from Hacker News

The Swedish Pandemic Approach: Now we know the results

by ptr on 3/12/23, 7:39 AM with 21 comments

  • by Symbiote on 3/12/23, 1:20 PM

    This blog plucks the most positive figure and quote from a more balanced article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe...

    And this article compares figures from various sources, which aren't all in agreement: https://www.thelocal.dk/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...

  • by jadamczyk on 3/12/23, 8:30 AM

    Looking only at excess mortality is pretty shallow. Being European and knowing the differences in health care systems across countries, the excess mortality chart also reflects the quality of healthcare systems in these countries. It isn’t much surprise to see nordic countries being the best here.

  • by slaw on 3/12/23, 12:50 PM

    > The main reason for this different strategy was that the covid-19 mitigation in Sweden was handled by the expert agency, the Swedish Health Agency.

    That's the opposite to other countries, where covid-19 mitigation was handled by media and bureaucrats.

  • by erwald on 3/12/23, 1:15 PM

    Excess mortality still looks substantially higher in Sweden than in Norway and Denmark (though not Finland) in this OWID data set, I wonder why the difference?

    - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...

  • by sam_goody on 3/12/23, 12:46 PM

    Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor.

    On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities that were taken advantage of by others. So from that perspective there are many politicians that are laughing their way to the bank.

    Lock downs became a political tool early on, and any place that still forces lock downs or masking is because politics. Which makes comparing them to another country an apple-and-oranges comparison.

  • by ofcourseyoudo on 3/12/23, 4:09 PM

    Throughout the lockdown Sweden had consistently worse death statistics than Denmark, Norway and Finland, which make the most sense to compare to geographically and culturally.

    And it's still true Sweden's approach was worse than theirs:

    > However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.

  • by lolc on 3/12/23, 1:35 PM

    That "result" is a fished statistic, as explained in an article of The Local: https://web.archive.org/web/20230310094110/https://www.thelo...

    Looking at the numbers in retrospect we see that the approach taken by Sweden was a good one. Just picking this one statistic out of many possible is dishonest though.

  • by readonthegoapp on 3/14/23, 4:17 AM

    posted a new blog post that lied on a 2-year old article. nice.