25 ms·

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

312 points by mrfusion 5y ago

ammar_x 5y ago
The main point of the article for me which is worth contemplating is that Sweden strategy didn't have the anticipated catastrophic consequences. The article acknowledges that what worked for Sweden would not have worked for other countries with higher population densities like UK.
gus_massa 5y ago
Original article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/22/sweden-experiment-no-lockdowns-led-better-mental-health-healthier/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/22/sweden-exp...
- dang 5y ago
  Yes. We've changed the URL to that from https://archive.is/cL6qp#selection-509.1-509.116 https://archive.is/cL6qp#selection-509.1-509.116. Thanks! Submitters: please post the original source so people know the site the article is coming from, and for the sake of the archives here. If there's a paywall workaround, it's fine to post it in the thread.
nickloewen 5y ago
The article provides evidence to support the claim made in the headline, but there are important caveats included at the end: > 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. > And Dr Bhatt does not think another, non-Nordic country such as Britain could have copied Sweden’s policies and got the same results. > With about 23 people per square kilometre, Sweden has about a tenth of the population density of the UK, while about half of Swedish households comprise just one person - a major factor in local transmission.
- dance-me 5y ago
  If you're going to quote that, you should add the directly relevant information from the other side: * "But that death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and well below those of France, Spain, Italy and the UK" * Dr Bhatt concedes "it worked for Sweden" * Dr Bhatt is "one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy" That last detail is important. Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK. If he said anything else, that would become the story. What's remarkable is that someone in his position is conceding as much as he has.
  - alecst 5y ago
    Edit: I am wrong. The population density of the Stockholm urban area is 4200 (2019), not 400 as I originally said. That number is for the county, not the municipal area. Leaving the rest of the comment so others can learn. Clearly the population density of Stockholm, which holds about 10% of the Swedish population, is not the relevant factor. > Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK. I'm guessing he didn't say it because he didn't think it was true. In Stockholm there are ~400 people per square km. In Milan there are 2000, in Madrid there are 5400, in London there are 5700, and in Paris there are 20,000. This detail alone -- ignoring other cultural and demographic differences between northern and southern Europe -- could be enough on its own to soften the blow.
    - wk_end 5y ago
      That’s the population density of Stockholm county. The population density of the city of Stockholm is 5200 per square km.
      - alecst 5y ago
        You are right. I am wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_urban_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_urban_area I find ~4200 on Wikipedia but your point stands.
tomohawk 5y ago
The excess mortality for the past few years in Sweden: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... Better than most, not as good as some. Certainly not the catastrophe predicted by some.
- ambicapter 5y ago
  I think they benefit from their relatively low pop density.
  - shadilay 5y ago
    Nearly 90% of Sweden lives in high population density urban environments. https://www.statista.com/statistics/455935/urbanization-in-sweden/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/455935/urbanization-in-s...
    - robocat 5y ago
      More than half of Swedish households are single-person https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190821-why-so-many-young-swedes-live-alone https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190821-why-so-many-yo...
- cygx 5y ago
  With hindsight, there's certainly a discussion to be had about the Covid response of any European country that experienced significant excess mortality in April 2020, because it didn't have to be that way. There may be extenuating circumstances in some instances, but in case of Sweden, I'm not sure what they would be. As far as I can see, policy makers rolled the dice and lost (assuming preservation of life is the metric of choice) - though that failure becomes less significant as time goes on and the fraction representing initial excess mortality starts shrinking...
- kybernetikos 5y ago
  It really depends who you're comparing with. If you're comparing with high population countries with lots of neighbors / travel links, then they did great. If you're comparing with literally any of their neighbors, then they did really really badly. Their excess mortality was around 1000 per million (i.e. around 10,000 more people dead than expected), while Denmark, Finland and Norway were much much less.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/cL6qp https://archive.is/cL6qp
dmitriid 5y ago
- Significantly higher mortality than immediate neighbors - Economy suffered the same as neighbors, and the government was quick to help big companies like Volvo (which immediately paid dividends to shareholders), but small businesses couldn't get their voices heard (even not-so-small businesses like airports) Alternative history re-writers already hail this as the greatest achievement ever.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
whiddershins 5y ago
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 troubling indicator that our entire response may have been irrational.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  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.
  - wraptile 5y ago
    What was recommended? AFAIK pandemic plans were always social distancing at their core right?
- sergiosgc 5y ago
  When Sweden decided for no lock-downs, we knew very little about the virus. It was effectively a jump into the unknown. Even if the decision proves beneficial, it was an error, in the knowledge context of March 2020.
  - weego 5y ago
    Assuming that in any give situation, the only correct decision in the absence of any knowledge is the most conservative one. Which this would disprove and thus the argument is provably false.
    - TheCowboy 5y ago
      Except that being wrong about how bad a virus is can be catastrophic, especially when nearly every nation was woefully underprepared. You can easily do math to demonstrate how small changes in the variables of a virus can lead to more dire outcomes. What if China had taken the most conservative policy in response to the appearance of covid-19? Maybe we would have been spared the turmoil and disruption of this pandemic. You're way too confident declaring this as "provably false". Hopefully our knowledge is greater and our preparedness will be better such that we don't have to always take such an aggressive policy position when faced with a novel virus.
warning26 5y ago
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?
- marjoripomarole 5y ago
  Not true. Many Brazilian cities and states had lockdown measures at various times this past 20 months.
- slim 5y ago
  Some people have better resistance to the virus. Maybe there's more of them in sweden
- marderfarker2 5y ago
  China did the opposite by sealing everything up in the beginning, and now everything has gone back to normal for them bar international travel. Probably it’s down to developed countries having a well-defined response protocol AND its citizen sticking to it.
  - neither_color 5y ago
    They've had regular city-wide/regional lockdowns all throughout. If someone in your apartment complex tests positive SURPRISE you cant leave for two weeks. Normal is gone, it's not coming back. When you move the goal post from "not overwhelming our medical system" to attempting "covid zero" this is the new normal you end up with, somewhere between China and Australia. August 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under-strict-lockdown-china-covid-outbreak https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under... June 2021 https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/3138002/flights-cancelled-and-districts-locked-down-amid-fresh https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/31380... January 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lockdown.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lo...
  - 5y ago
adevx 5y ago
Add to this that babies born during lockdown have found to have a significant lower IQ. “It’s not subtle by any stretch,” said Deoni. “You don’t typically see things like that, outside of major cognitive disorders.” I think we vastly underestimate the severe long-term effects of lockdowns. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-during-pandemic-have-lower-iqs-us-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  Your link doesn't seem to go anywhere. Also, how accurate are IQ tests on 1 year old and younger babies? I'm not sure why IQs would be lower (if indeed this is the case) - parents are still around. In fact parents have been more often around during the pandemic given the increase in work from home policies.
  - adevx 5y ago
    I've updated the link to a non-amp link. Details of the study can be found here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v...
    - soared 5y ago
      Pretty interesting read and it does make sense intuitively. My few thoughts after skimming it that I'd like to learn more about: Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover? > However, since all study visits take place in a clinical setting, parents less concerned about the pandemic, and those with strong social support networks, may have been more likely to participate than those with greater concerns. This seems pretty impactful to me. If you consider that people more worried about the pandemic were avoiding doctor visits, and the study showed parent's education reduced the effect they saw... They kind of glossed over the fact that children born just before the pandemic didn't have lower scores. I'm curious about that since the first few weeks/months for newborns they are not leaving the house much, so a pandemic shouldn't have changed a whole lot there. Why were they immune if the stages were they would've expected to start leaving the house (4+ months) were taken away, just like babies born during the pandemic?
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
Telegraph has an anti-lockdown agenda to push in the UK; it is not an impartial source here. In the UK the praise for the "Sweden model" comes particularly from the conservative-aligned pro-business anti-lockdown lobby; who are producing PR for their proposition that "lockdowns do more (economic) harm than they do (public health) good". Right or wrong, it's certainly not impartial reporting on a foreign country, it's selling the idea that this should be policy at home. If you're reading such an article from a UK publication and you're not in the UK, then you are not the target of this marketing exercise. You are informational Bycatch.
- tomp 5y ago
  Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK, except an ad-hominem jab on a more liberally-oriented website like HN? There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK (Labour is mired in one scandal after another and can't elect a proper leader), whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
    > Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK When it comes to UK newspapers of course it does. > There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK That's certainly an opinion, but one that is not relevant to talking about newspapers. > whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader. UK lockdowns were consistently too late, because the Conservative government did not want too admit the necessity. That's why the lockdowns had to be so long and repeated. Pressure like this article exits because the UK Government is know to be susceptible to it. Because they don't have their own serious plans for COVID, or actually for anything else either.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    I don't understand your argument. You seem to be saying that since there aren't any viable non-conservatives the Conservatives are not conservatives and that this newspaper isn't conservative.
dghughes 5y ago
I know a lot of right-wing types like to point to Sweden as an example. But I'd argue whether what they did was right or wrong the Swedish population was better prepared. Compared to the USA the Swedish socialized medical system would mean that most of their citizens probably started off healthier.
- nivenkos 5y ago
  Access to medicine is pretty terrible in Sweden for less critical issues. You have to pay for doctor's visits between $30-60 and often have to wait 4-8 weeks even with the fee. Almost everything requires a prescription compared to other countries, so the delays are problematic as there is no opportunity for self-medication at all. But there's definitely something to be said for the overall health of the population like obesity rates, smoking rates, etc.
varjag 5y ago
Hope that offsets the excess 10k dead.
- lazyjones 5y ago
  What "excess 10k dead"? Sweden basically only reported excess mortality in early 2020 and since then it has a mortality deficit.
  - varjag 5y ago
    Sweden has ~14k official COVID deaths. Neighbouring Norway, at half the population and a moderate lockdown/PPE policy, has ~800 COVID deaths. The culture, climate, population density and demographics are very close. All these extra Swedes died for sheer ineptitude of their government. There's hardly any difference in economic impact either.
    - ptr 5y ago
      The socioeconomic group that had the most deaths were people of foreign background aged 65 or more. Maybe Sweden just has a proportionally larger group of those?
    - lazyjones 5y ago
      Covid deaths aren't the same as "excess deaths". It's just one of many causes of deaths over a year. Excess deaths is the difference between expected (typically an average of the past 5 years) and actual number of deaths in a year. IOW, due to the circumstances, excess deaths can be 0 despite Covid deaths being > 0.
    - Dwelve 5y ago
      Just so we are clear. You're saying that if Covid didn't kill anybody, Sweden would have seen [1] 97k - 14k == 83k deaths in the year of 2020? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
  - ctvo 5y ago
giorgioz 5y ago
Is it just me or there are A LOT of articles about how Sweden is better in doing X coming from the US and the UK recently? What's going on here? Frankly it seems a bit of nationalist content marketing after the 10th article I read in 3 years. Most of the times the articles claim Sweden is doing better X but that X could easily be applied to several other countries in Europe. "Sweden offers free health care and education"... yeah A LOT of countries in Europe do that. For this article too it seems the overall achievement of Sweden are shared by many other countries by somehow Sweden is being singled out. I even googled it and found this: https://si.se/en/annual-report-of-the-image-of-sweden-abroad-2018-summary/ https://si.se/en/annual-report-of-the-image-of-sweden-abroad... Is there a cultural infatuation between the US/UK and Sweden? Is Sweden activally investing resources to improve their perceived image?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
  - onemorepasta 5y ago
    Can you paste this one more time please. Do it for daddy.
- throwaway_fjmr 5y ago
  Nope, you are looking at an article from the right-wing, anti-lockdown, COVID-sceptic Telegraph ;)
- T-A 5y ago
  > Is Sweden activally investing resources to improve their perceived image? Yes. Look at the About page on that site you found: https://si.se/en/about-si/our-mission/ https://si.se/en/about-si/our-mission/ The Swedish Institute is a public agency that promotes interest and trust in Sweden around the world.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  The funny thing is that the people glorifying Sweden's COVID-19 response historically reject comparisons with the country in other areas like human rights, penal policy, economic model, taxation policy etc. etc.
drudoo 5y ago
Non-Swede who lived in Sweden basically all of 2020 here. We basically self isolated most of the year and only did grocery shopping with masks and keeping distance but a lot of people really did not care about social distancing or masks. My wife and I were often very uncomfortable being out of the house and really did not like the relaxed guidelines. We commuted a lot to Denmark and the contrast was huge. We felt so much safer and comfortable being out shopping in Denmark compared to Sweden. We moved to Denmark start 2021 and has been back and forth between the two countries monthly and there’s still a big difference in behavior.
- TheGigaChad 5y ago
  Soy
- jansan 5y ago
  So now that Denmark is lifting basically all measures, are you planning to move on?
  - marvin 5y ago
    Practically everyone is vaccinated now, or very soon. Most people who were in favor of social distancing measures don't want this stuff to be codified indefinitely, just because they like limiting people's lifestyles. The intention has always been to mitigate the worst health effects of covid, which means temporary measures.
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Good luck changing the opinion of the cuckdowncels.
kybernetikos 5y ago
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 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 difference between them and their neighbors isn't small. Counterfactuals are always hard, and there might be valid non-lockdown related excuses for why Sweden did so poorly, but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.
- Closi 5y ago
  Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below: * Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years. * If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost. If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct. If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater. I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.
jaggs 5y ago
This narrative has been on-going during the pandemic. Easy to follow the money - https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/conservative-media-push-swedens-coronavirus-response-even-evidence-suggests-it https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/conservati...
beaunative 5y ago
People, wake up, Sweden is so loosely populated that the safe-distance is (almost) the regular distance. You risk of doing the same thing in Bay Area would result in more cases and deaths exponentially.
frankbreetz 5y ago
I see a lot of articles about how government reactions were good or bad for COVID. I have seen nothing regarding how a country's environment and population density affect COVID, I guess it is hard to push an agenda with that narrative. It seems the country's that "responded" the best all have low population density and/or are physically isolated from other countries. I see people praising leadership from places like New Zealand and South Korea, but maybe it is just easy to keep people out of these places.
- lrgzdmn 5y ago
  > I have seen nothing regarding how a country's environment and population density affect COVID This article does address that.
- alliao 5y ago
  South Korea/Taiwan don't have low population density. Best response comes from states with educated citizens with good basic hygiene and understanding of exponential so are able to accept early intervention. NZ have the benefit of citizens actually trust the government; bit of a wet dream for many politicians around the world.
  - frankbreetz 5y ago
    It seems improbable that all the best responses were all effectively isolated island nations. I think they may have another advantage.
    - lmm 5y ago
      This article is coming from Britain which is also an island nation, yet had a significantly worse pandemic experience.
- qayxc 5y ago
  > I see people praising leadership from places like New Zealand and South Korea, but maybe it is just easy to keep people out of these places. There's two components to this. The first is indeed that both countries are relatively isolated islands. Yes, South Korea is technically a peninsula, but the part that connects it to the mainland is separated by the best guarded border in the world, so... But the second component is how the situation was (and still is) handled: instead of waiting for exponential growth of the rate of new infections, both countries went into full emergency mode immediately. South Korea in particular applied lessons learned during the SARS crisis about a decade earlier and invested heavily in automated testing equipment, etc. In Europe, one of the critical failures was the inability to quickly and cost-effectively ramp up testing due to the lack of automated lab equipment. Other critical aspects of disease control included traceability, which worked exceptionally well in South Korea due to the excellent cell coverage and prevalence of smartphone app usage (plus permissive and practical data protection laws) and willing participation and support of the population. New Zealand is quick to order measures even if a single case is being reported. This prevents exponential spreading and keeps measures such as lock-downs short and reduces the overall negative impact. So it's really not just the location, but a number of measures that most other countries simply failed to take. The geography helps a lot, though, no question.
polote 5y ago
Can we ban discussion of covid restrictions on HN ? At that point nobody is going to change his position. Pro lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns dont work Anti lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns works. There is no point keep talking about it, unless you want to loose your time arguing with someone who will never agree with you. There was a post on HN a few days ago "Why it is so hard to be rational ?" [1], it perfectly describes the current situation. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197482
- bsaul 5y ago
  Please, let’s not ban one of the rare place where people of different opinions can exchange links and arguments with a pretty decent average scientific ground. Banning and expelling difficult topics from the public space has become far too common.
- naasking 5y ago
  > Anti lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns works Even if they do work it's barely relevant to the argument that lockdowns should be avoided. Lockdowns would have to work and be less harmful overall than cutting off or reducing access to everything else people depend on in society, like schooling, mental health services, cancer diagnostics and treatment, and so on and so forth. That's a tall order. Anti-lockdown people who claim lockdowns don't work are surely employing motivated reasoning.
black_13 5y ago
This is not science
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sorenjan 5y ago
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-19-mobilitetsanalys https://www.telia.se/privat/aktuellt/hemma-i-folknatet/covid... [1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...
GuB-42 5y ago
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.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
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-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-nordics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...
- mikem170 5y ago
  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/Study-compares-deaths-in-Sweden-and-Norway-before-and-after-COVID-pandemic.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
  - KingOfCoders 5y ago
    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.
    - mikem170 5y ago
      I didn't mean it as an argument. Just throwing an additional fact out there. It seems to be relevant, given the impact that covid has on people over 60/70/80/90 years old.
- Dwelve 5y ago
  "Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead." How the hell is saying shit like this allowed on this website?!?! Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead!?? Are you serious?
danfo 5y ago
The Queensland experiment: how 70 days of lockdown led to 448 days of paradise The Telegraph's title glosses over other factors, so hey: This one ^ does too! I am relieved by my region's luck and the collective will to move the goalpost of success to be 'limiting the number of people dying of COVID'. It has been basically normal life domestically besides scattered lockdowns for 5 million people, without losing parents, grandparents; 1 death per M here compared to Sweden's 1425, USA's 1895. National vaccination rate is lagging, on track to be sufficient in October, when the national modelling (Doherty) shows we will be sweet to test, trace, isolate, quarantine our way to control/suppression without need for further lockdown ad infinium. Just one precarious month in the way...
wesleywt 5y ago
These articles ignore places like Italy and now Florida where it did not go well. Conveniently.

312 points by mrfusion 5y ago

The main point of the article for me which is worth contemplating is that Sweden strategy didn't have the anticipated catastrophic consequences. The article acknowledges that what worked for Sweden would not have worked for other countries with higher population densities like UK.

gus_massa 5y ago

Original article: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/22/sweden-experiment-no-lockdowns-led-better-mental-health-healthier/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/08/22/sweden-exp...

dang 5y ago
Yes. We've changed the URL to that from https://archive.is/cL6qp#selection-509.1-509.116 https://archive.is/cL6qp#selection-509.1-509.116. Thanks! Submitters: please post the original source so people know the site the article is coming from, and for the sake of the archives here. If there's a paywall workaround, it's fine to post it in the thread.

nickloewen 5y ago

The article provides evidence to support the claim made in the headline, but there are important caveats included at the end: > 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. > And Dr Bhatt does not think another, non-Nordic country such as Britain could have copied Sweden’s policies and got the same results. > With about 23 people per square kilometre, Sweden has about a tenth of the population density of the UK, while about half of Swedish households comprise just one person - a major factor in local transmission.

dance-me 5y ago
If you're going to quote that, you should add the directly relevant information from the other side: * "But that death rate is lower than the average for the European Union as a whole (1,684), and well below those of France, Spain, Italy and the UK" * Dr Bhatt concedes "it worked for Sweden" * Dr Bhatt is "one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy" That last detail is important. Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK. If he said anything else, that would become the story. What's remarkable is that someone in his position is conceding as much as he has.
- alecst 5y ago
  Edit: I am wrong. The population density of the Stockholm urban area is 4200 (2019), not 400 as I originally said. That number is for the county, not the municipal area. Leaving the rest of the comment so others can learn. Clearly the population density of Stockholm, which holds about 10% of the Swedish population, is not the relevant factor. > Of course he has to say it couldn't have worked in the UK. I'm guessing he didn't say it because he didn't think it was true. In Stockholm there are ~400 people per square km. In Milan there are 2000, in Madrid there are 5400, in London there are 5700, and in Paris there are 20,000. This detail alone -- ignoring other cultural and demographic differences between northern and southern Europe -- could be enough on its own to soften the blow.
  - wk_end 5y ago
    That’s the population density of Stockholm county. The population density of the city of Stockholm is 5200 per square km.
    - alecst 5y ago
      You are right. I am wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_urban_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_urban_area I find ~4200 on Wikipedia but your point stands.

tomohawk 5y ago

The excess mortality for the past few years in Sweden: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-death-count?country=~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat... Better than most, not as good as some. Certainly not the catastrophe predicted by some.

ambicapter 5y ago
I think they benefit from their relatively low pop density.
- shadilay 5y ago
  Nearly 90% of Sweden lives in high population density urban environments. https://www.statista.com/statistics/455935/urbanization-in-sweden/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/455935/urbanization-in-s...
  - robocat 5y ago
    More than half of Swedish households are single-person https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190821-why-so-many-young-swedes-live-alone https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190821-why-so-many-yo...
cygx 5y ago
With hindsight, there's certainly a discussion to be had about the Covid response of any European country that experienced significant excess mortality in April 2020, because it didn't have to be that way. There may be extenuating circumstances in some instances, but in case of Sweden, I'm not sure what they would be. As far as I can see, policy makers rolled the dice and lost (assuming preservation of life is the metric of choice) - though that failure becomes less significant as time goes on and the fraction representing initial excess mortality starts shrinking...
kybernetikos 5y ago
It really depends who you're comparing with. If you're comparing with high population countries with lots of neighbors / travel links, then they did great. If you're comparing with literally any of their neighbors, then they did really really badly. Their excess mortality was around 1000 per million (i.e. around 10,000 more people dead than expected), while Denmark, Finland and Norway were much much less.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/cL6qp https://archive.is/cL6qp

dmitriid 5y ago

- Significantly higher mortality than immediate neighbors - Economy suffered the same as neighbors, and the government was quick to help big companies like Volvo (which immediately paid dividends to shareholders), but small businesses couldn't get their voices heard (even not-so-small businesses like airports) Alternative history re-writers already hail this as the greatest achievement ever.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

whiddershins 5y ago

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 troubling indicator that our entire response may have been irrational.

spookthesunset 5y ago
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.
- wraptile 5y ago
  What was recommended? AFAIK pandemic plans were always social distancing at their core right?
sergiosgc 5y ago
When Sweden decided for no lock-downs, we knew very little about the virus. It was effectively a jump into the unknown. Even if the decision proves beneficial, it was an error, in the knowledge context of March 2020.
- weego 5y ago
  Assuming that in any give situation, the only correct decision in the absence of any knowledge is the most conservative one. Which this would disprove and thus the argument is provably false.
  - TheCowboy 5y ago
    Except that being wrong about how bad a virus is can be catastrophic, especially when nearly every nation was woefully underprepared. You can easily do math to demonstrate how small changes in the variables of a virus can lead to more dire outcomes. What if China had taken the most conservative policy in response to the appearance of covid-19? Maybe we would have been spared the turmoil and disruption of this pandemic. You're way too confident declaring this as "provably false". Hopefully our knowledge is greater and our preparedness will be better such that we don't have to always take such an aggressive policy position when faced with a novel virus.

warning26 5y ago

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?

marjoripomarole 5y ago
Not true. Many Brazilian cities and states had lockdown measures at various times this past 20 months.
slim 5y ago
Some people have better resistance to the virus. Maybe there's more of them in sweden
marderfarker2 5y ago
China did the opposite by sealing everything up in the beginning, and now everything has gone back to normal for them bar international travel. Probably it’s down to developed countries having a well-defined response protocol AND its citizen sticking to it.
- neither_color 5y ago
  They've had regular city-wide/regional lockdowns all throughout. If someone in your apartment complex tests positive SURPRISE you cant leave for two weeks. Normal is gone, it's not coming back. When you move the goal post from "not overwhelming our medical system" to attempting "covid zero" this is the new normal you end up with, somewhere between China and Australia. August 2021 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under-strict-lockdown-china-covid-outbreak https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/02/millions-under... June 2021 https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/3138002/flights-cancelled-and-districts-locked-down-amid-fresh https://www.scmp.com/coronavirus/greater-china/article/31380... January 2021 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lockdown.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/world/asia/china-covid-lo...
- 5y ago

adevx 5y ago

Add to this that babies born during lockdown have found to have a significant lower IQ. “It’s not subtle by any stretch,” said Deoni. “You don’t typically see things like that, outside of major cognitive disorders.” I think we vastly underestimate the severe long-term effects of lockdowns. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-during-pandemic-have-lower-iqs-us-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/12/children-born-...

UncleOxidant 5y ago
Your link doesn't seem to go anywhere. Also, how accurate are IQ tests on 1 year old and younger babies? I'm not sure why IQs would be lower (if indeed this is the case) - parents are still around. In fact parents have been more often around during the pandemic given the increase in work from home policies.
- adevx 5y ago
  I've updated the link to a non-amp link. Details of the study can be found here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.10.21261846v...
  - soared 5y ago
    Pretty interesting read and it does make sense intuitively. My few thoughts after skimming it that I'd like to learn more about: Does these scores correlate to scores 10 years later/etc, or should we expect these children to recover? > However, since all study visits take place in a clinical setting, parents less concerned about the pandemic, and those with strong social support networks, may have been more likely to participate than those with greater concerns. This seems pretty impactful to me. If you consider that people more worried about the pandemic were avoiding doctor visits, and the study showed parent's education reduced the effect they saw... They kind of glossed over the fact that children born just before the pandemic didn't have lower scores. I'm curious about that since the first few weeks/months for newborns they are not leaving the house much, so a pandemic shouldn't have changed a whole lot there. Why were they immune if the stages were they would've expected to start leaving the house (4+ months) were taken away, just like babies born during the pandemic?

SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago

Telegraph has an anti-lockdown agenda to push in the UK; it is not an impartial source here. In the UK the praise for the "Sweden model" comes particularly from the conservative-aligned pro-business anti-lockdown lobby; who are producing PR for their proposition that "lockdowns do more (economic) harm than they do (public health) good". Right or wrong, it's certainly not impartial reporting on a foreign country, it's selling the idea that this should be policy at home. If you're reading such an article from a UK publication and you're not in the UK, then you are not the target of this marketing exercise. You are informational Bycatch.

tomp 5y ago
Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK, except an ad-hominem jab on a more liberally-oriented website like HN? There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK (Labour is mired in one scandal after another and can't elect a proper leader), whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Does "conservative-aligned" still mean anything at all in the UK When it comes to UK newspapers of course it does. > There's basically no more serious non-conservative political parties in the UK That's certainly an opinion, but one that is not relevant to talking about newspapers. > whereas the COVID lockdowns (lasting roughly 8 months) were enacted by a conservative leader. UK lockdowns were consistently too late, because the Conservative government did not want too admit the necessity. That's why the lockdowns had to be so long and repeated. Pressure like this article exits because the UK Government is know to be susceptible to it. Because they don't have their own serious plans for COVID, or actually for anything else either.
- guerrilla 5y ago
  I don't understand your argument. You seem to be saying that since there aren't any viable non-conservatives the Conservatives are not conservatives and that this newspaper isn't conservative.

dghughes 5y ago

I know a lot of right-wing types like to point to Sweden as an example. But I'd argue whether what they did was right or wrong the Swedish population was better prepared. Compared to the USA the Swedish socialized medical system would mean that most of their citizens probably started off healthier.

nivenkos 5y ago
Access to medicine is pretty terrible in Sweden for less critical issues. You have to pay for doctor's visits between $30-60 and often have to wait 4-8 weeks even with the fee. Almost everything requires a prescription compared to other countries, so the delays are problematic as there is no opportunity for self-medication at all. But there's definitely something to be said for the overall health of the population like obesity rates, smoking rates, etc.

varjag 5y ago

Hope that offsets the excess 10k dead.

lazyjones 5y ago
What "excess 10k dead"? Sweden basically only reported excess mortality in early 2020 and since then it has a mortality deficit.
- varjag 5y ago
  Sweden has ~14k official COVID deaths. Neighbouring Norway, at half the population and a moderate lockdown/PPE policy, has ~800 COVID deaths. The culture, climate, population density and demographics are very close. All these extra Swedes died for sheer ineptitude of their government. There's hardly any difference in economic impact either.
  - ptr 5y ago
    The socioeconomic group that had the most deaths were people of foreign background aged 65 or more. Maybe Sweden just has a proportionally larger group of those?
  - lazyjones 5y ago
    Covid deaths aren't the same as "excess deaths". It's just one of many causes of deaths over a year. Excess deaths is the difference between expected (typically an average of the past 5 years) and actual number of deaths in a year. IOW, due to the circumstances, excess deaths can be 0 despite Covid deaths being > 0.
  - Dwelve 5y ago
    Just so we are clear. You're saying that if Covid didn't kill anybody, Sweden would have seen [1] 97k - 14k == 83k deaths in the year of 2020? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-deaths/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
- ctvo 5y ago

giorgioz 5y ago

Is it just me or there are A LOT of articles about how Sweden is better in doing X coming from the US and the UK recently? What's going on here? Frankly it seems a bit of nationalist content marketing after the 10th article I read in 3 years. Most of the times the articles claim Sweden is doing better X but that X could easily be applied to several other countries in Europe. "Sweden offers free health care and education"... yeah A LOT of countries in Europe do that. For this article too it seems the overall achievement of Sweden are shared by many other countries by somehow Sweden is being singled out. I even googled it and found this: https://si.se/en/annual-report-of-the-image-of-sweden-abroad-2018-summary/ https://si.se/en/annual-report-of-the-image-of-sweden-abroad... Is there a cultural infatuation between the US/UK and Sweden? Is Sweden activally investing resources to improve their perceived image?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- onemorepasta 5y ago
  Can you paste this one more time please. Do it for daddy.
throwaway_fjmr 5y ago
Nope, you are looking at an article from the right-wing, anti-lockdown, COVID-sceptic Telegraph ;)
T-A 5y ago
> Is Sweden activally investing resources to improve their perceived image? Yes. Look at the About page on that site you found: https://si.se/en/about-si/our-mission/ https://si.se/en/about-si/our-mission/ The Swedish Institute is a public agency that promotes interest and trust in Sweden around the world.
anigbrowl 5y ago
The funny thing is that the people glorifying Sweden's COVID-19 response historically reject comparisons with the country in other areas like human rights, penal policy, economic model, taxation policy etc. etc.

drudoo 5y ago

Non-Swede who lived in Sweden basically all of 2020 here. We basically self isolated most of the year and only did grocery shopping with masks and keeping distance but a lot of people really did not care about social distancing or masks. My wife and I were often very uncomfortable being out of the house and really did not like the relaxed guidelines. We commuted a lot to Denmark and the contrast was huge. We felt so much safer and comfortable being out shopping in Denmark compared to Sweden. We moved to Denmark start 2021 and has been back and forth between the two countries monthly and there’s still a big difference in behavior.

TheGigaChad 5y ago
Soy
jansan 5y ago
So now that Denmark is lifting basically all measures, are you planning to move on?
- marvin 5y ago
  Practically everyone is vaccinated now, or very soon. Most people who were in favor of social distancing measures don't want this stuff to be codified indefinitely, just because they like limiting people's lifestyles. The intention has always been to mitigate the worst health effects of covid, which means temporary measures.

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Good luck changing the opinion of the cuckdowncels.

kybernetikos 5y ago

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 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 difference between them and their neighbors isn't small. Counterfactuals are always hard, and there might be valid non-lockdown related excuses for why Sweden did so poorly, but it's really strange to be reading articles about how well Sweden has done.

Closi 5y ago
Eh, It all depends how you look at the statistics. Consider the below: * Sweden had c14k deaths. Average age of death was in the eighty's - let's say Covid shortened life expectancy by 10 years on average (seems a conservative figure). Total life lost is c140k life-years. * If Sweden locked down like other countries for a year, this would have been 10m people * 1 year = 10 million years of lockdown. Let's say that people had a life that was 10% worse during that time because of the restrictions of lockdown, that's 1 million quality-adjusted life years lost. If you are trying to optimise for "total quality-adjusted life years" as a society across the full population rather than just 'save lives' - Sweden's approach looks absolutely valid and correct. If your measure of success is 'minimise the absolute number of lives lost to Covid, no matter what the cost' then it looks poor.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Personally I used this time to improve my relationship with my wife and improve myself. The loss this year isn't the loss of socialization or income it is the literal loss of our family members and friends who died and the loss with lesser measures could only be greater. I think attempts to quantify value of life are fraught with problems and absurdities. Consider an 80 year old whose average life expectancy based on health was just a year. Certainly you wouldn't suggest he be killed if it might save some 9000 people an hour in traffic? The problem lies not merely with the incorrect assignment of the value time during lockdown as having zero value itself clearly erroneous but with the idea that lives and time are so trivially fungible that you can come up with an acceptable number of hours stuck in your house watching netflix to folks slowly suffocated in their own fluids. There is no such algorithm that reasonable people could agree on in good faith even if we started with the best of intentions.

jaggs 5y ago

This narrative has been on-going during the pandemic. Easy to follow the money - https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/conservative-media-push-swedens-coronavirus-response-even-evidence-suggests-it https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/conservati...

beaunative 5y ago

People, wake up, Sweden is so loosely populated that the safe-distance is (almost) the regular distance. You risk of doing the same thing in Bay Area would result in more cases and deaths exponentially.

frankbreetz 5y ago

I see a lot of articles about how government reactions were good or bad for COVID. I have seen nothing regarding how a country's environment and population density affect COVID, I guess it is hard to push an agenda with that narrative. It seems the country's that "responded" the best all have low population density and/or are physically isolated from other countries. I see people praising leadership from places like New Zealand and South Korea, but maybe it is just easy to keep people out of these places.

lrgzdmn 5y ago
> I have seen nothing regarding how a country's environment and population density affect COVID This article does address that.
alliao 5y ago
South Korea/Taiwan don't have low population density. Best response comes from states with educated citizens with good basic hygiene and understanding of exponential so are able to accept early intervention. NZ have the benefit of citizens actually trust the government; bit of a wet dream for many politicians around the world.
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  It seems improbable that all the best responses were all effectively isolated island nations. I think they may have another advantage.
  - lmm 5y ago
    This article is coming from Britain which is also an island nation, yet had a significantly worse pandemic experience.
qayxc 5y ago
> I see people praising leadership from places like New Zealand and South Korea, but maybe it is just easy to keep people out of these places. There's two components to this. The first is indeed that both countries are relatively isolated islands. Yes, South Korea is technically a peninsula, but the part that connects it to the mainland is separated by the best guarded border in the world, so... But the second component is how the situation was (and still is) handled: instead of waiting for exponential growth of the rate of new infections, both countries went into full emergency mode immediately. South Korea in particular applied lessons learned during the SARS crisis about a decade earlier and invested heavily in automated testing equipment, etc. In Europe, one of the critical failures was the inability to quickly and cost-effectively ramp up testing due to the lack of automated lab equipment. Other critical aspects of disease control included traceability, which worked exceptionally well in South Korea due to the excellent cell coverage and prevalence of smartphone app usage (plus permissive and practical data protection laws) and willing participation and support of the population. New Zealand is quick to order measures even if a single case is being reported. This prevents exponential spreading and keeps measures such as lock-downs short and reduces the overall negative impact. So it's really not just the location, but a number of measures that most other countries simply failed to take. The geography helps a lot, though, no question.

polote 5y ago

Can we ban discussion of covid restrictions on HN ? At that point nobody is going to change his position. Pro lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns dont work Anti lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns works. There is no point keep talking about it, unless you want to loose your time arguing with someone who will never agree with you. There was a post on HN a few days ago "Why it is so hard to be rational ?" [1], it perfectly describes the current situation. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28197482

bsaul 5y ago
Please, let’s not ban one of the rare place where people of different opinions can exchange links and arguments with a pretty decent average scientific ground. Banning and expelling difficult topics from the public space has become far too common.
naasking 5y ago
> Anti lockdown people will not change their opinion even if there are proof that masks mandate and lockdowns works Even if they do work it's barely relevant to the argument that lockdowns should be avoided. Lockdowns would have to work and be less harmful overall than cutting off or reducing access to everything else people depend on in society, like schooling, mental health services, cancer diagnostics and treatment, and so on and so forth. That's a tall order. Anti-lockdown people who claim lockdowns don't work are surely employing motivated reasoning.

black_13 5y ago

This is not science

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sorenjan 5y ago

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-19-mobilitetsanalys https://www.telia.se/privat/aktuellt/hemma-i-folknatet/covid... [1] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...

GuB-42 5y ago

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.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

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-coronavirus-deaths-in-the-nordics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron...

mikem170 5y ago
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/Study-compares-deaths-in-Sweden-and-Norway-before-and-after-COVID-pandemic.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  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.
  - mikem170 5y ago
    I didn't mean it as an argument. Just throwing an additional fact out there. It seems to be relevant, given the impact that covid has on people over 60/70/80/90 years old.
Dwelve 5y ago
"Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead." How the hell is saying shit like this allowed on this website?!?! Tell that headline to the relatives of the dead!?? Are you serious?

danfo 5y ago

The Queensland experiment: how 70 days of lockdown led to 448 days of paradise The Telegraph's title glosses over other factors, so hey: This one ^ does too! I am relieved by my region's luck and the collective will to move the goalpost of success to be 'limiting the number of people dying of COVID'. It has been basically normal life domestically besides scattered lockdowns for 5 million people, without losing parents, grandparents; 1 death per M here compared to Sweden's 1425, USA's 1895. National vaccination rate is lagging, on track to be sufficient in October, when the national modelling (Doherty) shows we will be sweet to test, trace, isolate, quarantine our way to control/suppression without need for further lockdown ad infinium. Just one precarious month in the way...

wesleywt 5y ago

These articles ignore places like Italy and now Florida where it did not go well. Conveniently.