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I just can't take this article seriously, so reactionary, so rebellious. All the criticism it applies can be applied to itself. At the end of the day, there's a

I just can't take this article seriously, so reactionary, so rebellious. All the criticism it applies can be applied to itself. At the end of the day, there's a lot of data that is hard to correlate and harder to find causation for. This person claims to know better, yet provides no suggestions, just complaints, pointing fingers at imaginary figures like "The Media", "The Science", "The Expert". People that just like to complain and point the finger aren't helpful. Being helpful takes a whole other kind of person, and this article isn't helpful.

ducktective 5y ago
Can you even post about your doubts anywhere on the internet without hordes of "The Media", "The Science", "The Experts" coming for you trying to scold you, cancel you, report you to your employer? Obviously, I'm don't consider myself an expert in the medical field but the mere draconian groupthink has left a bitter taste in me and has clouded my judgement.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  There are literally millions of bad takes, every day, on every social media available, that don't get canceled. It is a microcosm of drama that has been shown the largely irrelevant in the real world.
- peakaboo 5y ago
  Reddits conspiracy channel is the best. But it's absurd we have to be called conspiracy theorists to have an intelligent discussion these days. Sort that channel in "top per day" mode and a real discussion is going on.
  - glennvtx 5y ago
    reddit's conspiracy channel is groupthink (or, the lacking of critical thought?) at it's absolute worst. Point out the obvious flaws in their reasoning, get banned, just as fast as any other subreddit. In short, reddit is cancerous no matter the forum.
ayberkt 5y ago
Exactly. Even though I thought the author was bringing up an important point, I couldn't take them seriously due to the repeated finger-pointing and the conspiracy-theorist attitude.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  Ironically this is the exact point criticised by the article. Namely people's preference for pseudoscientifically presented factoids of arbitrary provenance over more fruitful, curated discussions in more approachable, honest language.
- smsm42 5y ago
  Sure, let's totally ignore that and instead turn to places where the same topic is discussed in a calm, scientific, factual manner, that does not involve conspiracies and finger pointing. BTW, where is that? Could you point me to such places that are discussing Sweden and Israel data right now?
erichahn 5y ago
Sadly the lies, skewed narratives and new kinds of ideologies are abundant in media, politics and counter-culture this day. Here are a couple of key concerns that I have with the data and the anti-covid measures : 1) There is no baseline. How many people die with a postive PCR-test for influenza or other coronaviruses each year? Did we ever test millions of sick people? 2) How did the morbidity actually change after the spread of Sars-CoV-2? If you want to measure this you need to compute some age-adjusted probability that people will die in a given year. Data from germany suggests that although ~100k people died, the probability to die didn't change much or at least changed around a typical baseline for the last 10 years. 3) If age-adjusted morbidity didn't change then PCR-tests measure natural morbidity to a large extend. 4) Nobody is talking about the negative impact of the lockdown. To name a few : less births in several countries in the EU, inflation, +60% cases of anorexia in german youth, +10% increased tabacco usage in germany, no proper schooling for 2 years, social cooling in general, ... I could go on endlessly. 5) The language changed. There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019. This is very worrysome in my opinion because it shows a radical change in ideology of the population that goes way beyond a pandemic and shows changes in mass psychology.
- frereubu 5y ago
  1-3: Have you heard of "excess mortality"? (Genuine question, not snark). That's commonly used as a measure to understand the underlying mortality rather than "death within X days of a positive PCR test". E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~IND https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... 4: People are absolutely talking about the negative impact of the lockdowns. I'm not sure why you think otherwise - there have been robust debates about this, at least in the UK media. Perhaps what you mean is that you think it hasn't been taken into account in a way that you'd like? 5: This is a once-in-a-century event. Of course there's new language around it.
  - 5y ago
Chris2048 5y ago
So don't criticise the government and their experts if you can't do better? Sorry, I expect them to do much better than me, at least. > Being helpful takes a whole other kind of person ^ this sounds like an ad-hom
13415 5y ago
This article is cherry-picking. There are good reasons why people often compare Sweden with similar neighboring countries like Denmark and Norway. The less similar the compared countries are, the more additional factors need to be taken into account: health systems, compliance levels, population density, population habits and frequency of contacts, how they deal with elderly and how often young and older people mix, economics, and so on and so forth. Experts will provide thorough analysis of fatality rates and the effectiveness of healthcare measures, but it will take a while and I'd rather wait a few years until emotions have cooled down and this is no longer such a "political issue" (most of it is not, but some people chose to make it one). Personally, I'm quite happy with how my host country Portugal dealt with the crisis.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sakopov 5y ago
It's humorous to me that you're dismissing this particular criticism of the Western media's "global think" COVID response in the same exact way that the media and the experts have been dismissing criticism for their repeated contradictions and invalid causation resulting from inability to correctly correlate a lot of COVID data. Additionally, this article isn't written to share suggestions. It's to demonstrate that there are more than one way to handle a crisis that nobody knows how to deal with and instead of pointing fingers and blaming we should be looking at data.
- chalst 5y ago
  > It's to demonstrate that there are more than one way to handle a crisis that nobody knows how to deal with This the article doesn't succeed in doing. It's so focussed on the rhetorical aspects of rubbing the nose of MSM in the failure of their claims, which in and of itself is OK, that it doesn't invest enough to succeed in its attempts to argue for its claims beyond that. While I narrowly agree with many of the criticisms, I don't think the article justifies any wider conclusions beyond "be skeptical of media narratives". I'm not upvoting this story.
- nzealand 5y ago
  This article is being dismissed because it is not a good-faith question, nor is it being asked out of an honest curiosity.
seanp2k2 5y ago
Same, and this is my problem with almost all that want mandates to end: what is the proposed solution, then? Also, to me at least there is very clear motivation for governments to keep people alive and profit motive for vaccine manufacturers to make vaccines that work. Unfortunately these days we seem to live in a world where 100% effort is put into criticizing actions and 0% into searching for a better solution.
- native_samples 5y ago
  The assumption that there must be a solution, and if someone isn't presenting one then they're a bad and unhelpful person, is the fallacy at the root of a lot of these problems. It is possible for problems to exist that people, and especially governments, cannot solve, or for which all the "solutions" are worse than the problem. Pointing out when that seems to be the case is not problematic, and in fact is a valuable service that should be praised, exactly because so many people get stuck in this mental rut of "if you don't have a solution you shouldn't speak at all".
belorn 5y ago
If we want to ask the question what Sweden actually did, the answer is a bit more traditional in terms of science and a bit less interesting for anyone including the media. Covid infections are not evenly spread. The most vulnerable people are not evenly spread, as is high risk areas. Sweden did shut down and restrict a lot of those things. The elder care was compared to prison, with people doing "prison breaks" through open windows. Sports, bath houses, concerts, and similar places were closed down. People were strongly discouraged from using mass transit. Infection were still located mostly in hot zones around the large cities, in general where the large concentration of elderly care is located, and those working there had the full setup with mask and face protection and gloves and so on. To me it seems like the different strategy can be classified as either targeted or generalized. Sweden went with a mostly targeted approach, although not as effective as it could have been since it was initially a bit delayed. One other major decision that the Swedish government did was to remove the so called "karensdag". Before the pandemic people who got sick had to go without pay for the first day of the sickness, a measure that was likely there to discourage people from falsely calling in sick. By removing it they made it very clear to people to stay at home if they feel sick, with only 20% reduction in pay if you call in sick.
- Shaanie 5y ago
  The point about "karensdag" isn't quite true as the max compensation for it is significantly lower than 80% of your salary (afaik it's 810 SEK for that day).
  - belorn 5y ago
    Didn't know that. 810 SEK for a day after tax represent a 80% monthly salary of around 30k before tax if my math is right, which is slightly lower than the median income which is 32k. That might be significant lower than for most people on HN. It would be interesting to know how they determined that number and how many people that requests the money are hitting the max.
- gerikson 5y ago
  Not only that. The government also took over the payment of the first 14 days of sick pay - previously paid by the employer.
hanoz 5y ago
Nevertheless the titular question deserves to be raised. We heard no end of derision for Sweden's outlier approach when they were having a rough time of it, but now things are better - radio silence. Why? What is behind this? Similarly, the fact that yet again in a thread on this topic, perfectly reasonable comments are being downvoted to oblivion, should give everyone serious cause for concern about the way things are going.
- ipv6ipv4 5y ago
  > but now things are better - radio silence. Why? Because it’s expected in a highly vaccinated population.
  - SergeAx 5y ago
    Israel and UK are highly vaccinated, but their things are pretty far from being better.
    - ipv6ipv4 5y ago
      I don't have the numbers handy for the U.K. I'm copy pasting what I dredged up for an earlier comment on the comparison with Israel. As of Sep. 1, 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated. Sweden seems to be close to, if not already at, the coveted herd immunity by vaccination. In comparison, in Israel, 65% have had one shot and only 60% are fully vaccinated (a smidge over half of those 3x).
      - leereeves 5y ago
        > 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated You should compare eligible to eligible, not 82% of eligible Swedes to 65% of all Israelis. In Israel, "eligible" includes being over 12 years old (the vaccines aren't approved for younger children yet), and according to NPR, as of a month ago "78% of eligible Israelis over 12 years old are vaccinated." https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628471/highly-vaccinated-israel-is-seeing-a-dramatic-surge-in-new-covid-cases-heres-why https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...
clairity 5y ago
talk about a hard-to-take-seriously, unhelful comment, at the top no less... so reactionary, no suggestions, just complaints... perhaps just a little charity would suggest that the mere framing of a problem helps people further frame solutions, that more than one post just might be warranted for such an encompassing topic. in any case, rather than obsessing over irrelevant minutiae as the mediopolitical machine has done over the past 2 years to their own substantial benefit, what we should have done is simple: (1) quarantine the elderly with their caregivers (well-supported/-compensated, on a rotating basis), (2) be mindful only of long, close indoor exhaust-sharing (not incidental/public contact), and (3) quarantine when sick. but otherwise, get on with life absent economic ravagement, mass psychosocial injury, increased socioeconomic inequality, and depressed health and welfare. then when the vaccines came, (4) supply (not mandate) them to the vulnerable and the risk-averse. this is basically what sweden did except for #1, which is where their mortality rates took a big hit. this approach is well supported by the available scientific evidence, unlike most of what we did, but it has no mediopolitical support, which is why it's so woefully under-considered and under-recommended.

ducktective 5y ago

Can you even post about your doubts anywhere on the internet without hordes of "The Media", "The Science", "The Experts" coming for you trying to scold you, cancel you, report you to your employer? Obviously, I'm don't consider myself an expert in the medical field but the mere draconian groupthink has left a bitter taste in me and has clouded my judgement.

Daishiman 5y ago
There are literally millions of bad takes, every day, on every social media available, that don't get canceled. It is a microcosm of drama that has been shown the largely irrelevant in the real world.
peakaboo 5y ago
Reddits conspiracy channel is the best. But it's absurd we have to be called conspiracy theorists to have an intelligent discussion these days. Sort that channel in "top per day" mode and a real discussion is going on.
- glennvtx 5y ago
  reddit's conspiracy channel is groupthink (or, the lacking of critical thought?) at it's absolute worst. Point out the obvious flaws in their reasoning, get banned, just as fast as any other subreddit. In short, reddit is cancerous no matter the forum.

ayberkt 5y ago

Exactly. Even though I thought the author was bringing up an important point, I couldn't take them seriously due to the repeated finger-pointing and the conspiracy-theorist attitude.

tpoacher 5y ago
Ironically this is the exact point criticised by the article. Namely people's preference for pseudoscientifically presented factoids of arbitrary provenance over more fruitful, curated discussions in more approachable, honest language.
smsm42 5y ago
Sure, let's totally ignore that and instead turn to places where the same topic is discussed in a calm, scientific, factual manner, that does not involve conspiracies and finger pointing. BTW, where is that? Could you point me to such places that are discussing Sweden and Israel data right now?

erichahn 5y ago

Sadly the lies, skewed narratives and new kinds of ideologies are abundant in media, politics and counter-culture this day. Here are a couple of key concerns that I have with the data and the anti-covid measures : 1) There is no baseline. How many people die with a postive PCR-test for influenza or other coronaviruses each year? Did we ever test millions of sick people? 2) How did the morbidity actually change after the spread of Sars-CoV-2? If you want to measure this you need to compute some age-adjusted probability that people will die in a given year. Data from germany suggests that although ~100k people died, the probability to die didn't change much or at least changed around a typical baseline for the last 10 years. 3) If age-adjusted morbidity didn't change then PCR-tests measure natural morbidity to a large extend. 4) Nobody is talking about the negative impact of the lockdown. To name a few : less births in several countries in the EU, inflation, +60% cases of anorexia in german youth, +10% increased tabacco usage in germany, no proper schooling for 2 years, social cooling in general, ... I could go on endlessly. 5) The language changed. There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019. This is very worrysome in my opinion because it shows a radical change in ideology of the population that goes way beyond a pandemic and shows changes in mass psychology.

frereubu 5y ago
1-3: Have you heard of "excess mortality"? (Genuine question, not snark). That's commonly used as a measure to understand the underlying mortality rather than "death within X days of a positive PCR test". E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=USA~GBR~CAN~DEU~ITA~IND https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... 4: People are absolutely talking about the negative impact of the lockdowns. I'm not sure why you think otherwise - there have been robust debates about this, at least in the UK media. Perhaps what you mean is that you think it hasn't been taken into account in a way that you'd like? 5: This is a once-in-a-century event. Of course there's new language around it.
- 5y ago

Chris2048 5y ago

So don't criticise the government and their experts if you can't do better? Sorry, I expect them to do much better than me, at least. > Being helpful takes a whole other kind of person ^ this sounds like an ad-hom

13415 5y ago

This article is cherry-picking. There are good reasons why people often compare Sweden with similar neighboring countries like Denmark and Norway. The less similar the compared countries are, the more additional factors need to be taken into account: health systems, compliance levels, population density, population habits and frequency of contacts, how they deal with elderly and how often young and older people mix, economics, and so on and so forth. Experts will provide thorough analysis of fatality rates and the effectiveness of healthcare measures, but it will take a while and I'd rather wait a few years until emotions have cooled down and this is no longer such a "political issue" (most of it is not, but some people chose to make it one). Personally, I'm quite happy with how my host country Portugal dealt with the crisis.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

sakopov 5y ago

It's humorous to me that you're dismissing this particular criticism of the Western media's "global think" COVID response in the same exact way that the media and the experts have been dismissing criticism for their repeated contradictions and invalid causation resulting from inability to correctly correlate a lot of COVID data. Additionally, this article isn't written to share suggestions. It's to demonstrate that there are more than one way to handle a crisis that nobody knows how to deal with and instead of pointing fingers and blaming we should be looking at data.

chalst 5y ago
> It's to demonstrate that there are more than one way to handle a crisis that nobody knows how to deal with This the article doesn't succeed in doing. It's so focussed on the rhetorical aspects of rubbing the nose of MSM in the failure of their claims, which in and of itself is OK, that it doesn't invest enough to succeed in its attempts to argue for its claims beyond that. While I narrowly agree with many of the criticisms, I don't think the article justifies any wider conclusions beyond "be skeptical of media narratives". I'm not upvoting this story.
nzealand 5y ago
This article is being dismissed because it is not a good-faith question, nor is it being asked out of an honest curiosity.

seanp2k2 5y ago

Same, and this is my problem with almost all that want mandates to end: what is the proposed solution, then? Also, to me at least there is very clear motivation for governments to keep people alive and profit motive for vaccine manufacturers to make vaccines that work. Unfortunately these days we seem to live in a world where 100% effort is put into criticizing actions and 0% into searching for a better solution.

native_samples 5y ago
The assumption that there must be a solution, and if someone isn't presenting one then they're a bad and unhelpful person, is the fallacy at the root of a lot of these problems. It is possible for problems to exist that people, and especially governments, cannot solve, or for which all the "solutions" are worse than the problem. Pointing out when that seems to be the case is not problematic, and in fact is a valuable service that should be praised, exactly because so many people get stuck in this mental rut of "if you don't have a solution you shouldn't speak at all".

belorn 5y ago

If we want to ask the question what Sweden actually did, the answer is a bit more traditional in terms of science and a bit less interesting for anyone including the media. Covid infections are not evenly spread. The most vulnerable people are not evenly spread, as is high risk areas. Sweden did shut down and restrict a lot of those things. The elder care was compared to prison, with people doing "prison breaks" through open windows. Sports, bath houses, concerts, and similar places were closed down. People were strongly discouraged from using mass transit. Infection were still located mostly in hot zones around the large cities, in general where the large concentration of elderly care is located, and those working there had the full setup with mask and face protection and gloves and so on. To me it seems like the different strategy can be classified as either targeted or generalized. Sweden went with a mostly targeted approach, although not as effective as it could have been since it was initially a bit delayed. One other major decision that the Swedish government did was to remove the so called "karensdag". Before the pandemic people who got sick had to go without pay for the first day of the sickness, a measure that was likely there to discourage people from falsely calling in sick. By removing it they made it very clear to people to stay at home if they feel sick, with only 20% reduction in pay if you call in sick.

Shaanie 5y ago
The point about "karensdag" isn't quite true as the max compensation for it is significantly lower than 80% of your salary (afaik it's 810 SEK for that day).
- belorn 5y ago
  Didn't know that. 810 SEK for a day after tax represent a 80% monthly salary of around 30k before tax if my math is right, which is slightly lower than the median income which is 32k. That might be significant lower than for most people on HN. It would be interesting to know how they determined that number and how many people that requests the money are hitting the max.
gerikson 5y ago
Not only that. The government also took over the payment of the first 14 days of sick pay - previously paid by the employer.

hanoz 5y ago

Nevertheless the titular question deserves to be raised. We heard no end of derision for Sweden's outlier approach when they were having a rough time of it, but now things are better - radio silence. Why? What is behind this? Similarly, the fact that yet again in a thread on this topic, perfectly reasonable comments are being downvoted to oblivion, should give everyone serious cause for concern about the way things are going.

ipv6ipv4 5y ago
> but now things are better - radio silence. Why? Because it’s expected in a highly vaccinated population.
- SergeAx 5y ago
  Israel and UK are highly vaccinated, but their things are pretty far from being better.
  - ipv6ipv4 5y ago
    I don't have the numbers handy for the U.K. I'm copy pasting what I dredged up for an earlier comment on the comparison with Israel. As of Sep. 1, 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated. Sweden seems to be close to, if not already at, the coveted herd immunity by vaccination. In comparison, in Israel, 65% have had one shot and only 60% are fully vaccinated (a smidge over half of those 3x).
    - leereeves 5y ago
      > 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated You should compare eligible to eligible, not 82% of eligible Swedes to 65% of all Israelis. In Israel, "eligible" includes being over 12 years old (the vaccines aren't approved for younger children yet), and according to NPR, as of a month ago "78% of eligible Israelis over 12 years old are vaccinated." https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628471/highly-vaccinated-israel-is-seeing-a-dramatic-surge-in-new-covid-cases-heres-why https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

clairity 5y ago

talk about a hard-to-take-seriously, unhelful comment, at the top no less... so reactionary, no suggestions, just complaints... perhaps just a little charity would suggest that the mere framing of a problem helps people further frame solutions, that more than one post just might be warranted for such an encompassing topic. in any case, rather than obsessing over irrelevant minutiae as the mediopolitical machine has done over the past 2 years to their own substantial benefit, what we should have done is simple: (1) quarantine the elderly with their caregivers (well-supported/-compensated, on a rotating basis), (2) be mindful only of long, close indoor exhaust-sharing (not incidental/public contact), and (3) quarantine when sick. but otherwise, get on with life absent economic ravagement, mass psychosocial injury, increased socioeconomic inequality, and depressed health and welfare. then when the vaccines came, (4) supply (not mandate) them to the vulnerable and the risk-averse. this is basically what sweden did except for #1, which is where their mortality rates took a big hit. this approach is well supported by the available scientific evidence, unlike most of what we did, but it has no mediopolitical support, which is why it's so woefully under-considered and under-recommended.