If we want to ask the question what Sweden actually did, the answer is a bit more traditional in terms of science and a bit less interesting for anyone including the media.

Covid infections are not evenly spread. The most vulnerable people are not evenly spread, as is high risk areas.

Sweden did shut down and restrict a lot of those things. The elder care was compared to prison, with people doing "prison breaks" through open windows. Sports, bath houses, concerts, and similar places were closed down. People were strongly discouraged from using mass transit. Infection were still located mostly in hot zones around the large cities, in general where the large concentration of elderly care is located, and those working there had the full setup with mask and face protection and gloves and so on.

To me it seems like the different strategy can be classified as either targeted or generalized. Sweden went with a mostly targeted approach, although not as effective as it could have been since it was initially a bit delayed.

One other major decision that the Swedish government did was to remove the so called "karensdag". Before the pandemic people who got sick had to go without pay for the first day of the sickness, a measure that was likely there to discourage people from falsely calling in sick. By removing it they made it very clear to people to stay at home if they feel sick, with only 20% reduction in pay if you call in sick.

The point about "karensdag" isn't quite true as the max compensation for it is significantly lower than 80% of your salary (afaik it's 810 SEK for that day).

Didn't know that. 810 SEK for a day after tax represent a 80% monthly salary of around 30k before tax if my math is right, which is slightly lower than the median income which is 32k. That might be significant lower than for most people on HN. It would be interesting to know how they determined that number and how many people that requests the money are hitting the max.

Not only that. The government also took over the payment of the first 14 days of sick pay - previously paid by the employer.

Nevertheless the titular question deserves to be raised. We heard no end of derision for Sweden's outlier approach when they were having a rough time of it, but now things are better - radio silence. Why? What is behind this?

Similarly, the fact that yet again in a thread on this topic, perfectly reasonable comments are being downvoted to oblivion, should give everyone serious cause for concern about the way things are going.

> Nevertheless the titular question deserves to be raised

Does it though?

Or is it "just asking questions" about the competence of experts and "the media"?

What's wrong with asking questions about the competence (and honesty) of experts and "the media"?

Asking questions is obviously fine. "Just asking questions" is a specific bad-faith rhetorical tactic: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Nothing is wrong with a good-faith question asked out of an honest curiosity.

Have you looked at which countries were identified as high risk back in April 16 2020?

https://www.newsfirst.lk/2020/04/16/sri-lanka-ranked-16th-am...

Then compared it to actual deaths?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

we only ever hear about another country when they're doing worse as it's a good way for politicians to boast about their own strategies.

> Nevertheless the titular question deserves to be raised. We heard no end of derision for Sweden's outlier approach when they were having a rough time of it, but now things are better - radio silence. Why? What is behind this?

Things are better due to vaccinations having been administered fairly successfully.

It would be unwise to accept the numbers presented in this article without any skepticism, in particular given that the author is very transparent about their agenda (discredit mask usage). The numbers are very cherry-picked to precisely fit their argument.

First off - herd immunity was never the strategy to combat COVID-19 in Sweden. We had some forms of restrictions, we mostly just strayed from the 'majority' of countries, if you will, by not mandating that some businesses shut down, and by not making mask usage mandatory. Notably, we also do not mandate quarantine for arriving travelers - we merely encourage it.

Sweden, their response to COVID-19 and the results of that response are most accurately discussed in the context of our close neighbours. It would be inaccurate to measure against other countries with wildly differing cultures and economic situations, it's making too much of an apples to oranges comparison. The death rate numbers in that context (which as you may note are conveniently left out by the author) speak for themselves - Swedens death rate per capita is around 3 times as high as the next neighbor, Denmark (1434/million vs 449/million), 7 times as high as Finland (190/million) and 9 times as high as Norway (157/million). These numbers should be expected to more or less converge now that we have vaccinated at fairly similar rates, and hence comparisons of recent numbers, as made in the article, is fairly useless.

> but now things are better - radio silence. Why?

Because it’s expected in a highly vaccinated population.

Israel and UK are highly vaccinated, but their things are pretty far from being better.

I don't have the numbers handy for the U.K. I'm copy pasting what I dredged up for an earlier comment on the comparison with Israel.

As of Sep. 1, 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated. Sweden seems to be close to, if not already at, the coveted herd immunity by vaccination. In comparison, in Israel, 65% have had one shot and only 60% are fully vaccinated (a smidge over half of those 3x).

> 82% of eligible Swedes have had one shot, and 70% are fully vaccinated

You should compare eligible to eligible, not 82% of eligible Swedes to 65% of all Israelis.

In Israel, "eligible" includes being over 12 years old (the vaccines aren't approved for younger children yet), and according to NPR, as of a month ago "78% of eligible Israelis over 12 years old are vaccinated."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

I am taking data from Google search page, it claims it took it from Our World On Data.

Sweden: 61.9% of population fully vaccinated, Israel: 61.6% of population fully vaccinated. Those numbers are pretty much the same.

I think your error was to compare % of elegible Swedes and % of Israel population.

Anyway, I still think that Israel is highly vaccinated. If I sort Google data by % of population vaccinated, I see typical result is 70%-75%, bar microscopic countries like San Marino or Malta. Undervaccinated countries like Argentina or Brazil are at 35%-45%.

Israel was among the first countries to reach a vaccinated majority in March 2021, thats likely where this common wisdom comes from. but since then it appears that the vaccination rate has stagnated.

From Aug 20, "That means only 58% of Israel's total citizenry is fully vaccinated. [1]"

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/08/20/1029628...

Exactly. Even though I thought the author was bringing up an important point, I couldn't take them seriously due to the repeated finger-pointing and the conspiracy-theorist attitude.

Ironically this is the exact point criticised by the article.

Namely people's preference for pseudoscientifically presented factoids of arbitrary provenance over more fruitful, curated discussions in more approachable, honest language.

Sure, let's totally ignore that and instead turn to places where the same topic is discussed in a calm, scientific, factual manner, that does not involve conspiracies and finger pointing. BTW, where is that? Could you point me to such places that are discussing Sweden and Israel data right now?

It's humorous to me that you're dismissing this particular criticism of the Western media's "global think" COVID response in the same exact way that the media and the experts have been dismissing criticism for their repeated contradictions and invalid causation resulting from inability to correctly correlate a lot of COVID data. Additionally, this article isn't written to share suggestions. It's to demonstrate that there are more than one way to handle a crisis that nobody knows how to deal with and instead of pointing fingers and blaming we should be looking at data.

> It's to demonstrate that there are more than one way to handle a crisis that nobody knows how to deal with

This the article doesn't succeed in doing. It's so focussed on the rhetorical aspects of rubbing the nose of MSM in the failure of their claims, which in and of itself is OK, that it doesn't invest enough to succeed in its attempts to argue for its claims beyond that. While I narrowly agree with many of the criticisms, I don't think the article justifies any wider conclusions beyond "be skeptical of media narratives". I'm not upvoting this story.

This article is being dismissed because it is not a good-faith question, nor is it being asked out of an honest curiosity.

Can you even post about your doubts anywhere on the internet without hordes of "The Media", "The Science", "The Experts" coming for you trying to scold you, cancel you, report you to your employer?

Obviously, I'm don't consider myself an expert in the medical field but the mere draconian groupthink has left a bitter taste in me and has clouded my judgement.

There are literally millions of bad takes, every day, on every social media available, that don't get canceled. It is a microcosm of drama that has been shown the largely irrelevant in the real world.

Reddits conspiracy channel is the best. But it's absurd we have to be called conspiracy theorists to have an intelligent discussion these days.

Sort that channel in "top per day" mode and a real discussion is going on.

reddit's conspiracy channel is groupthink (or, the lacking of critical thought?) at it's absolute worst. Point out the obvious flaws in their reasoning, get banned, just as fast as any other subreddit. In short, reddit is cancerous no matter the forum.

Same, and this is my problem with almost all that want mandates to end: what is the proposed solution, then?

Also, to me at least there is very clear motivation for governments to keep people alive and profit motive for vaccine manufacturers to make vaccines that work.

Unfortunately these days we seem to live in a world where 100% effort is put into criticizing actions and 0% into searching for a better solution.

The assumption that there must be a solution, and if someone isn't presenting one then they're a bad and unhelpful person, is the fallacy at the root of a lot of these problems. It is possible for problems to exist that people, and especially governments, cannot solve, or for which all the "solutions" are worse than the problem. Pointing out when that seems to be the case is not problematic, and in fact is a valuable service that should be praised, exactly because so many people get stuck in this mental rut of "if you don't have a solution you shouldn't speak at all".

talk about a hard-to-take-seriously, unhelful comment, at the top no less... so reactionary, no suggestions, just complaints... perhaps just a little charity would suggest that the mere framing of a problem helps people further frame solutions, that more than one post just might be warranted for such an encompassing topic.

in any case, rather than obsessing over irrelevant minutiae as the mediopolitical machine has done over the past 2 years to their own substantial benefit, what we should have done is simple: (1) quarantine the elderly with their caregivers (well-supported/-compensated, on a rotating basis), (2) be mindful only of long, close indoor exhaust-sharing (not incidental/public contact), and (3) quarantine when sick. but otherwise, get on with life absent economic ravagement, mass psychosocial injury, increased socioeconomic inequality, and depressed health and welfare. then when the vaccines came, (4) supply (not mandate) them to the vulnerable and the risk-averse.

this is basically what sweden did except for #1, which is where their mortality rates took a big hit. this approach is well supported by the available scientific evidence, unlike most of what we did, but it has no mediopolitical support, which is why it's so woefully under-considered and under-recommended.

So don't criticise the government and their experts if you can't do better? Sorry, I expect them to do much better than me, at least.

> Being helpful takes a whole other kind of person

^ this sounds like an ad-hom

This article is cherry-picking. There are good reasons why people often compare Sweden with similar neighboring countries like Denmark and Norway. The less similar the compared countries are, the more additional factors need to be taken into account: health systems, compliance levels, population density, population habits and frequency of contacts, how they deal with elderly and how often young and older people mix, economics, and so on and so forth.

Experts will provide thorough analysis of fatality rates and the effectiveness of healthcare measures, but it will take a while and I'd rather wait a few years until emotions have cooled down and this is no longer such a "political issue" (most of it is not, but some people chose to make it one). Personally, I'm quite happy with how my host country Portugal dealt with the crisis.

Sadly the lies, skewed narratives and new kinds of ideologies are abundant in media, politics and counter-culture this day.

Here are a couple of key concerns that I have with the data and the anti-covid measures : 1) There is no baseline. How many people die with a postive PCR-test for influenza or other coronaviruses each year? Did we ever test millions of sick people? 2) How did the morbidity actually change after the spread of Sars-CoV-2? If you want to measure this you need to compute some age-adjusted probability that people will die in a given year. Data from germany suggests that although ~100k people died, the probability to die didn't change much or at least changed around a typical baseline for the last 10 years. 3) If age-adjusted morbidity didn't change then PCR-tests measure natural morbidity to a large extend. 4) Nobody is talking about the negative impact of the lockdown. To name a few : less births in several countries in the EU, inflation, +60% cases of anorexia in german youth, +10% increased tabacco usage in germany, no proper schooling for 2 years, social cooling in general, ... I could go on endlessly. 5) The language changed. There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019. This is very worrysome in my opinion because it shows a radical change in ideology of the population that goes way beyond a pandemic and shows changes in mass psychology.

1-3: Have you heard of "excess mortality"? (Genuine question, not snark). That's commonly used as a measure to understand the underlying mortality rather than "death within X days of a positive PCR test". E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

4: People are absolutely talking about the negative impact of the lockdowns. I'm not sure why you think otherwise - there have been robust debates about this, at least in the UK media. Perhaps what you mean is that you think it hasn't been taken into account in a way that you'd like?

5: This is a once-in-a-century event. Of course there's new language around it.

As mentioned in the article Sweden is part of EUROMOMO that tracks excess mortality which doesn't measure if someone died from covid or from negative effects of a lockdown but simply that they died.

Even though it's downplayed in the article Sweden had significant excess mortality in the spring of 2020 and at the turn of 2020-2021 compared to other countries like Norway and Finland that are used as benchmarks in the article.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

1: This has nothing to do with excess mortality per se but rather with proper data analysis.

2-3: That's exactly what I mean but you should not measure excess mortality as absolute deaths / million people but you should adjust for demographics. Because if you have older population, you will have more expected deaths. And if you adjust for age the excess mortality vanishes for germany.

4: Yes, it is talked about but not to the extend that would be necessary. In reality most people experience the various negative consequences of the lockdown policies but very few the negative consequences of the virus.

5: This is certainly debatable. If you compare this to the HIV-pandemic (still ~1mio Deaths / yr), then Covid has a factor of 10^5 more public attention (but 2x the death toll). A similar number of people die of tuberculosis. Nobody knows how many people die of influenza or coronavirus each year. We suspect there are 100 Mio dengue virus infections each year. Nobody knows what a once-in-a-century pandemic is. It seems to be a matter of public attention and newness instead of careful data analysis.

Necessary for what? To convince everyone to stop with masks and restrictions?

It's not just about mortality rates. The other problem is hospitalizations. If you get in a bad car accident, get a bad infection, or have a pregnancy go bad you want an ICU bed not occupied by someone drowning from COVID. I expect most of these mortality rates are from places that didn't have their hospital systems collapse and have to ration care. I think US is heading there in some states, then mortality will get closer to that hospitalization rate.

Excess mortality has to somehow account for reduced commuting, reduced regular medical visits, more domestic violence, etc it's a mixed bag when you are dealing with pandemic behavioral changes do they have real models for all that?

The same baseline problem holds for hospitalizations as well. Nobody knows how many hospital beds were occupied in the last 10 years. Evidence points to a strong decrease in hospital capacity in germany at least in the last 20 years. Talking about "collapse of hospital system" is very bad in my opinion. No data shows that this actually happened in the EU at least. Also keep in mind that there is always (year does not matter) some place on earth where a hospital may collapse. So bergamo (italy) for example is just anecdotal evidence.

On possibly reduced mortality by lockdown : OK, fair enough. I think you can see it in decreased car accidents in germany and also in seemingly low influenza associated deaths. But my theory is that influenza and sars2 are evolutionary competing for vulnerable individuals and sars2 seems to be winning right now. I saw a nice study showing this for several flu-like viruses a couple of years ago. But getting enough and clean data for problems like this is very hard.

I think the lockdown has almost nothing to do with the virus but is a strange reaction to increased pressure of globalization and digitalization on the societies as well as a global economic crisis. Maybe lockdown policies will stay for a long time. But not to protect us from a dangerous virus but to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy.

Here in Buenos Aires, 2 months ago, we a big covid19 wave an we had more than 90% of occupation of the ICU beds, after delaying all the medical procedures that was possible to delay. It was not normal, because during the rest of the pandemic it was much smaller, and the government of the city, and the government of the province that controls most of the area of the extended metropolitan area were worried. (They also had different opinions about how strict should be the lockdown, so they blamed each other.)

In Austria there were multiple times that all planned operations have been postponed. This has never happened previously. I would present that as a clear case of this being a different situation.

I'm talking from the point of view that the lockdown measures managed to keep ICU capacity open which reduced our current excess mortality observed. As far as I've read ICU capacity dropped greatly in many countries over the past decades, but my thinking is that we can't easily argue the various lockdown measures were bad using figures like national excess mortality because our current measures don't share the same baseline as an unrestricted pandemic free society.

Everyone has had vastly different experiences with the virus which affects views of the lockdown and behaviors.

Within the first few months of it in the US lost 3 coworkers to it, 1 known personally all around the same time. No clear mortality rate at the time, lockdowns made sense to us, it was real, we stayed masked up and crazy isolated. By comparison to my father who knew no one affected at all for the first year or longer. So to everyone outside of NY and California or wherever it started it was a whole lot of nothing. Either anxiety of virus that wasn't nearby for the vulnerable or another media hype like Swine flu or Avian flu or MERS that never really hit.

I'm sure there are still plenty of people who haven't been directly affected by the actual virus just the restrictions, only know people who maybe had a positive test or a short fever with their kids. When people only get news loosely from posts on the internet I'm sure many ignore or miss the semi-regular pleas from doctors and nurses to take it seriously and keep the F out of the hospitals. Like one I recently saw from Florida.

I consider COVID a new killer in addition to flu, I assume flu vaccines actually work (imperfectly) to lessen symptoms and everyone's annual clichè claims that the vaccine makes them sick or does nothing is just repeating the same old shtick. To be fair I have no data to back that up that the influenza vaccine does anything but I think it just underscores the vague distrust of medicine floating about. I'm almost a scientist and optimistically drink the koolaid and get my flu shot annual and trust that government fda, cdc, whatever generally does want medicines to actually work to keep people working.

"to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy."

I don't usually go along with these things that sound like grand control conspiracies.

The anxiety about globalization and digitization is probably part of all the conspiracy thinking. Globalization is moving what used to be semi livable jobs out and replacing livable wage work with software engineering and advanced degree jobs or rent seeking almost exclusively. Everyone else is getting squeezed by big corps, franchise contracts vs minimum wage, high tech gear with no right to repair, etc. Grand control conspiracies in my mind are a weird commiserating hope that the world sucks on purpose because some elite levers of power are making it that way when really the world sucks because a bunch of simple systems chasing money or power are making a big complicated mess the crushed the unlucky under the cruel invisible hand of the market.

On the other hand hearing vaguely about Turing being part of a team successfully handling details from the cracked enigma machine to steer WWII without letting Nazis realize the code was broken seems to give credit to the idea that the knowledge collected by agencies like the NSA could be used by geniuses around the world to manipulate things. But if they exist they do a great job making governments look dumb...

Sorry this turned into word spaghetti.

Mass anxiety is not a conspiracy theory but rather a measurable social effect. See social cooling.

I didn't say there is somebody controlling or forcing the population into technocracy. What I meant is that it is inevitable to some degree that tech will continue to shape our society in unexpected and unintended ways.

Even if I did. Nothing is wrong with good conspiracy theories. Sometimes they turn out to be true.

> There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019.

For example?

In germany at least... Maybe it is very different elsewhere... I hope so...

> In germany at least

For example?

Chin diaper