is 100% satire and fake. It's used as a fake news source by people wanting to spread misinformation.

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

#250

Post by nmfisher » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

kenneth wrote: post #230

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…

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…

At the risk of having everyone jump down my throat for saying it, I feel very much the same.

I'm consciously aware of how many (or how few) years I have left, and I would never have agreed to losing two of them by not being able to see my family (including 2 babies born) in that time).

I don't really have a problem with social distancing/masks/quarantine/etc, but locking people in their homes (and locking people out of their countries) was entirely too much. "Living" shouldn't have been treated as just a transmission vector for COVID.