News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus strategy’. Parent comment

Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by jonplackett on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @05:31PM (#24426151)
Isn’t the point that they didn’t close the country so that’s a massive up side.

Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway.

(For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by pjc50 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @05:40PM (#24426256)
The UK has been characteristically incompetent; missing PPE, incoherent advice, incoherent track and trace (somewhat substituted by local authorities actions), pushing people into old people's homes without testing, and the Barnard Castle incident.

How many cabinet ministers have you seen in masks?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by jonplackett on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @06:35PM (#24426698)
Well, Boris and Hancock have no need - they just went and got coronavirus by being idiots.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by wolco on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @05:40PM (#24426255)
Now if you started sooner and if people took it more seriously perhaps numbers would be different.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by jonplackett on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @06:35PM (#24426691)
They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by elcritch on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @07:07PM (#24426984)
Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by jonplackett on Thursday September 10, 2020 @03:10AM (#24429722)
I saw some research the other day that they think the decrease in death rate is because everyone is wearing masks and social distancing. Therefore anyone getting sick is getting a very low viral load compared to before. If comparing to flu we should compare to pre-lockdown, pre-mask death rate.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by matz1 on Thursday September 10, 2020 @08:29AM (#24431640)
No, The decrease of death rate is because more testing done on more people. The more you test, the larger the number of asymptomatic/mild symptom case you have, thus decrease the death rate.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by elcritch on Thursday September 10, 2020 @02:07PM (#24434946)
I could see both, and likely both would need to be part of estimation. It's not binary, but likely, 20% due to mask lowering viral exposure loads, 50% due to more healthy people (hence asymptomatic) getting the virus.

However, that doesn't invalidate the overall comparisons. Countries like Sweden have a lowering death rate despite no broad mask wearing (https://fortune.com/2020/07/29/no-point-in-wearing-mask-swed...). You can see an example graph here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...

[ Parent | on HN ]