Stockholm (the worst hit part of Sweden) has about half the deaths per capita of the state New York (26 deaths per 100k vs 56 deaths per 100k) despite Sweden having laxer restrictions. And Stockholm is generally more densely populated.

So while I too am a bit skeptical of the Swedish policies it is doing pretty average on a global scale. Worse than some countries with harsh lockdown but also better than some countries with harsh lockdowns. It is too early to say for sure if the Swedish policy was stupid or not.

In Swedish news the currently most popular theory for why we have more deaths per capita than our Scandinavian neighbors is not necessarily our lax lockdown (though it may have made things worse) but lack of supplies and poor routines in old people's homes. This is of course speculation.

Most of the cases in New York are concentrated in and around NYC, which is an international travel hub with 3 very busy international airports in the area. I don't think there are many places in the world which are going to have had the same number of asymptomatic and symptomatic carriers pass through. So on that basis I don't think it's a good benchmark for most other cities or countries to use.

I wonder if it's better to compare Swedens overall per-capita infection rates with other states in the US where there is a lockdown but whose capitals/major cities are more secondary cities from the perspective of international travel. Let's try North Carolina (picked for being closest in population to SE and also being not a top airport hub or travel destination compared to its neighbors) though it does have significant business and educational centers, it's probably a fair comparison to Sweden wrt population density.

NC total population: 10.5 million NC confirmed cases: 7,285

SE total population: 10.2 million SE confirmed cases: 11,445

So anyway, there are other states and countries that are doing better and worse than Sweden, but I don't think that Sweden is in any way demonstrating that it is doing better by trying to ignore the problem and possibly to blame the lack of strict enough sanitation ("lack of supplies and poor routines"), it's just coming later than to higher-volume travel centers like WA, NYC, the UK, France, Italy, etc.

In any case, the idea of doing better or worse will, in the end, be measured in per capita deaths at the end of this disaster, and we haven't gotten there yet. I truly hope that Sweden finds its way through with as few deaths as possible, but I don't think that's what they've done.

You've gotta compare deaths, not confirmed cases, because cases are being so severely under-tested right now (especially in Sweden, which has a nearly 10% case fatality rate, indicating that they're probably only catching 1 case out of every 50, or more). Deaths are the most reliable statistic we have right now because they're the least likely to be under-reported (though they still suffer from that). Once this is all over and we can do population studies based on widespread blood antibody testing then we'll have better stats, but that's years out.

So, comparing the deaths per 10M population, Sweden is currently at 1,014, whereas North Carolina is at 114. So Sweden is suffering roughly one order of magnitude worse from the pandemic than North Carolina is at the moment. And keep in mind that North Carolina went into a shelter in place order over two weeks ago while Sweden hasn't yet, so there's a loooot more pending cases in Sweden's pipeline than NC's.

> Stockholm (the worst hit part of Sweden) has about half the deaths per capita of the state New York (26 deaths per 100k vs 56 deaths per 100k) despite Sweden having laxer restrictions.

So far. It's way too early into this unfolding disaster to be making pronouncements like this while the figures are still increasing exponentially. NYC has had shelter-in-place for several weeks now while Stockholm has not. If you'd done this analysis a week ago, and then two weeks ago, you'd see Stockholm looking progressively better and better in comparison to NYC the more you go back in time. In other words, they're catching up, because here in NY we're sheltering in place and it's working, and in Sweden they aren't (yet) and thus their spread is higher.

> And Stockholm is generally more densely populated.

Not in comparison to NYC it's not, which is the fair comparison for Stockholm because Stockholm is a city whereas all of New York is a much much larger state that amounts to 1/3rd of the land area of the entirety of Sweden. NYC's density is 10,715/km2 vs Stockholm's 4,200/km2.

Is it really the best comparison to use Stockholm vs. New York state instead of Stockholm vs New York city? A city-city comparison seems more logical, no? In the latter comparison, we have NYC 2x as dense as Stockholm with a much larger population.

I don't know the particularities of Sweden, so maybe it makes more sense as you have outlined it. My apologies if that's the case!

Without air traffic and closed borders, a country that's not that affected could get through it with few measures. Not sure if many countries are still at that stage but it's no coincidence that international travel hubs got affected worst.

The good thing is we’ll see in the end. Lots of predictions. It’s almost as if you can’t be criticized for being too cautious. Sure, but the good will won’t last forever.

The US accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking due to flu. That’s just the flu. What’s the magic number we’re willing to accept? 50k? 100? There has to be a percentage of the population we are willing to accept as casualty because we already do, just unstated.

The lockdown will ultimately spread misery far and wide if left unchecked. Massive rise in poverty, violence, drug abuse, depression, crime, suicide, homelessness, prostitution, etc.

People need to be more clear on what they’re willing to accept. Right now there is no real discussion on “what next”. Lots of obsessing over the current body count though.

> accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking

The US spends a lot of effort trying to convince people to get flu shots, take antivirals if they get sick, and stay away from vulnerable populations while contagious; hospitals prepare extensively for increased use during flu season (and medical workers are vaccinated, making flu much less personally risky for them), widely distribute easy-to-administer flu tests, treat people and keep them alive as best they can, etc. Estimated flu death numbers are also not comparable to current reported Covid death numbers, because they include a ton of guesswork, since many of the people who die while infected with flu officially succumb to some other condition (according to death certificates).

We don’t go into total economic lockdown for 2 months per year, because it would be impossible to enforce and extremely expensive, but we sure did during the last comparable pandemic, the 1918 flu.

Currently (and this will hopefully change as medical knowledge improves), Covid seems to be more than 10x more deadly than seasonal flu for most demographic groups. In an unchecked Covid epidemic (with hospitals overwhelmed) it appears that on the order of 1% of the population dies. (This has happened in some towns in Italy, where a very high percentage of the population was likely infected.)

> lockdown will ultimately spread misery

Having 1% of the entire population die within a matter of months is going to cause an extremely severe economic shock with or without official actions.

Let’s not talk abstractly. How many deaths within your family and circle of friends are you willing to accept?

The logic still applies. Obviously, I hope for zero deaths. But I also don’t forbid them from driving, despite the high number of deaths for that mode of travel. I don’t tell them to quarantine themselves every flu season.

Anyway, I’m not sure we’ve overreacted. I’m just saying it’s possible and it’s pretty amazing how it’s hard to have a conversation about it. People treat the topic like there’s only one answer and anyone who dissents is a murderer.

The risks of driving and seasonal flu are fairly well understood. And there are mitigation’s in place: seatbelts, traffic laws, theraflu, flu shots, etc.

I’m not calling you a murderer. I’m asking you to put a hard number in the risk you are willing to absorb.

Mine is 0.

> Mine is 0.

To be perfectly fair, the current lockdown _IS_ going to kill people that would've survived otherwise. People that now won't go into emergency rooms out of fear of contracting Covid19, poor people whose source of income is completely dried out. And longer term, this is going to cost massive amounts of money, a fraction of which would of course be used to prolong someone's life in some way, eventually. I think the question raised in this thread is simply one of "what's the trade-off". It's very clear that there are costs to this lockdown, and at least to me it's also very clear that that some of those costs are human lives. However, we can't estimate those costs. We do have a guess of the rough fatality rate of covid19, and we do have models that will tell us how many people will die if we don't go into lockdown. But we don't have the same luxury for estimating the amount of people hurt and dead because of it that could otherwise be saved. We can quantify the monetary loss, but not how much of that loss would've otherwise gone towards saving lives. I think the question of "what are the human costs of this lockdown" is a fair one to ask. Don't get me wrong, I too think the lockdown makes sense and overall does save lifes. But the lockdown is not without risk, and even more importantly: I have not seen any estimate of the risk. Is it lower than 0.5-5% of the population? I think so, but both of us haven't done the math, so you talking down to people who ask about it is wrong.

> To be perfectly fair, the current lockdown _IS_ going to kill people that would've survived otherwise. People that now won't go into emergency rooms out of fear of contracting Covid19

You've got the blame all wrong here. These people that are dying who would've survived otherwise are directly being killed by the pandemic, not by the lockdown. If the pandemic were completely uncontained then the hospital system would be way more overwhelmed and you'd be much more likely to die of other causes for lack of healthcare. The lockdown is saving lives by helping to preserve healthcare resources so that if you have some other need like a heart attack there might still be a doctor free.

It's not like, if the lockdown weren't happening, then there wouldn't be a pandemic. What would happen is that the pandemic would be way way worse.

Good question. How many deaths within your family and circle of friends are you willing to accept from political instability resulting from lockdowns?

Zero. And so far there have been zero, but I know of people who've actually died from COVID-19.

We are very, very far from political instability still. Let's not be alarmist.

Of course. It's not like a global recession in the midst of widespread political polarization has ever caused problems before.

> The US accepts 22k deaths a year without blinking due to flu. That’s just the flu. What’s the magic number we’re willing to accept? 50k? 100? There has to be a percentage of the population we are willing to accept as casualty because we already do, just unstated.

Unfortunately the worst case death numbers for an uncontrolled pandemic crack into the millions in the US alone. That is, frankly, more deaths than anyone with a sound conscience is willing to accept.

Also, we have vaccines for the flu that significantly decrease your chance from dying of it. I get the vaccine every year. There's a big difference between being completely at the whim of a disease and being able to take proactive measures against it to help protect yourself. The only proactive measure that works against COVID-19 (which is much deadlier than the flu mind you) right now is social distancing, so it's not surprising to see so many people using the only effective measure that currently exists. Don't underestimate people's desire to not suffer a debilitating illness that leaves them unable to breathe for a week before killing them. Social distancing would be happening regardless of the official stay at home orders.

> Lots of obsessing over the current body count though.

I mean ... yeah. These are our friends, our family, our neighbors. Each one of them was a real person who is dying unnecessarily, and more deaths like them could be spared through better social distancing. This isn't "obsessing", it's a very real concern. You'd care more if it were people you knew dying. I've already had people in my extended contacts die of it (I live here in NYC), and it's rough. Hell, I already got it, and fortunately recovered. Let me tell you, spending days unable to catch your breath even just from walking is terrifying. You'd understand more if this was affecting you more personally. It's not just some abstract discussion about numbers.

I keep hearing these stories about how Sweden's approach will end in disaster, but their new case rate is ~500 per day with >10,000 existing cases. A 5% growth rate of new cases strongly implies that they are already past the peak.

What am I missing that would imply things are about to get vastly worse there?

(I do see some other specific mistakes there that lead to a higher death rate, but I don't see the concern about things suddenly getting worse in the future)

Existing cases counts are at worst fantasist, at best state and policy dependent. You can't compare case counts between countries.

Then what you're missing is that sweden case counting method report very low numbers (either that or their mortality rate is absurdly high, which seems more unlikely).

And a good contrast is Bulgaria, which shutdown early, on March 13th or so (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-bulgar...), and which has a death rate on par with South Korea's. The neighbouring countries (Romania, Serbia, Greece) are also low but at least 2x that rate.

it all depends on circumstances. Romania had 400k workers returning from Italy in the past month. It is harder to contain.

On a per capita basis sweden isn't really more worse off than many other countries that have shutdown. It's about middle of the pack. Personal responsibility lets us have our cake and eat it too.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

> On a per capita basis sweden isn't really more worse off than many other countries that have shutdown.

This is so untrue.

Norway and Denmark had initially many more cases then Sweden but since their curves flattened.

As of yesterday

Norway - 26 deaths / milion

Sweden - 102 deaths / million

Denmark - 52 deaths / milion

But there is also "Beglium - 359 deaths / million" which had early lockdowns. They started their lockdown one day before Denmark. By cherry picking countries one can chose a story to tell. I think it is too early to say if Sweden's strategy was stupid or not.

Belgium counts deaths not in hospitals much more accurately. Really, looking at worldometer numbers and comparing between countries makes no sense whatsoever, yet everyone (including media) does it anyway.

Belgium has people concentrated in a few centers, is a travel hub in the middle of Europe and has a high density of EU employees. With that they imported cases from pretty much everywhere at an early stage.

Know what else Belgium has? A flattened growth rate. Sweden’s on alone a bad track.

I guess Denmark and Norway as both Nordic countries with similiar wealth and culture are as similar to Sweden as possible.

one can argue that Sweden has a larger immigrant population than those countries. Majority of deaths in Sweden are from immigrant populations. They are blamed for not following the social distancing rules that most Swedens follow day to day. Also they are poorer, live in larger families in small houses etc. and it is harder for them to follow the rules.

One can also argue that the virus doesn't care about your ethnicity, and just because it's hit some particular community hard first doesn't mean it's not going to spread through the rest of your society too absent serious measures being taken. In the US, focusing on the "others" who had the virus, in our case the Chinese, while not taking effective measures early enough to stop the disease, was a huge mistake. It was a distraction, an excuse for racism and not doing more. This is not just a disease of poor immigrants. It's coming for everyone.

How much of that is related to a higher percentage of black people doing more dangerous jobs (one with increased contact with the public)

Of the three people they mention in the article, two take buses.

There's not even an attempt to control. Are black judges living in Westchester statistically more likely than white judges living in Westchester to suffer more from the disease?

That doesn't remotely change the fact that non-black people are still dying in droves, and you can't attempt to minimize this pandemic as saying "Well it's mostly black people dying, so if you're not black don't worry", which is the analogy to the post about the poor foreign immigrants dying from it in greater numbers in Sweden.

Don't just drop a link, let's hear your real argument here.

I'm not making an argument. I'm just providing a reference to counter the claim made. I have no dog in this fight other than I like to see references and evidence. Hence why I only dropped a link. You don't need to pick fights with everyone, you know?

Belgiums population density is much much higher

U.K. 166 deaths per million with a full lockdown in place

"with a very late full lockdown in place". It actually proves that locking down early works and things get out of control extremely fast

It doesn't prove anything about lockdowns given that the UK has plenty of healthcare capacity and in fact like elsewhere its hospitals are nearly empty right now. If fewer British people survive in their hospitals all it may show is those hospitals aren't very good, but it wouldn't be due to being "too late" as that would require deaths due to overload.

If you look at the huge drop in cardiac ER admissions it's clear that people are dying because they are having heart attacks and not going to hospital when they should. There's actually a severe problem with hospital underload right now. Governments, supposedly following the science, have built emergency field hospitals and shut down other medical work to protect hospitals that are now nearly empty. This was not predicted by anyone pushing lockdowns and is a grotesque mis-prediction with deadly consequences.

Nobody will talk about it at the moment, but I suspect when all this is studied in years to come the UK will be seen to have done worse partly because its population over-reacted to government extortions to "stay home, save the NHS". People are going to die just because they aren't going to hospitals they've been told they need to "protect" as some sort of moral mission. The NHS is often called a national religion, which isn't quite right - it's a religion to some and unfortunately those people aggressively attack anyone who points out what an institutional failure it is. It's easily believable that people will be avoiding hospitals in the UK in greater numbers than elsewhere right now.

We need to watch out for a lot of retroactive nonsense in the coming months. People will claim epidemiologists predicted all this (they didn't), that the lack of lockdown explains differing death rates (already disproven completely by the case of Sweden). Cold logic is all that will clear the fog.

You may want to pick a less terrible example. UK went into lockdown very late, tried to insist on some bullshit herd immunity theory, very nearly lost even its PM, and is now paying the price in blood.

That's extremely overdramatic.

UK was the country that first wanted to isolate the elderly and get young people infected and immune. The current case count is a reflection of that rather than the lockdown which came afterwards.

False. Sweden has had no lockdown at all and has had less fatalities per capita.

Yeah not really worse off, just worse off than all their neighbors?

They have roughly an order of magnitude more deaths per million than Finland does (11.6 vs 99). We're somewhat locked down in Finland.

By “personal responsibility” I guess you mean something like «each individual person makes their own decisions without official guidance about how their behavior might affect their neighbors – during a severe crisis when nobody has access to complete or accurate information – and we just all hold our breaths and hope none of them make bad choices».

Personally I would call this “government irresponsibility”, but I guess we’ll find how it turns out within a few more weeks.

I’m not sure “have our cake and eat it to” is a good way to describe a crisis that is killing a whole lot of people and smashing the economy (in Sweden and many other places).

> and we just all hold our breaths and hope none of them make bad choices. Personally I would call this “government irresponsibility”, but I guess we’ll find how it turns out within a few more weeks.

This approach absolutely infuriates me too, and it is the fault of "the government", but I am very curious what a more precise explanation is. Is it the current individuals in government? The ongoing culture within government? The broader culture of the country? Or maybe a mix of some of these, plus other things that I'm not able to perceive or imagine.

I bet we (humanity) could get get pretty close to the correct answer, if we made a collective and proper (easier said than done) effort to find out.

A good first step would be for you to stop supporting racist misogynistic islamophobic homophobic xenophobic narcissistic politicians who are pathological liars, science deniers, global warming deniers, and who don't believe doctors and epidemiologists, but do spread racist conspiracy theories.

Hi Don, I am always glad to hear from you (and I mean that 100% sincerely, though that may be hard for you to believe) - I think our perspectives and axioms are so incredibly divergent, that with a little effort on both our parts, a tremendous amount of learning could be achieved from proper discussion.

> A good first step would be for you to stop...

I have no hesitation whatsoever to admit that your approach may be correct, and mine incorrect, but I suspect this feeling is not mutual - is my intuition correct?

The problem (or more accurately, a problem) we have under our current form of democracy (in the US) is that we have an infinite number of variables that can be taken into consideration (and different people will select a different set for analysis), but we are only offered a single choice, with two options: Democrat or Republican.

I can respect your decision (analysis), and would be happy to devote literally hours to listening to your reasoning (I've extended such an offer in the past, as you may recall), but I suspect you don't feel the same way. Rather, it seems to me that you are determined to not like me, and accordingly, will look only at variables that support your conclusion, even if the values of those variables are absolutely incorrect (because they are based not on evidence, but rather speculation within your own mind).

In all of our conversations, you exhibit (so I perceive) extreme confidence and certainty in your beliefs, as well as an utter lack of concern (if not even realization of the very possibility) for the notion that you may not 100% correct in your beliefs - not just about me and my true beliefs, but also what is the necessary set of actions to achieve your (and my!) intended goals. If my perception is accurate, and if you are unwilling/unable to realize and rectify this situation, it seems reasonable that the consequences of this is that you will continue to have a highly flawed model of me in your mind.

I would recommend thinking of such ideas via mental experiments, such as: if one wrote software with such disregard for the importance of accurate analysis of reality, would you expect your program to function correctly? I suspect not. So why then would you expect different behavior when it comes to human and societal interactions? After all, are humans not in a sense extremely analogous to hardware that is executing software, all within a shared, interactive environment? I like to conceptualize humanity as a kind of MMORPG, not only because it's fun to look at it this way, but I think there is great utility in viewing things from a third person perspective, as it can often be helpful in achieving greater emotional separation from the situation, and therefore realize clearer thinking.

Furthermore, I speculate that if this sort of behavior is occurring at scale (across the broad population), the consequence may be that we may never be able to turn this ship around, and things will continue to get worse - ironically, bring about the very opposite of what your intended goal is!

Once again, I am putting a stake in the ground. Throwing down the gauntlet. I challenge you to engage in a proper conversation, with the goal (at least) of discovering what I really believe. I'm not asking that you agree with me, but only to face what my beliefs really are. Thus far, you[1] have been unwilling to engage in a serious, nuanced conversation, or even admit (consider?) that there could be value in such an exercise. You are free to do as you choose of course, as am I. I will continue to occasionally post comments from my perspective, and be open to proper discussion and challenges from all sides. If you choose to continue to respond with downvotes and inaccurate, hateful accusations, that is your right (although technically, it is very much counter to the HN Guidelines). And even though you may feel hate for me, and "people like me" (or so you subconsciously speculate), I will not feel hate for you, or people who hold beliefs similar to yours, because that road leads to hell.

[1] Actually, this is a bit harsh in that it could easily be interpreted as an assertion that you are unique in this regard. Rather, quite the opposite is true - it is my perception that I haven't encountered a single comment that has indicated a willingness to properly consider my fairly unique perspective. To be clear, this is not an assertion that all people on HN are in some way guilty of wrongdoing, but only that I have not encountered anyone "doing the right thing", for my definition of "the right thing" (dealing with this subset of reality honestly and ethically).

As predicted.

Let me know when you muster up courage proportional to your ego, and maybe we can have a discussion that consists of something more than insults and evasive tactics.

I'd say it's too early to tell. The consequences can lag for up to three weeks, no?

I hope you're not looking at case numbers, because Sweden is so far behind on testing compared to most of europe.

Look at the rate of growth for deaths per day (filtering out weekends because obviously swedes refuse to die on weekends)

Most places are seeing a plateau in number of daily deaths while Sweden is still growing exponentially

I'm looking at deaths per capita. It can still be manipulated but it's the hardest to manipulate.

Look at the trend... 15% of their deaths happened in the past 24 hours

It's very hard to compare the US with Sweden. In Sweden people are able to stay at home without losing much income due to a strong welfare state - which has also been made event stronger due to the virus. In the I assume that a lot of people would be economically forced to disregard "personal responsibility".

On the other hand, Sweden also took measures, they just weren't as extreme. The virus spread in Europe mainly through travel and large groups of people. Sweden has neither (also because no neighboring country would allow travel). They didn't impose a lock down but it's not like nothing happened in Sweden.

Anders Tegnell - author of Swedish strategy says that the measures are working and deaths are concentrated in Somali, Iraqi and Syria - born population.

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/folkhalsomynd...

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/2Gx0Ev/fodda-i-somalia-...

Country of birth Number of cases Over-representation

Somalia 283 7

Turkiet 150 5,1

Irak 242 2,9

Finland 188 2,3

Eritrea 55 2,1

Syrien 197 1,8

Iran 83 1,8

Forna Jugoslavien 60 1,6

So pehaps this is what's been planned after all. Remember that Swedish eugenics laws lapsed only in 1976.

https://www.economist.com/europe/1997/08/28/here-of-all-plac...

But it's not stopping the spread. A friend's office in Västerås just had a case and only now went wfh, while that friend already wfh but still drops off and picks his kids up from school and is getting symptoms now.

The comment about the deaths being primarily in particular communities sounds like the opposite of working, though. Can you provide context regarding why it's working if people in some communities are dying?

* Edit: thanks for clarifying. I didn't realize that your comment about measures working as intended was hinting at a eugenics motives of the policymakers when I first read it, but do now.

Well the real reason there is no lockdown in Sweden is that the owners of the country said No to lockdown. The rest is just unique Swedish doublespeak.

https://www.ft.com/content/3b8ec9fe-6eb8-11ea-89df-41bea0557...

> An estimate from The Economist finds that the value of Swedish billionaires’ fortunes is equivalent to a quarter of the country’s annual gdp. Only in tax havens such as Cyprus or Monaco, or captured economies such as Russia or Georgia, are plutocrats more dominant

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/11/28/in-sweden-bill...

Maybe it's just concentrated on poorer parts of the population? Generally poorer people tend to live closer together and can't afford staying home when they're sick. Immigrants tend to be poorer in most countries, including Sweden. I'm not sure how it helps to name place of birth for infected, finding out the actual factors determining the spread would be more helpful.

Perhaps. Or perhaps cultural behavioral norms, or even just lack of understanding due to language barriers is to blame. Strategic, covert genocide seems fairly unlikely to me, but then I'm relying purely on personal heuristics, which in turn rely upon my limited knowledge of Sweden.

Keeping with the spirit of precision:

- that doctor is making a prediction about the future, based (in part) on evidence that you and I are unable to verify

- there has been no shortage of incorrect opinions and predictions from those who are genuine experts throughout this crisis

Please note that I am not disagreeing with you. Rather, I am adding benign supplementary information.