Sweden 1.456 Norway 0.194 Denmark 0.489 Finland 0.236

Saying Sweden has "just survived" doesn't capture these numbers well, I think. If this is "embarrassing" for anyone, it's Sweden, but I wouldn't use the word embarrassing. It's tragic.

Besides, people keep comparing Sweden to Norway, Denmark and Finland, which is a bad comparison as the demographies are very different.

Rather surprised you don't think Norway and Denmark are appropriate peers against which to compare Sweden. So please provide better suggestions for peers, rather than comparing it as you are, apparently, against Greece.

The urbanization % for the four countries are: 82.9%, 87.9%, 85.5%, and 88.1%. Which one of those do you think is Sweden? Do you think it's at all plausible that such small differences could account for an order of magnitude more deaths?

> The country also has more people who don’t speak the native language

What are the numbers, and why would that be relevant?

Europe "just survived" the black plague (1/3rd of Europe died). Life on Earth "just survived" the Chicxulub impactor (the Dinosaurs and 90% of species on Earth died). People who say flippant things like this are unserious and frankly, dangerous.

Could you post a clarifying remark on what you consider the correct place to draw the line where more inconvenient quarantine measures are warranted?

It's pretty obvious that this is a very contentious subject. But it's also very obvious that a considerable democratic majority in most Western countries seems to agree on where the line should be drawn for their community, and that this line is much more conservative (on the side of public health getting priority over business as usual) than with most earlier pandemics. This is an interesting policy development.

Locking down has tremendous costs whether mental or economic, you just can't compute and make a nice graph of it.

The gorilla in the room that no one’s wants to acknowledge…we locked down to allow people who were likely to die within the next 3-5 years to maybe survive a couple of those years. The price of the lockdowns economically, physical health, mental health, and in education will be paid by folks who were probably never in much danger from this virus for decades.

I fully believe that historians will look back at this time and talk of the lopsided cost/benefit.

How many people die in car accidents each year?

I'm curious what you think of Florida, which has had almost no restrictions for a majority of the pandemic and yet is actually doing better than some other states. Seems to disprove your assertion?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/438009/number-of-road-de...

I understand that's not currently the case in a lot of the world, which is why I think cars need to be banned eventually, not right now.

Which implies you have some problem with the ordinary state lockdowns. These were certainly poorly executed and yet we can Sweden with nearly ten times the casualties-per-capita of an equivalent nation (Norway). Where my actual point about people taking their own measures is that life was sucky in Sweden as well as the rest of the world.

So what you effectively saying is: "I don't care if things were not that different in practice, for my principle of freedom, I'll 10K deaths without quality of life that different."

Edit:

"the people could largely be trusted with taking appropriate measures"

Trust is a pretty disingenuous term here. What's actually happened is that the people who took risks were the people who economically forced. Ironically, that include workers who took care of the elderly; poorly paid in Sweden and elsewhere, they then took their infections to the elderly concentrated in homes. Stopping this would have required more measures than any of the nations were will to do.

I disagree with him but I wouldn't want to silence him. He needs to feel free to express his viewpoint and we should feel free to attack those views with other views and maybe throw in some facts to strength our case.

Of course, someone can also say everyone has bias what with it being a global pandemic, but it's still useful to be cognizant of said biases.

You can also compare with other neighbors and Europe: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Is that a pragmatic-enough reason to significantly deteriorate the economy and mental health of the enormous majority of people?

Sweden had no advantage over its neighbors on the economic outcome, and you'd need to cite real data in order to make an argument for mental health. Naïvely assuming a causal relationship with quarantine measures for both without considering positive effects of better health outcomes (and other factors) is fallacious.

It is still an exponential curve that will overflow all the hospitals the moment you stop paying attention, causing hundred thousands of additional deaths indirectly due to overworked med staff.

Object permanence is a thing.

Isn't that just exacerbating the problem? Were those unvaccinated medical workers really killing more people than they saved? I honestly don't know but it doesn't feel like we really did the calculus and are instead just shooting from the hip.

These are the people we all called heros just a year ago. Again, are they really killing more people than they saved?

As long as that makes essential things such as grocery shopping more dangerous for others, such as myself, no.

Don't want to get sick? Order groceries online and have them delivered to your door.

And that since we can’t hold individuals responsible, everyone else needs to alter their behavior?

That is, one infectious person wandering around a grocery store gets to force everyone else to shop online and is not doing anything wrong?

I'm all ears!

I truly hate that guy, but “facts don’t care about your feelings”.

If humans evolve to adapt then those adaptations may come at the cost of something else, given large enough time scales.

But we don't regular wear masks during winter nor enforce limited capacity or hours or quarantines. Personally of those options I'd be down for short term, financially assisted family quarantine and punishments for going to work sick.

In the history of our species, we have never been this connected on a global level before, we were potentially sitting on a timebomb just waiting for the appropriate viral trigger to bring it down.

If you're restricting your own behavior, stop. If you're being restricted by third parties, seriously consider moving or outright disobeying. This doesn't end until people (not politicians) make it end.

There's no reason for me to brag here. You can pretend I am an unhealthy, fat hick if it makes you feel better. For anyone else who is thinking of becoming a bit more self sufficient and is chafing under the yoke, I would recommend leaving the large cities foremost, and buying a house on some arable land. Read "The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency" for a primer on what is possible.

But the problem is that governments change. I'll move somewhere and a new government will get voted in that'll change the game again..

https://corpo.metro.ca/en/covid-19-cases-ontario.html

No but they tend to become less severe for the surviving population. Either because susceptible individuals don't make it or the immune system is learning and the virus runs out of good mutations. So far it seems that higher transmissibility was the driving factor. We still have a large percentage of the population waiting for their first infection. Next we will see more immune escape variants and then probably come the variants that diversify but they will probably run out of useful mutations and our trained immune systems are better at preventing severe infection. It could take some more years and some more severe waves (and some calm years in between) until we arrive there.

The new Joker we have are mRNA vaccines with which we might quickly sharpen our immune response before the main wave of a new variant arrives.

That “just surviving” came at a huge cost of lives.

1. Can't access the vaccine, 2. Can't take it for medical reasons 3. Who are scared/skeptical of getting it due to misinformation (often spread by those in power). Florida could have pushed for higher vaccination rates, but mainstreamed misinformation and skepticism instead

Lockdowns are not about overcoming it; they're about saving lives. I think it's fair to say that the lockdowns saved quite a lot of them. Looking at how the death charts correlate with lockdown impositions might support this viewpoint.

2 years of this is a non trivial amount of time.

We are all alive in our heads just like you are in yours.

To suggest it is totally cool to play this game 2 years into this requires an awful lot of privilege.

There is no certain amount of privilege required to "play this game" for 2 years than 1 year, or 1 month. You're setting up arbitrary lines in the sand and pretending they're laws of nature or maybe government.

I understand 2 years is as long as you want to wait, but we're all doing things we don't want to be doing. Such is the cost of living in a society.

In the mean time we have developed numerous vaccines and possible treatments, and have only seen a handful of dangerous mutations. The lockdowns certainly seem to be working as intended.

RNA viruses have high mutation rates and variants will never end in the same way that flu & common-cold variation continues. The more interesting question is how will our immune systems adapt and will vaccines continue to provide protection against severity of illness at the same time as they apply selective pressure that enhances viral transmissibility?

Of further interest is why Japanese and Taiwan infection and severity rates remain comparatively low and what - if any - role their openness to a certain anti-parasitic, protease inhibiting drug has played in their success.

Also of great interest is why aspiration isn't mandatory in the US to prevent the vaccine from entering the bloodstream (primarily the heart) rapidly and in large quantities.

Many unanswered questions.

We know that obesity is a large driver not just in severity, but transmission.

When you compare a world map of obesity rates to Covid death rates, you'll find a better match than any other single variable, far better-matching than income, masking, density, or any other single variable.

Just a stab in the dark, but generally high social conformity and particularly mask wearing.

There's a trial study currently in progress in Japan to investigate this, but all the evidence we have points to ivermectin being of no benefit to Covid patients unless they have parasitic worms. See, for example: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t...

It's not an unanswered question, in other words. Ivermectin doesn't help against Covid.

Wearing face masks in public places.. indoors and outdoors. Social distancing is non existent considering how crowded places can be.

The same story applies to China, Hong Kong, Macau and S. Korea as well as some countries in SE Asia like Vietnam. Face mask wearing is culturally acceptable/normal in this part of the world so that's why people there started wearing them as soon as stuff started kicking off in Jan 2020 without their governments telling them.

People on HN are arguing over scientific papers on whether face masks are effective. You don't need scientific papers when these countries are proof that face mask wearing is effective.

Less people infected, lower chance of mutations. You will not hear about new SARS-COV-2 variants first being detected in these countries.

Societies survive these things, usually; it's people who die.

If I had to guess our future, COVID will become endemic but with less potency. We will manage it with vaccines and anti-virals.

Lockdowns and restrictions? Frankly, I don't think business will allow it, particularly given how hard it is to demonstrate their efficacy (we can't look at the parallel universe where restrictions weren't imposed by a nation).

We have managed to clear out measles, so we should be able to stop COVID as well with high enough vaccination rates. Although this is not apples-to-apples comparison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine

No, we have not. In fact, there has been a rather significant resurgence in measles over the course of the last two years. One of the many side-effects of our reaction to Covid that is not properly accounted.

https://www.who.int/news/item/10-11-2021-global-progress-aga...

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1077482

https://www.outbreakobservatory.org/outbreakthursday-1/3/11/...

> The surface proteins that the measles virus uses to enter cells are ineffective if they suffer any mutation, meaning that any changes to the virus come at a major cost.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521133628.h...

Since the COVID shots doesn't prevent catching and transmitting the virus, at least the current shots aren't going to achieve herd immunity / get rid of COVID.

AstraZeneca vaccine's lead researcher and head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Andrew Pollard, stated that the "idea of achieving herd immunity is mythical" and "not a possibility" because "vaccinated people can still be infected and transmit the virus". He also warned against making any vaccination policies and programs based on the idea of herd immunity because the virus may mutate to an even more transmissible variant among vaccinated populations.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/12/herd-immunity-is-mythical-wi...

Every year it will be a little less. Vaccines and other medicines will dampen the casualties. Partial lockdowns and restrictions will be kept in place so it doesn't get too much out of control.

Kids and teenager will grow up with corona being just one of the viruses they get among many others and build up, it not a full immunity at least a decent ability to handle it.

And slowly less and less it will control our society. But will definitely take a while.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/02/deer-identified-as-widespread-...

Though I'm also curious why this only happens for this virus, and not any of the others we've destroyed with vaccination like smallpox, or reduced to nothingness like polio or measles. (short version: you don't know what you're talking about).

This vaccine doesn't prevent covid the way the smallpox vaccine does. This is a new type of vaccine trying to reduce deaths. Calling the same is a marketing trick.