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

#331

Post by catears » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:44 AM UTC

warning26 wrote: post #17

What I find particularly interesting is that Sweden wasn't the only country that did this -- Brazil also did a no-lockdown strategy, and it was basically a disaster there. Evidently, there must have been some other factors at play besides the boolean of lockdown true/false. Better healthcare, maybe?

"no-lockdown" is unfortunately "technically true but far from the truth". I consider poor journalistic reporting a major contributor to this...

I can't remember the exact date, but I think in march or april 2020 there were restrictions put in place by government to limit the number of people that could attend a public event. Organizers and event-goers would commit a crime if they attended an event with more than 50 people.

Sure infected people did not get literally locked into their own homes, but "lockdown" is clearly more of a scale where some governments effectively locked the doors to everyones homes and some told everyone to stay home.

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

#332

Post by ajdlinux » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:53 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #293

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.

Australia sacrificed international travel too. It still leaked in which led to occasional limited lockdowns. Until Delta strain hit and spread too fast for the small lockdown strategy to contain it. Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials. Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup pla…

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.

Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).

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

#333

Post by dmitriid » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 5:57 AM UTC

mannerheim wrote: post #301

Kye wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's not an accurate figure for the density where a typical Swede lives. Most of the population lives in the southern part of the country, a quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area as well. It's like using Canadian population density with the whole country when almost the entire population lives within a hundred miles of the US border.

> quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area

You've never been to Stockholm metro area. It's very sparsely populated compared to many big metro areas.

Stockholm is a small city (800k people or so) surrounded by villages (another 1.5 million people) spread over 6,519.3 km2. Density is 360/km2

And that's the biggest city in the country.

In comparison, Paris (as we were talking about France): 13 mln people over 18,940.7 km2 with a density of 690/km2. That's for metro area. Urban area alone is 10 mln people with density of 21,000/km2

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

#334

Post by KingOfCoders » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

mikem170 wrote: post #327

KingOfCoders wrote: post #314

Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead. "The highest number of confirmed coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in the Nordic countries as of August 18, 2021, had occurred in Sweden at 14,664. Denmark followed with 2,562 deaths, Finland with 1,008, and Norway with 811." https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...

Did you know that the same number of people have died in Sweden and Norway over the last four years? [0] For some reason more people died in Norway than in Sweden in the couple years before the pandemic, then Sweden caught up. They are tied over the last four years. More people may have died of covid in Sweden because there were more old vulnerable people in Sweden. [0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Stud…

So? Being vulnerable marks you as ok to die? The argument would only work if both countries had the same measures and there died more people in Sweden.

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

#335

Post by bog_alchemist » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

heisenzombie wrote: post #287

ajdlinux wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Give it a month

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

#336

Post by mrlagmer » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:12 AM UTC

jchook wrote: post #91

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…

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

Victoria took 110 days of lockdown to get back to "normal" in lockdown number 2. We are now on lockdown number 6 and have spent over 200 days in lockdown. Can't go more than 5km at current have a 9pm curfew. I would not say it is working well.

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

#337

Post by eCa » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:13 AM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #313

bnralt wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. When it comes to Covid it seems there's a lot of shifting standards of evidence.

> It's strange. I'll see people compare U.S. numbers to the numbers from Germany, Vietnam, and New Zealand. Then when you Sweden is compared to other European countries, they'll suddenly say that you can't make such a comparison and Sweden should only be compared to other Nordic countries. That kind of makes sense though. Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate fo…

> Sweden, specifically, is held up by a certain political faction as a poster child to advocate for certain set of policies

Interestingly, from inside the country it seems to be held up by the right as the worst handling possible, and from outside the country it is held up by the right as the only reasonable handling.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. I think it is important to look at the data without left/right tinted glasses.

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

#338

Post by nl » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:16 AM UTC

ajdlinux wrote: post #332

nl wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia sacrificed international travel too. It still leaked in which led to occasional limited lockdowns. Until Delta strain hit and spread too fast for the small lockdown strategy to contain it. Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials. Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup pla…

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials. New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing. A…

The issues with the non-AZ vaccines was that they didn't lock in early supply dates soon enough. For example, in June (which was already late for what was needed) Australia only had 1.7M Pfizer doses available[1] and now the PM is putting out press releases about obtaining extra supply from Poland[2].

Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/australia-to-get-pfiz...

[2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/vaccine-operations-centre-wee...

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

#339

Post by LinAGKar » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:17 AM UTC

tpmx wrote: post #119

LinAGKar wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stefan Löfven made a surprise announcement today that he'll be stepping down in November Again? He got kicked out and reelected two months ago. This government is a damn yo-yo.

Yeah.. the electoral situation in the parliament hadn't really changed, so that was kinda stupid. Mostly it was just a way for the socialist (borderline communist) eternal support party to the social democrats to flex its muscles, for once.

Looks like we'll have to brace for yet another government crisis

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

#340

Post by HWR_14 » Mon, Aug 23, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

mikem170 wrote: post #307

nl wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it…

> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years). The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years. Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway: > "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during t…

> The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.

The excess mortality graph only goes back 19 months, because that's when COVID start. It uses excess mortality, so those numbers are based on numbers in the previous years.

It's like looking at a chart showing inflation over the past year and saying "this says nothing about the prices two years ago!" They're used to compute the numbers on the chart, not be shown on the chart.