from Hacker News

Why No One Wants to Talk About Sweden

by malchow on 4/19/22, 4:39 PM with 46 comments

  • by AIorNot on 4/19/22, 6:17 PM

    Well regarding the Western response to COVID and “lockdowns” - Tell this story to doctors and nurses in wards where young people died gasping for breath (so many I personally know of) - of course we needed to lockdown

    Insane that a contagious disease directly killed over 50,000 young people (under age 50) in the usa alone and we are still debating if our lockdown response was disproportionate?

    It’s simple - people were dying who should not normally be were and the medical community was overwhelmed - we needed to lockdown untill a we knew that an effective vaccine worked or the effective transmission rate declined, or the virus mutated into a safer variant

    Wars and terrorism killed far less and the impact was far greater as well

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

  • by bjornsing on 4/19/22, 6:18 PM

    This Johan Anderberg is a complete crank. He spent much of the pandemic with state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and his predecessor Johan Giesecke, who gave him access so that he could write a book. It’s some kind of weird bromance between the three of them.

    Fact is that Johan Giesecke was completely wrong about almost every epidemiologically important property of SARS-CoV-2. I documented his delusions here already in April 2020: http://www.openias.org/swedens-covid19-strategy

  • by sharemywin on 4/19/22, 5:18 PM

    Sweden should be compared to other Nordic countries with similar demographics etc.

    https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/12/what-have-norway-...

  • by jgrahamc on 4/19/22, 4:52 PM

    I flew from Portugal to Sweden during 2020 and it was a very strange feeling. Masks on the plane all the way to Stockholm and then... nothing. Swedes were going about their business as usual.

  • by thawaya3113 on 4/19/22, 11:26 PM

    Sweden’s death toll is at least twice as much as all it’s comparable neighbors and it’s economy was the worst performing of the lot.

    There is no point comparing Sweden to “at least 56 countries that did worse” because Sweden is a highly advanced society with excellent healthcare infrastructure (poor healthcare infrastructure is very strongly correlated with worse outcomes).

    Sweden’s entire original approach (which they changed, btw, after which their death rate plummeted) was based on a single fallacy. That asymptomatic people did not spread COVID. Unfortunately, since Tegnell refused to initially believe this, which led to a lot of deaths, he doubled down until the evidence for asymptomatic spread became too strong to ignore, at which point Sweden also did change their approach, and incorporated lockdowns, etc into the mix of tools that they used.

    Of course, by that point our understanding of COVID was much better, testing was far more prevalent and widespread, efc. So lockdowns we’re not really necessary outside of rare circumstances.

  • by SideburnsOfDoom on 4/19/22, 7:08 PM

    I doesn't seem to be true that "No one wants to talk about Sweden".

    There's been a fair amount of talk recently on the topic, e.g.

    Scathing evaluation of Sweden's COVID response reveals 'failures' to control the virus https://abcnews.go.com/Health/scathing-evaluation-swedens-co...

    "Sweden's record is disastrous"

    https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-31/sweden-cov...

    "Study details COVID's toll on essential workers, health workers in Sweden"

    https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/04/study-de...

    "Sweden’s Deadly COVID Failure"

    https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/06/Sweden-Deadly-COVID-F...

    Dispute the conclusions all you want .. but they are talking.

  • by ohiovr on 4/19/22, 10:24 PM

    In the 1980s we were told that if you were in a group that you are unable to question the authority of, you were in a cult.

  • by karmakaze on 4/19/22, 10:24 PM

    It's easy to say things in retrospect after a risky gamble ended up being not as bad as feared. Sweden's neighbours fared better.

    I'm glad for how things we're handled in Canada, except that I wish we'd locked down sooner and harder at the start of subsequent waves. I also welcome many of the changes that were accelerated, notably working from home and elimination or simplification of many fees and services. Having hand sanitizer everywhere is also great for cold/flu seasons too.

  • by powerslacker on 4/19/22, 9:04 PM

    > In the US, the average guess in mid-July was that 9% of the population had died.

    We need some studies on how bad the average American is at guesswork. 9% is an incredibly bad guess.

  • by hitovst on 4/19/22, 7:34 PM

    People must learn that everything is a pretense. It might also be something else, but everything will be used as a pretense.

  • by malchow on 4/19/22, 4:40 PM

  • by AnEro on 4/19/22, 6:10 PM

    Obviously just looking at numbers without context of differences between Sweden and other countries it looks bad...

    There's other really well written articles from PHDs about how their model literally would only work in Sweden.

    The author is only bestseller of a book based on their experience not a perspective from someone trying to approach it like an academic as far as I can tell.

  • by infamouscow on 4/19/22, 4:49 PM

    The history books will not be kind to those that supported lockdowns, nor should they be.

  • by cutler on 4/19/22, 6:50 PM

    No mention of the article's subject matter - Sweden - until paragraph 6. Sorry, you lost me.