7 ms·

Two comments from me: 1) From the comments of the blog post: "todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20." So one theory is that pe

Two comments from me: 1) From the comments of the blog post: "todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20." So one theory is that people are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as surgery this year. I am sure that people are driving less, flying less, working less, and in general, doing less that can increase the risk of death. 2) There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I am always wary of some totally random fact. "Least deadliest September on record." There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.

mrfusion 6y ago
It’s funny you won’t even consider that their strategy actually worked.
- kreetx 6y ago
  Haven't corona infections and deaths been relatively higher in Sweden than in other countries? I.e when looking for a confirmation for "Sweden being right" then I'm not sure this is the data that proves it.
  - trash_cat 6y ago
    Deaths and infections have been much higher (per capita too) in Sweden compared to nordic (who had lockdowns) countries. But faired better compared to UK, which had several madatory lockdowns. So its not either or, but a gray area. There are several reasons that could explain why Sweden had high death rate.
    - leesalminen 6y ago
      People seem to really want to correlate all kinds of things together with this virus when in reality we just don’t know. There are 1000s of variables- many of which we don’t even know of yet. One thing I’ve personally found interesting in the US is that nobody talks about the general poor health of a plurality of Americans. We lead the way in obesity and related diseases. Surely that is a factor in covid deaths but I haven’t seen anyone say it aloud.
      - lambdaba 6y ago
        Americans probably have the worst health, or more precisely immune system fitness, in the world, as evidenced by the epidemic of chronic disease. My opinion is that, along with population density, is the only significant factor. The reason it's not discussed much is that society as a whole is still under the pharma paradigm, where individual agency on health is all but negated, and "health", is mostly dispensed by a doctor prescribing medicine. Hence the focus on things like masks and expensive drugs like Remdesivir (which is useless) VS getting proper vitamin D status, for example (which is crucial for immune system function and has been shown to be a major factor in COVID).
        literallycancer 6y ago
        Why do you think it's useless?
        lambdaba 6y ago
        I read that in studies, including a meta-study showing no difference in mortality rate. I suppose it's not strictly "useless" as it apparently can reduce time spent in ICU in patients who would get better anyway, but in my view to call it useful it should affect outcomes. I'm also betraying my frustration with pharma's hold on the medical system and minds, where common sense interventions like correcting deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc etc. are seemingly ignored. Even the media is in on it. It's really an awful situation.
        akiselev 6y ago
        That "epidemic of chronic disease" isn't an American phenomenon, it's a global one. The percentage of people suffering from chronic conditions is surprisingly stable from country to country. It's the prevalence of acute diseases that changes due to quality of healthcare and (in the case of COVID) transient government competence. The each step in the shift from subsistence agriculture => industrial labor => sedentary lifestyles are characterized by their own maladies. It starts with chronic malnutrition, then moves to chronic diseases cause by pollution, then to chronic obesity and heart disease and is compounded by climate. Each country has its own unique mix of the four but the overall rates don't change much.
    - Retric 6y ago
      You need to compare relatively similar countries to verify how successful their strategy was vs differences in population demographics etc from playing a role. As such Sweden vs Norway shows how Sweden failed from a public health standpoint, but both countries had significant advantages over the UK due to their dramatically lower population density. In that context Sweden’s strategy is actually reasonable for such a low population country to attempt.
      - neuronexmachina 6y ago
        I didn't realize until I looked it up just now that the Nordic countries have a population density 1/10th that of Germany and the UK: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-population-density.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
        Gwypaas 6y ago
        Population density really doesn't matter in these discussions regarding spread. How does the huge Canadian arctic influence any spread happening in public transportation in Toronto? It doesn't. Same with Sweden and the other Nordic countries with vast forests between towns. A more general measure is urbanization, and by that measure Sweden is more urbanized at 88% than both Germany at 77.5% and United Kingdom at 84%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
        clairity 6y ago
        urbanization doesn't matter either. it's indoor mixing density (which population density and urbanization poorly approximate in this case) that matters. that's again why the key mitigation is to avoid breathing others' direct exhaust, which is most directly heuristicized by distancing indoors (which implicitly addresses density, unlike masks which only help at the margins and are mostly performative due to their counterintuitive failure modes, such as every breath rehydrating and potentially dislodging virus particles otherwise caught in the mask).
        6y ago
    - hristov 6y ago
      UK had mandatory lockdowns only after they tried herd immunity which caused the virus to go wild in their population. By the time they had mandatory lockdowns, infections were already through the roof. In general, scandanivian countries should be much better protected against the virus, all other things being equal. Scandinavian countries tend to have much lower population density, they culturally require more personal space, they have much lower average dwelling occupancy, in fact they have a lot of people living alone in their apartments etc. If you compare Sweden with their Scandinavian neighbors you can see how their coronavirus policies failed. If you compare England with their European neighbors and peers (e.g., France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium), you can see how their policies failed. Comparing Sweden and England is not as instructive. These are two countries that both had failing policies but Sweden did much better because it was better demographically and culturally set up for a pandemic.
    - cma 6y ago
      UK is over 10 times more dense than Sweden I believe.
  - turing_complete 6y ago
    The most important factor is how well you protect the elderly and in particularly nursing homes. Sweden did a relatively poor job at that in the beginning. New York did a very poor job at that. Strict lockdowns don't seem to help. In fact, some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths (UK, France, Italy...)
    - hyko 6y ago
      some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths That doesn’t really tell you much about the short term efficacy of lockdowns, as they were enacted in response to an alarming rise in deaths.
    - _Microft 6y ago
      Strict lockdowns, if properly followed or enforced, do help to get the number of cases down. They are no panacea though. They help to reduce the number of cases in short term but they absolutely need to be followed up with other action. Germany has an extensive contact tracing scheme in place that allowed us to find and quarantine as many contacts of infected people as possible. This limited spread and is why we fared better than others so far. The relatively low numbers gave a false sense of security unfortunately which lead to increasingly risky behaviour of people. Currently, we are seeing a rise in case numbers, albeit not as bad as in neighbouring countries which easily report multiple times the number of cases per 100000 inhabitants and week. Local health authorities are slowly reaching their limits with contact tracing at the moment, this is why measures similar to lockdowns are used locally to get them back under control. The Bundeswehr, that is the german military, also trained a few thousand soldiers to support local health authorities with their tracing work, so all is not lost yet. Turns out that having a large number of decently organized people that are easily deployed to where they are needed are a good thing, after all ;)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  Well it's hard to prove that that "the least deadly month ever" was a goal of their strategy...
- _Microft 6y ago
  Germany has eight times as many inhabitants but only twice as many fatalities so far. Sweden messed up the beginning of the pandemic but the current numbers do not look worse than in other countries now. Let's hope for the best. Edit: I (heavily) edited the comment, there was way more snark initially than I should have posted. My apologies.
  - kungtotte 6y ago
    One point to consider there is how poorly managed our elderly care is, well before this crisis. It's hard to determine for sure but I can't imagine that it didn't factor into our high mortality among the elderly. Staff went to work without PPE, and some were ordered to go to work despite showing symptoms. The effects of COVID19 are not tied solely to the immediate actions in March and April but are affected by systemic issues too.
  - turing_complete 6y ago
    The most important factor is how well you protect the elderly and in particularly nursing homes. Sweden did a relatively poor job at that. New York did a very poor job at that. Strict lockdowns don't seem to help. In fact, some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths.
    - hyko 6y ago
      I think this is a duplicate post?
- msinca 6y ago
  I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you saying that Sweden's coronavirus policy somehow led to all deaths in Sweden lowering? Looking at the graph, the clear trend is death rate lowering year after year since the 60s. That would mean that each new year, statistically, there will be several months that happen to be the 'lowest' ever. I don't see how this data proves (or disproves) any coronavirus strategy.
  - carlivar 6y ago
    I think what some people take from this is the opposite: that Sweden's strategy hasn't been a catastrophe many predicted (aside from poor initial elderly protections).
    - evgen 6y ago
      (and aside from any comparisons to its neighboring countries too?) Yes, it has been a catestrophic fuck-up. As predicted.
      - laichzeit0 6y ago
        Wasn’t the point that when those neighboring countries eventually open up, then the people that would have died will probably still end up dying and the numbers will look the same?
        evgen 6y ago
        Bold claim Cotton, let's see if it works out... Joking aside, that is based upon the mostly discredited 'herd immunity' theory. It is not the case that someone who is in a vulnerable population is somehow doomed to die from this disease, and there are many different ways to mitigate the problems as countries respond to the ebb and flow of the different Covid waves. When the neighboring countries open up (and several of them have partially opened at times) they have more medical resources available to mitigate the effects and they are more prepared to revert to lockdown if necessary.
    - 6y ago
- geofft 6y ago
  I don't see any evidence that that explanation wasn't considered. What I do see is cautious scientific skepticism and a willingness to investigate the truth and take all evidence into account instead of jumping to a politically-correct conclusion.
- riffraff 6y ago
  Sweden's approach may have been a good idea for Sweden, but it wasn't directly applicable everywhere. Still, they did, and currently do, worse than their neighbours[0][1]. [0] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/situation-updates/weekly-maps-coordinated-restriction-free-movement https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/situation-updates/wee... [1] saved image in case it changes https://imgur.com/a/bVtvv92 https://imgur.com/a/bVtvv92
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Wow that visualisation is awful.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia. We don't do that with any other region in the planet. At any rate, their Covid deaths have been at near zero per day for over 3 months now. They're living life. They aren't cowering in fear from a virus with an extremely high survival rate.
    - riffraff 6y ago
      > The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia. the population density, demographics, intergenerational living, and healthcare are vastly different between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. For example, Sweden has a density of 25/km2, while Belgium has 383/km2. The Stockholm county, the worst hit, has less population density than Lombardy (360/km2 vs 420/km2), while Lombardy has more inhabitants than the whole of Sweden. You can easily see how population density relates closely with the intensity of the epidemic[0]. See also household size[1] The one _really_ doing well is Germany. But as I said: Sweden's choice may have been perfectly good for Sweden! It just doesn't translate as-is to all countries, because each country is different. Anyway, the problem was never the survival rate, but the overloading of ICU, if that is less likely to happen you'd do very well to not have a lockdown, but this was not and is not the case everywhere. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20170406-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D... [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Single-person_households,_by_NUTS_level_3_region,_2011_(%25_share_of_all_households)_PITEU17.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- noobermin 6y ago
  It didn't work anywhere else, specifically didn't work at all in parts of the US.
- Dumblydorr 6y ago
  What's funny is that your comment doesn't contribute to the discussion or meaningfully respond to the parent. The parent comment touches on the statistical folly of overgeneralizing from small sample sizes, as well as points out a potential confounding factor to the death rate, which is implicitly considering Sweden's covid strategy. The parent doesn't attempt to judge the merit of their minimalist approach to covid response. So you're shoehorning the comment into a debate it wasn't trying to be in, it was merely attempting to contextualize the clickbait headline.
- refurb 6y ago
  Of course, there is a lot riding on this. Different countries took different approaches and they will have severe consequences, not only the death toll, but economic impact.
- dnautics 6y ago
  I doubt it. Even in, say, the US, coronavirus is such a small, small fraction of all causes mortality, probably less than 5%. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post snarky or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. It makes the threads worse and evokes worse still from others. Thoughtful critique, on the other hand, is welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tomohawk 6y ago
Current covid death statistics for some countries, including Sweden https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&minPopulationFilter=1000000&time=2020-08-21..latest&country=BEL~CAN~FRA~DEU~ITA~ESP~SWE~GBR~USA&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=smoothed&hideControls=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... Note that countries have different ways of counting. Here are the excess mortality statistics for some countries. This statistic takes a while to gather, so it lags 1-2 months, depending. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&time=2020-04-26..latest&country=BEL~DEU~NOR~ESP~SWE~USA&region=World https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... Sweden reached no excess mortality sometime in June, and is doing quite well.
nsonha 6y ago
> There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful. Really? I can think of a narrative here about the virus being not as serious as people thought. I can't relate to your complain at all. We want more straight fact not "helpful" opinions. If someone can't form an opinion on their own it's fine, just dont participate in the discussion. The last thing we want is some people joining some discussion just to magnify other people's thoughts.
tinus_hn 6y ago
You can imagine what kind of conclusions would be drawn with implied causations if it were the other way.

mrfusion 6y ago

It’s funny you won’t even consider that their strategy actually worked.

kreetx 6y ago
Haven't corona infections and deaths been relatively higher in Sweden than in other countries? I.e when looking for a confirmation for "Sweden being right" then I'm not sure this is the data that proves it.
- trash_cat 6y ago
  Deaths and infections have been much higher (per capita too) in Sweden compared to nordic (who had lockdowns) countries. But faired better compared to UK, which had several madatory lockdowns. So its not either or, but a gray area. There are several reasons that could explain why Sweden had high death rate.
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    People seem to really want to correlate all kinds of things together with this virus when in reality we just don’t know. There are 1000s of variables- many of which we don’t even know of yet. One thing I’ve personally found interesting in the US is that nobody talks about the general poor health of a plurality of Americans. We lead the way in obesity and related diseases. Surely that is a factor in covid deaths but I haven’t seen anyone say it aloud.
    - lambdaba 6y ago
      Americans probably have the worst health, or more precisely immune system fitness, in the world, as evidenced by the epidemic of chronic disease. My opinion is that, along with population density, is the only significant factor. The reason it's not discussed much is that society as a whole is still under the pharma paradigm, where individual agency on health is all but negated, and "health", is mostly dispensed by a doctor prescribing medicine. Hence the focus on things like masks and expensive drugs like Remdesivir (which is useless) VS getting proper vitamin D status, for example (which is crucial for immune system function and has been shown to be a major factor in COVID).
      - literallycancer 6y ago
        Why do you think it's useless?
        lambdaba 6y ago
        I read that in studies, including a meta-study showing no difference in mortality rate. I suppose it's not strictly "useless" as it apparently can reduce time spent in ICU in patients who would get better anyway, but in my view to call it useful it should affect outcomes. I'm also betraying my frustration with pharma's hold on the medical system and minds, where common sense interventions like correcting deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc etc. are seemingly ignored. Even the media is in on it. It's really an awful situation.
      - akiselev 6y ago
        That "epidemic of chronic disease" isn't an American phenomenon, it's a global one. The percentage of people suffering from chronic conditions is surprisingly stable from country to country. It's the prevalence of acute diseases that changes due to quality of healthcare and (in the case of COVID) transient government competence. The each step in the shift from subsistence agriculture => industrial labor => sedentary lifestyles are characterized by their own maladies. It starts with chronic malnutrition, then moves to chronic diseases cause by pollution, then to chronic obesity and heart disease and is compounded by climate. Each country has its own unique mix of the four but the overall rates don't change much.
  - Retric 6y ago
    You need to compare relatively similar countries to verify how successful their strategy was vs differences in population demographics etc from playing a role. As such Sweden vs Norway shows how Sweden failed from a public health standpoint, but both countries had significant advantages over the UK due to their dramatically lower population density. In that context Sweden’s strategy is actually reasonable for such a low population country to attempt.
    - neuronexmachina 6y ago
      I didn't realize until I looked it up just now that the Nordic countries have a population density 1/10th that of Germany and the UK: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-population-density.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
      - Gwypaas 6y ago
        Population density really doesn't matter in these discussions regarding spread. How does the huge Canadian arctic influence any spread happening in public transportation in Toronto? It doesn't. Same with Sweden and the other Nordic countries with vast forests between towns. A more general measure is urbanization, and by that measure Sweden is more urbanized at 88% than both Germany at 77.5% and United Kingdom at 84%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
        clairity 6y ago
        urbanization doesn't matter either. it's indoor mixing density (which population density and urbanization poorly approximate in this case) that matters. that's again why the key mitigation is to avoid breathing others' direct exhaust, which is most directly heuristicized by distancing indoors (which implicitly addresses density, unlike masks which only help at the margins and are mostly performative due to their counterintuitive failure modes, such as every breath rehydrating and potentially dislodging virus particles otherwise caught in the mask).
        6y ago
  - hristov 6y ago
    UK had mandatory lockdowns only after they tried herd immunity which caused the virus to go wild in their population. By the time they had mandatory lockdowns, infections were already through the roof. In general, scandanivian countries should be much better protected against the virus, all other things being equal. Scandinavian countries tend to have much lower population density, they culturally require more personal space, they have much lower average dwelling occupancy, in fact they have a lot of people living alone in their apartments etc. If you compare Sweden with their Scandinavian neighbors you can see how their coronavirus policies failed. If you compare England with their European neighbors and peers (e.g., France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium), you can see how their policies failed. Comparing Sweden and England is not as instructive. These are two countries that both had failing policies but Sweden did much better because it was better demographically and culturally set up for a pandemic.
  - cma 6y ago
    UK is over 10 times more dense than Sweden I believe.
- turing_complete 6y ago
  The most important factor is how well you protect the elderly and in particularly nursing homes. Sweden did a relatively poor job at that in the beginning. New York did a very poor job at that. Strict lockdowns don't seem to help. In fact, some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths (UK, France, Italy...)
  - hyko 6y ago
    some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths That doesn’t really tell you much about the short term efficacy of lockdowns, as they were enacted in response to an alarming rise in deaths.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Strict lockdowns, if properly followed or enforced, do help to get the number of cases down. They are no panacea though. They help to reduce the number of cases in short term but they absolutely need to be followed up with other action. Germany has an extensive contact tracing scheme in place that allowed us to find and quarantine as many contacts of infected people as possible. This limited spread and is why we fared better than others so far. The relatively low numbers gave a false sense of security unfortunately which lead to increasingly risky behaviour of people. Currently, we are seeing a rise in case numbers, albeit not as bad as in neighbouring countries which easily report multiple times the number of cases per 100000 inhabitants and week. Local health authorities are slowly reaching their limits with contact tracing at the moment, this is why measures similar to lockdowns are used locally to get them back under control. The Bundeswehr, that is the german military, also trained a few thousand soldiers to support local health authorities with their tracing work, so all is not lost yet. Turns out that having a large number of decently organized people that are easily deployed to where they are needed are a good thing, after all ;)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
romanoderoma 6y ago
Well it's hard to prove that that "the least deadly month ever" was a goal of their strategy...
_Microft 6y ago
Germany has eight times as many inhabitants but only twice as many fatalities so far. Sweden messed up the beginning of the pandemic but the current numbers do not look worse than in other countries now. Let's hope for the best. Edit: I (heavily) edited the comment, there was way more snark initially than I should have posted. My apologies.
- kungtotte 6y ago
  One point to consider there is how poorly managed our elderly care is, well before this crisis. It's hard to determine for sure but I can't imagine that it didn't factor into our high mortality among the elderly. Staff went to work without PPE, and some were ordered to go to work despite showing symptoms. The effects of COVID19 are not tied solely to the immediate actions in March and April but are affected by systemic issues too.
- turing_complete 6y ago
  The most important factor is how well you protect the elderly and in particularly nursing homes. Sweden did a relatively poor job at that. New York did a very poor job at that. Strict lockdowns don't seem to help. In fact, some of the places with the strictest lockdowns have the largest numbers of deaths.
  - hyko 6y ago
    I think this is a duplicate post?
msinca 6y ago
I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you saying that Sweden's coronavirus policy somehow led to all deaths in Sweden lowering? Looking at the graph, the clear trend is death rate lowering year after year since the 60s. That would mean that each new year, statistically, there will be several months that happen to be the 'lowest' ever. I don't see how this data proves (or disproves) any coronavirus strategy.
- carlivar 6y ago
  I think what some people take from this is the opposite: that Sweden's strategy hasn't been a catastrophe many predicted (aside from poor initial elderly protections).
  - evgen 6y ago
    (and aside from any comparisons to its neighboring countries too?) Yes, it has been a catestrophic fuck-up. As predicted.
    - laichzeit0 6y ago
      Wasn’t the point that when those neighboring countries eventually open up, then the people that would have died will probably still end up dying and the numbers will look the same?
      - evgen 6y ago
        Bold claim Cotton, let's see if it works out... Joking aside, that is based upon the mostly discredited 'herd immunity' theory. It is not the case that someone who is in a vulnerable population is somehow doomed to die from this disease, and there are many different ways to mitigate the problems as countries respond to the ebb and flow of the different Covid waves. When the neighboring countries open up (and several of them have partially opened at times) they have more medical resources available to mitigate the effects and they are more prepared to revert to lockdown if necessary.
  - 6y ago
geofft 6y ago
I don't see any evidence that that explanation wasn't considered. What I do see is cautious scientific skepticism and a willingness to investigate the truth and take all evidence into account instead of jumping to a politically-correct conclusion.
riffraff 6y ago
Sweden's approach may have been a good idea for Sweden, but it wasn't directly applicable everywhere. Still, they did, and currently do, worse than their neighbours[0][1]. [0] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/situation-updates/weekly-maps-coordinated-restriction-free-movement https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/situation-updates/wee... [1] saved image in case it changes https://imgur.com/a/bVtvv92 https://imgur.com/a/bVtvv92
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Wow that visualisation is awful.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisco255 6y ago
  The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia. We don't do that with any other region in the planet. At any rate, their Covid deaths have been at near zero per day for over 3 months now. They're living life. They aren't cowering in fear from a virus with an extremely high survival rate.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    > The UK, Belgium, France, Spain, etc are all neighbors of Sweden. It's ridiculous to isolate Scandinavia. the population density, demographics, intergenerational living, and healthcare are vastly different between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. For example, Sweden has a density of 25/km2, while Belgium has 383/km2. The Stockholm county, the worst hit, has less population density than Lombardy (360/km2 vs 420/km2), while Lombardy has more inhabitants than the whole of Sweden. You can easily see how population density relates closely with the intensity of the epidemic[0]. See also household size[1] The one _really_ doing well is Germany. But as I said: Sweden's choice may have been perfectly good for Sweden! It just doesn't translate as-is to all countries, because each country is different. Anyway, the problem was never the survival rate, but the overloading of ICU, if that is less likely to happen you'd do very well to not have a lockdown, but this was not and is not the case everywhere. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20170406-1 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D... [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Single-person_households,_by_NUTS_level_3_region,_2011_(%25_share_of_all_households)_PITEU17.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
noobermin 6y ago
It didn't work anywhere else, specifically didn't work at all in parts of the US.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
What's funny is that your comment doesn't contribute to the discussion or meaningfully respond to the parent. The parent comment touches on the statistical folly of overgeneralizing from small sample sizes, as well as points out a potential confounding factor to the death rate, which is implicitly considering Sweden's covid strategy. The parent doesn't attempt to judge the merit of their minimalist approach to covid response. So you're shoehorning the comment into a debate it wasn't trying to be in, it was merely attempting to contextualize the clickbait headline.
refurb 6y ago
Of course, there is a lot riding on this. Different countries took different approaches and they will have severe consequences, not only the death toll, but economic impact.
dnautics 6y ago
I doubt it. Even in, say, the US, coronavirus is such a small, small fraction of all causes mortality, probably less than 5%. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
dang 6y ago
Please don't post snarky or unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. It makes the threads worse and evokes worse still from others. Thoughtful critique, on the other hand, is welcome. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tomohawk 6y ago

Current covid death statistics for some countries, including Sweden https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&minPopulationFilter=1000000&time=2020-08-21..latest&country=BEL~CAN~FRA~DEU~ITA~ESP~SWE~GBR~USA&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=smoothed&hideControls=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS... Note that countries have different ways of counting. Here are the excess mortality statistics for some countries. This statistic takes a while to gather, so it lags 1-2 months, depending. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores?tab=chart&stackMode=absolute&time=2020-04-26..latest&country=BEL~DEU~NOR~ESP~SWE~USA&region=World https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... Sweden reached no excess mortality sometime in June, and is doing quite well.

nsonha 6y ago

> There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful. Really? I can think of a narrative here about the virus being not as serious as people thought. I can't relate to your complain at all. We want more straight fact not "helpful" opinions. If someone can't form an opinion on their own it's fine, just dont participate in the discussion. The last thing we want is some people joining some discussion just to magnify other people's thoughts.

tinus_hn 6y ago

You can imagine what kind of conclusions would be drawn with implied causations if it were the other way.