> 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.