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I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the hi

I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries. Seems to me like the worst of both worlds.

officialchicken 6y ago
I too call B.S. There is an ongoing concerted and heavily proactive campaign being orchestrated in the press about Sweden, at their own behest (I'm sure other foreign governments that like to meddle in elections). And it seems almost entirely to prevent comparing them to their more successful neighbors.
- paul7986 6y ago
  Exactly and why I've tuned out all media minus local weather and or emergency reports.
vkou 6y ago
It's also sporting a GDP contraction that is... A little worse than some of its neighbors, a little better than others, but entirely in the same ballpark.
- Gwypaas 6y ago
  I really wonder what GDP really means in todays world when money is "free" and there are no limits on government spending. For example Denmark had less bankruptcies than previous years back in March and April. Looking at government debt both Finland and Denmark loaned about double compared to Sweden, while having half the population, essentially 4x the loaning per inhabitant with similar results. Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-debt https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-debt Denmark: https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/government-debt https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/government-debt Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/government-debt https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/government-debt
jacques_chester 6y ago
> I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. I'm not.
centimeter 6y ago
What was their relative unemployment rate before covid? It doesn't make sense to compare absolute rates - you should compare the change.
addicted 6y ago
And their numbers are going back up. And their economy was the worst performing among their comparable neighbors. It makes no sense at all because for a few weeks their case numbers are lower. And even if they remain, say 50% of what their neighbors’ case loads are, their response will still have been worse in outcomes because we know much more about how to handle COVID which has led to significantly better results for people who get it today vs a few months ago. Even if the total number of cases are exactly the same, having those cases later is a huge win in itself.
jlmorton 6y ago
Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Sweden had a light response to the pandemic, and it quickly found itself with a major outbreak, and a high rate of deaths. Yet without implementing any major controls, with significantly less social distancing among the population, without significant mask usage, the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. It's almost impossible to make these comparisons in real-time, without the benefit of hindsight. We won't know if this approach made sense until after the pandemic is over. But it's certainly an interesting data point. One thing that is clear is that it's far too complex to look at a couple metrics, compare them against wildly different populations, and form a conclusion. Sweden had a higher unemployment rate than many of its peers before the pandemic. Exports are a staggering 47% of GDP in Sweden. Sweden made the same mistake as many other countries, putting COVID-positive patients in nursing homes. But the longer the pandemic remains under control in Sweden, with comparatively little social distancing and mask usage, the more interesting it becomes, particularly as countries which implemented strong lockdowns see renewed outbreaks.
- addicted 6y ago
  The uncertainty was all the more reason to be more aggressive! We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. And the death rate is down because we understand the virus better and so are able to take actions that do not involve locking down to control it. And also it wasn’t a massive emergency at this time with massive shortages of PPE etc.
  - jlmorton 6y ago
    I agree with you, I supported the lockdowns in the United States, and I think, for instance, the SF Bay Area did a good job. But it's still an interesting data point.
  - btilly 6y ago
    We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. If you think that was luck, then you didn't understand the difference between CFR and IFR. The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is the fraction of reported cases that result in death. This is easier to measure. And if you're sick enough to become a reported case, it is the best back of the envelope estimate of how likely you are to die. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is the fraction of infected people that will die. For estimating how many will wind up dead if you hit herd immunity, that is the relevant figure. It is also harder to produce. Early on we were seeing CFRs in the 5-10% range. That is the figure that you remember But the first estimates of the IFR was an analysis of the Diamond Princess. It estimated an IFR of around 0.5%. In late March, Fauci reported that it was about 1%. Both estimates had significant error bars. The figures that Neil Ferguson used in his model was in the same range. All of this happened while we saw CFRs in the 5-10% range. And therefore there should have been no surprise from the beginning that the CDC estimate of the IFR for the Spring would come out where it did, 0.65%.
gridlockd 6y ago
If you compare it to its more sparsely populated immediate neighbors, sure, Sweden looks bad. If you compare it to UK, France, Spain, Italy, who all did a severe lockdown, Sweden does not look bad.
- jeremysalwen 6y ago
  Which is exactly the point: Why would you compare it to dramatically different countries instead of ones that mainly differed on the axis of interest, unless you had an axe to grind?
  - aga98mtl 6y ago
    Stockholm is actually the only big, dense, international city in the Nordic countries. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populated_municipalities_in_the_Nordic_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populated_mun... The disease likes dense urban areas with a lot of poor immigrants working in big care homes. Comparing countries is not really "fair". In Canada, Montreal got hit hard. In the USA, NYC, Philadelphia and Boston got it hard. It's a urban centric disease. So yes it's fair to compare to Sweden to Germany, France, UK and Belgium.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      Sweden has 11 million citizens, 2.5 millions in Stockholm metropolitan area. Norway has 5 million people, 1.8 millions living in Oslo metropolitan area. Finland has 5.5 million citizens, 1.7 millions living in Greater Helsinki. Lots of countryside elsewhere. The Nordic countries are quite comparable.
      - gridlockd 6y ago
        Perhaps we should also be looking at population density: Stockholm: 11,802/sqm Oslo: 4,268/sqm Helsinki: 3,670/sqm
        6y ago
BurningFrog 6y ago
Yes they had a terrible phase early on. The stories now is about how they've gone to almost no cases the last few months.
- tyfon 6y ago
  Except they are now rising again rapidly in Stockholm for instance [1]. You can use the html console to remove the overlay to read the article. They also were never on "almost no cases", they have been higher than the neighbours all the time except for a very brief period where they were on the same level. [1] https://www.dn.se/sthlm/antalet-coronafall-har-fordubblats-i-stockholm-vi-ar-allvarligt-bekymrade/ https://www.dn.se/sthlm/antalet-coronafall-har-fordubblats-i...
  - irq11 6y ago
    They are not. Cases are up slightly in the past few weeks, but on par with where they were in July (after which they saw a decline). You have to be extrapolating wildly to call this a rapid increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102193/coronavirus-cases-development-in-sweden/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102193/coronavirus-case...
    - morsch 6y ago
      Sweden started July with a bit more than double their current cases, and ended it with a bit less than half. Four weeks ago was as low as it ever got in Sweden, and since then it has risen steadily, up to more than double what it was. It's also 30% higher than the last local maximum, in the middle of August. Here's a better source, which also isn't out of date by 6 days: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?yScale=log&zoomToSelection=true&minPopulationFilter=1000000&time=2020-06-01..latest&country=FRA~DEU~USA~SWE~ESP&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&hideControls=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?yScale=...
      - BurningFrog 6y ago
oxymoran 6y ago
Maybe because you are only looking at it’s immediate neighbors. Sweden had nearly exactly the same population size and death rate as Michigan but Michigan had a strong and lengthy lockdown.
- gnat 6y ago
  America had an appallingly incompetent Covid response, with poor testing, tracing, and compliance. This makes it a poor benchmark for updating your priors, unless one of your previous beliefs was "America can muster a coordinated response to a pandemic".
  - creddit 6y ago
    You can count on one hand the number of countries with a “good” COVID response.
    - Synaesthesia 6y ago
      Most Asian countries did pretty well.
      - pvaldes 6y ago
        And many countries in Africa also
- triceratops 6y ago
  Sweden's population is far healthier than Michigan's and has better access to high-quality care. This can be seen from the differences in their life expectancy (82 vs 78). Imagine how bad Michigan would've been if they followed the Swedish model.
  - lsllc 6y ago
    For comparison with the US, Massachusetts might be a better choice. World class healthcare, highly educated population, average life expectancy of 80yrs 8 months [0], and a similar-ish sized population (6.8M in MA vs 10.3M in Sweden). Despite a lengthy lockdown, excellent social distancing and fairly high mask compliance MA hasn't done so well. As of Sept 29 MA has recorded 9423 deaths vs 5893 in Sweden [1][2]. Unfortunately, like Sweden, MA was not able to prevent COVID19 from spreading to nursing homes with over 64% of deaths (6K+) occurring in long term care (LTC) facilities alone. In fact MA was #1 in the US for deaths in LTC homes with 12.35% of the _entire_ LTC population in the state dying from COVID19 and #3 in the US for COVID19 infections in LTC homes with 35% of _all_ LTC residents contracting COVID19 [2]. This is really a terrible, awful (and avoidable) failure on the Commonwealth's part. [0] https://www.mass.gov/news/life-expectancy-rises-in-massachusetts-breaking-with-national-trend https://www.mass.gov/news/life-expectancy-rises-in-massachus... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/ [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ [3] https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bkwz-xpvg https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bk...
ardy42 6y ago
> I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries. Seems to me like the worst of both worlds. Because a lot of people, mainly for ideological reasons, would have preferred the US and the rest of Europe have done similar. A key part of justifying that view is to be convinced it was a success, true or not.
- troughway 6y ago
  To put it in a _slightly_ more direct way: HN is just as delusional as the rest of the world, more so in topics they have no understanding of whatsoever.
  - kalaido 6y ago
    Agree. Obama stopped testing for swine flu - pandemic gone.
  - rtp 6y ago
    It's amazing how quickly people forget about Dunning-Kruger effect and how often people widely acclaimed for their academic prowess will reveal themselves ignorant when trying to act as an authority outside their field.d
    - troughway 6y ago
      Turns from amazing to expected after awhile. The more I read the comments the more I agree with the Gell Man Amnesia Effect. I don't trust HN with any commentary about anything anymore - not even software development.
      - dang 6y ago
        HN is an internet forum. Obviously you shouldn't trust it.
    - Loughla 6y ago
eightysixfour 6y ago
Not only that, but according to the JHU dashboard, the number of infections are increasing again and not that far off of their previous peak, unlike their neighbors whose new peaks appear to be lower so far. Dashboard here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  They had zero deaths yesterday. Sweden is not aiming for a suppression strategy with cases like New Zealand and Australia.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - eightysixfour 6y ago
    I understand, and there's not going to be a way to judge the outcome until after this is all "over." I think articles saying that they've been successful are premature, for the reasons I mentioned before, but it is too early to call it a loss either. My personal forecast is that by the end I think they're going to have similar levels of economic damage (can't export to closed countries) and higher death rates than their direct neighbors who implemented more restrictive policies and we will never have a clear way to decide if that was better or worse because there is no answer to "how many deaths are worth it?"
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >there is no answer to "how many deaths are worth it?" And, in many cases, there may not be a clear answer to why outcomes were so good in Place A and so poor in Place B.
    - ketamine__ 6y ago
      It depends on how you define success. How about happiness and freedom of movement?
claudeganon 6y ago
Or compared to Vietnam, which has 100 million people and less than 40 deaths. People have just hung their hat on Sweden’s approach out of some ideological attachment that’s completely independent from how countries across the world have performed.
- lsllc 6y ago
  Vietnam is interesting, they initially were very successfully contained COVID, but have had a resurgence over the summer that they put down to a "more infectious" strain (the "G" strain that has been prevalent in the US, Italy/Europe vs the supposedly less infectious "D" strain in Asia): https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-fights-new-COVID-19-strain-with-higher-infection-rate https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-fights... https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-deploys-elite-team-to-Danang-to-curb-new-wave-of-COVID-19 https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-deploy... But regardless, Vietnam has done quite well.
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    You need to look the excess death. The only true indicator. There might be hidden deaths, keeping in mind that Vietnam is not a country where the press is free.
mabbo 6y ago
It's because they loudly didn't do what experts recommended, and things turned out okay. Just like sometimes when you drive drunk, you don't die in a horrible accident and actually get home safely. Doesn't mean you did the right thing.
- epistasis 6y ago
  I think that the OP's point is that they are emphatically not OK, and worse in every way.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The comparatively higher death rate was mainly elderly in care homes. Some are simply OK with sacrificing the elderly to avoid restrictions on the lives of younger generations. Others would hold that, yes, failing to protect care homes was a screwup on the part of the Swedish authorities, but the avoiding of a lockdown still seems sound.
- twblalock 6y ago
  > The comparatively higher death rate was mainly elderly in care homes. The same was true in New York, which locked down.
  - finder83 6y ago
    New York also sent the elderly with covid back into their nursing/care homes. So New York probably isn't the best example, since they handled the elderly situation so poorly
    - Loughla 6y ago
      This is exactly why I have zero faith in any substantive knowledge coming from this pandemic until, what, a hundred years afterward? So many variables that change the narrative if ignored. This is going to be like everything else (at least in the US). People will seek out sources that confirm their already established belief. It's hard being positive about, well, anything right now. Is this depression, or is this just a realistic view of humanity?
      - finder83 6y ago
        Unfortunately I think that's the current state of things. It takes a lot of work to get any semblance of the truth, and even then it's extremely localized. IMHO, C19 was WAY more politicized than it should have been, which caused a lot of the misinformation. For me to be less despaired, I give up on things like national news (or severely limit it), and hang around positive people, particularly ones doing good things in the community. There are still good people out there doing great things. I don't think that the media portrayal of many things is a realistic view of reality in most places.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jamescontrol 6y ago
Exactly, and news headlines praise them for not having the same second surge of cases as denmark right now. While 5800 people dies versus 650 in Denmark.
twblalock 6y ago
> The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries. So far. Lockdown strategies will always look better than Sweden's strategy at the beginning, because Sweden's strategy gets most of the deaths over with in the first few months. If a vaccine takes long enough, the countries that locked down might eventually catch up to Sweden's per-capita death rate, although it's worth noting that some of them have already surpassed it. If you look at the charts here, you will see that Sweden had a big spike in deaths at the beginning of the outbreak and now it's daily death rate is far below that of most other countries: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?country=~SWE#daily-confirmed-deaths-are-countries-bending-the-curve https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr... Sweden's approach looks better relative to other countries with every passing day. The longer it takes for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, the better Sweden's strategy will look. People who insist that Sweden made a horrible mistake are overconfident. Whether or not it was a mistake really depends on how long the pandemic lasts.
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  Pretty safe to say we're far enough along to be able to declare it a failure.
  - twblalock 6y ago
    By what metric? The metric that matters to me is this: what was the death rate, per capita, in a country during the entire duration of the pandemic? Since the pandemic is not over yet, and may not be over for another year or even more, it is far to early to tell. We may still be in the first half of the duration of the pandemic.
- rndmio 6y ago
  You seem to falsely assume that all the deaths Sweden has suffered so far would have happened at some point regardless. Given the development of better treatments already some of those who died would, if they had caught it later, have survived. Given three GDP hot is similar to their neighbours all they've done is needlessly kill some of their population.
rossdavidh 6y ago
Well, a few reasons. One is that their death rates per capita were better than several major western European countries, such as Spain, Belgium, Italy, and the U.K., that did a lot more lockdown, and this suggests that the "if you don't lock down you get more deaths" idea cannot be right. The other is that, for example, Denmark opened up their elementary schools again in late April, and Finland in early May. So even the comparison to other Scandinavian countries is missing a lot of nuance. Plus, I am led to believe that Sweden DID close their high schools and colleges, since it was easier for older kids to do distance learning. The nasty secret that neither most news articles, nor this one, admits to is that, if you take all available evidence, national policy doesn't seem to have mattered much one way or the other. Sweden is in the middle of the pack among western Europe. Belarus is in the middle of the pack among Eastern Europe. Japan is in the middle of the pack (or better) in east Asia. If national policy were important, they all should be either the best or the worst. I think maybe we just did stuff, pretending it would matter, while the virus went about its normal pandemic business, and nothing we did really mattered that much.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  I wonder if another interpretation might be that culture matters regardless what policies get enforced. I hear that people in Sweden stayed at home more and distanced themselves regardless of enforcement. Similarly asian countries likely already had higher acceptance of mask wearing regardless of what was enforced and so on. The praising of swedish policies seems to largely come from folks in the US wear we have no social/cultural consensuses because the country is so divided
  - ghaff 6y ago
    You're still making an assumption that those culture matters have an effect. For pretty much any country (or smaller region) it's easy to construct an after the fact rationalization of the outcomes. Asia did better because people accept mask wearing--true but it's still pretty minimal in normal times. But somehow lack of mask wearing probably didn't matter in Sweden--but that's because they hate getting anywhere near another person anyway. But in the US Trump supporters not wearing masks is a big problem. Etc. I'm not going to argue that nothing matters. (Certainly protecting especially vulnerable populations is something a lot of places totally whiffed on early.) But I expect that some things people are really polarized about don't matter much.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawaysea 6y ago
Focusing on comparisons to geographically nearby countries doesn't make sense to me, and feels arbitrary. That's also not controlling for all the factors that differ between the countries. Reducing the conversation to total deaths and unemployment rates also doesn't give credit for the various benefits of having permissive COVID guidelines. Sweden had a big spike in COVID deaths very early on, and it was in large part from adult nursing homes, where appropriate precautions were not taken. As of late July, 70% of COVID deaths in Sweden were from adult nursing homes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7369443/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7369443/). But they first hit no excess mortality in early June (https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-records-first-week-no-155441443.html https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-records-first-week-no-15544144...), while still retaining many of their freedoms. That's noteworthy. As for unemployment - making a comparison across countries doesn't control for all the other confounding factors that are relevant to economic health. And in a globalized economy where we have suppliers and customers in foreign countries, it is hard to remove all exposure to OTHER countries' COVID economic impacts. Perhaps if more countries implemented Sweden's plan, everyone's economic outcomes would be better. Getting back to the unrecognized value of Sweden's approach: there is value in having the freedom to move around, in holding gatherings, in patronizing businesses, in having kids receive a normal education, and so forth. I am shocked Americans have accepted top-down authoritarian restrictions on their lives so readily, as the goals changed from flattening the curve to seemingly trying to save every last life. I would rather individuals make decisions about their own lives while assessing the risks for themselves. Those who are risk averse are free to restrict their own lives - but they shouldn't impose restrictions or demand actions of others. We can't operate society around trying to save every last life. If that is the bar, then even in a typical flu season we should be keeping everything on lockdown. Could you imagine living like that permanently? Clearly that isn't acceptable. But if THAT isn't acceptable, then we are already saying that there is a finite value in saving a life (rather than infinite), which has to be taken in balance against the value in everything else. Moreover, given how low the infection mortality rates are for those under 70 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...), we are simply robbing the young [of socialization, education, summer vacations, memories with their family, etc.] to keep the old alive longer. I don't think that tradeoff makes sense, and we should simply ask those at risk to stay home while others are free to go about their lives.
codeulike 6y ago
Sweden seems to have become a Dem/Rep arguing point in the USA and unfortunately that means you can't discuss it anywhere online without loads of hot takes. But I think there is stuff worth looking at in Sweden's approach. It certainly can't be dismissed as trivially as you are trying to dismiss it. Here's a Guardian article from a few days ago https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/15/sweden-records-its-fewest-daily-covid-19-cases-since-march https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/15/sweden-records... And here's a blog post giving some pro-swedish-approach arguments https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-thing-about-sweden-and-coronavirus.html https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-thing-a... However, here's a good twitter thread about how you can't really translate Swedens approach to the USA https://twitter.com/ChrChristensen/status/1309668851387334663 https://twitter.com/ChrChristensen/status/130966885138733466... [Sweden’s COVID] policy can only be understood as inseparable from Sweden’s developed welfare state, social system: universal healthcare, paid sick leave, paid leave to care for sick kids, subsidized daycare & pre/after-school care.
JoshuaDavid 6y ago
Do you expect the 10x number to still be true 6 months from now?
surfsvammel 6y ago
The numbers cannot really be compared. In Sweden they count any death where the patient had the virus, or had it in the last two weeks, as a COVID death. The other countries count differently. Most deaths in Sweden where in care homes of elderly. In Finland, for example, I believe only deaths at hospitals are counted as COVID deaths. We will see in a couple of years what is up and what was down of this whole debacle.
- mcguire 6y ago
  Yep. It ain't over 'till the fat lady sings. Where "fat lady" is probably a vaccine and "sings" means generally available.
5thaccount 6y ago
There is an idea many hold that we all knew how to fight COVID and for various reasons simply failed to implement it. The reality is that we didn't know much about it, there was no overt strategy forward, and like all good science, we need controls to understand what happened and what the affect of various policies are. There are lots of variables at play here, and understand the affects of different policy is important. Countries that did the exact same thing have a natural control for activity, meaning differences in outcome should be environmental, Milan vs Rome, structural, Norway vs Sweden, and/or genetic differences, Norway vs Vietnam. Things like population density, multi-generational homes can be better understood, as can racial and environmental differences (theories that some countries had a COVID-19 precursor that provided some immunity). This is also true for regions within a country, e.g. Milan vs Rome. Where responses vary, we get a data point for the response's effectiveness. This is true right down to specifics e.g. a 50 person group limit vs 25. Sweden is a different data point, and that is extremely valuable, not just short term but longer term as well. In 2-10 years, the death rate for COVID in Scandinavia vs GDP growth will be useful to compare. I am thankful Sweden chose a different path. It took courage, as choosing a safe middle of the road path would teach us little, and given how little we know about pandemic response, the long term value of better understanding could potentially save millions over the next 100 or so years of human existence.
juancn 6y ago
Really? Because they're back to normal while the rest of us don't have lives anymore. There's so much fear of dying that nobody is living, we survive and endure, but that's about it. There are worse things than dying, life is risk.

officialchicken 6y ago

I too call B.S. There is an ongoing concerted and heavily proactive campaign being orchestrated in the press about Sweden, at their own behest (I'm sure other foreign governments that like to meddle in elections). And it seems almost entirely to prevent comparing them to their more successful neighbors.

paul7986 6y ago
Exactly and why I've tuned out all media minus local weather and or emergency reports.

vkou 6y ago

It's also sporting a GDP contraction that is... A little worse than some of its neighbors, a little better than others, but entirely in the same ballpark.

Gwypaas 6y ago
I really wonder what GDP really means in todays world when money is "free" and there are no limits on government spending. For example Denmark had less bankruptcies than previous years back in March and April. Looking at government debt both Finland and Denmark loaned about double compared to Sweden, while having half the population, essentially 4x the loaning per inhabitant with similar results. Sweden: https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-debt https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-debt Denmark: https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/government-debt https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/government-debt Finland: https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/government-debt https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/government-debt

jacques_chester 6y ago

> I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. I'm not.

centimeter 6y ago

What was their relative unemployment rate before covid? It doesn't make sense to compare absolute rates - you should compare the change.

addicted 6y ago

And their numbers are going back up. And their economy was the worst performing among their comparable neighbors. It makes no sense at all because for a few weeks their case numbers are lower. And even if they remain, say 50% of what their neighbors’ case loads are, their response will still have been worse in outcomes because we know much more about how to handle COVID which has led to significantly better results for people who get it today vs a few months ago. Even if the total number of cases are exactly the same, having those cases later is a huge win in itself.

jlmorton 6y ago

Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Sweden had a light response to the pandemic, and it quickly found itself with a major outbreak, and a high rate of deaths. Yet without implementing any major controls, with significantly less social distancing among the population, without significant mask usage, the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. It's almost impossible to make these comparisons in real-time, without the benefit of hindsight. We won't know if this approach made sense until after the pandemic is over. But it's certainly an interesting data point. One thing that is clear is that it's far too complex to look at a couple metrics, compare them against wildly different populations, and form a conclusion. Sweden had a higher unemployment rate than many of its peers before the pandemic. Exports are a staggering 47% of GDP in Sweden. Sweden made the same mistake as many other countries, putting COVID-positive patients in nursing homes. But the longer the pandemic remains under control in Sweden, with comparatively little social distancing and mask usage, the more interesting it becomes, particularly as countries which implemented strong lockdowns see renewed outbreaks.

addicted 6y ago
The uncertainty was all the more reason to be more aggressive! We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. And the death rate is down because we understand the virus better and so are able to take actions that do not involve locking down to control it. And also it wasn’t a massive emergency at this time with massive shortages of PPE etc.
- jlmorton 6y ago
  I agree with you, I supported the lockdowns in the United States, and I think, for instance, the SF Bay Area did a good job. But it's still an interesting data point.
- btilly 6y ago
  We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. If you think that was luck, then you didn't understand the difference between CFR and IFR. The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is the fraction of reported cases that result in death. This is easier to measure. And if you're sick enough to become a reported case, it is the best back of the envelope estimate of how likely you are to die. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is the fraction of infected people that will die. For estimating how many will wind up dead if you hit herd immunity, that is the relevant figure. It is also harder to produce. Early on we were seeing CFRs in the 5-10% range. That is the figure that you remember But the first estimates of the IFR was an analysis of the Diamond Princess. It estimated an IFR of around 0.5%. In late March, Fauci reported that it was about 1%. Both estimates had significant error bars. The figures that Neil Ferguson used in his model was in the same range. All of this happened while we saw CFRs in the 5-10% range. And therefore there should have been no surprise from the beginning that the CDC estimate of the IFR for the Spring would come out where it did, 0.65%.

gridlockd 6y ago

If you compare it to its more sparsely populated immediate neighbors, sure, Sweden looks bad. If you compare it to UK, France, Spain, Italy, who all did a severe lockdown, Sweden does not look bad.

jeremysalwen 6y ago
Which is exactly the point: Why would you compare it to dramatically different countries instead of ones that mainly differed on the axis of interest, unless you had an axe to grind?
- aga98mtl 6y ago
  Stockholm is actually the only big, dense, international city in the Nordic countries. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populated_municipalities_in_the_Nordic_countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_populated_mun... The disease likes dense urban areas with a lot of poor immigrants working in big care homes. Comparing countries is not really "fair". In Canada, Montreal got hit hard. In the USA, NYC, Philadelphia and Boston got it hard. It's a urban centric disease. So yes it's fair to compare to Sweden to Germany, France, UK and Belgium.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Sweden has 11 million citizens, 2.5 millions in Stockholm metropolitan area. Norway has 5 million people, 1.8 millions living in Oslo metropolitan area. Finland has 5.5 million citizens, 1.7 millions living in Greater Helsinki. Lots of countryside elsewhere. The Nordic countries are quite comparable.
    - gridlockd 6y ago
      Perhaps we should also be looking at population density: Stockholm: 11,802/sqm Oslo: 4,268/sqm Helsinki: 3,670/sqm
      - 6y ago

BurningFrog 6y ago

Yes they had a terrible phase early on. The stories now is about how they've gone to almost no cases the last few months.

tyfon 6y ago
Except they are now rising again rapidly in Stockholm for instance [1]. You can use the html console to remove the overlay to read the article. They also were never on "almost no cases", they have been higher than the neighbours all the time except for a very brief period where they were on the same level. [1] https://www.dn.se/sthlm/antalet-coronafall-har-fordubblats-i-stockholm-vi-ar-allvarligt-bekymrade/ https://www.dn.se/sthlm/antalet-coronafall-har-fordubblats-i...
- irq11 6y ago
  They are not. Cases are up slightly in the past few weeks, but on par with where they were in July (after which they saw a decline). You have to be extrapolating wildly to call this a rapid increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102193/coronavirus-cases-development-in-sweden/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102193/coronavirus-case...
  - morsch 6y ago
    Sweden started July with a bit more than double their current cases, and ended it with a bit less than half. Four weeks ago was as low as it ever got in Sweden, and since then it has risen steadily, up to more than double what it was. It's also 30% higher than the last local maximum, in the middle of August. Here's a better source, which also isn't out of date by 6 days: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?yScale=log&zoomToSelection=true&minPopulationFilter=1000000&time=2020-06-01..latest&country=FRA~DEU~USA~SWE~ESP&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&hideControls=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?yScale=...
    - BurningFrog 6y ago

oxymoran 6y ago

Maybe because you are only looking at it’s immediate neighbors. Sweden had nearly exactly the same population size and death rate as Michigan but Michigan had a strong and lengthy lockdown.

gnat 6y ago
America had an appallingly incompetent Covid response, with poor testing, tracing, and compliance. This makes it a poor benchmark for updating your priors, unless one of your previous beliefs was "America can muster a coordinated response to a pandemic".
- creddit 6y ago
  You can count on one hand the number of countries with a “good” COVID response.
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    Most Asian countries did pretty well.
    - pvaldes 6y ago
      And many countries in Africa also
triceratops 6y ago
Sweden's population is far healthier than Michigan's and has better access to high-quality care. This can be seen from the differences in their life expectancy (82 vs 78). Imagine how bad Michigan would've been if they followed the Swedish model.
- lsllc 6y ago
  For comparison with the US, Massachusetts might be a better choice. World class healthcare, highly educated population, average life expectancy of 80yrs 8 months [0], and a similar-ish sized population (6.8M in MA vs 10.3M in Sweden). Despite a lengthy lockdown, excellent social distancing and fairly high mask compliance MA hasn't done so well. As of Sept 29 MA has recorded 9423 deaths vs 5893 in Sweden [1][2]. Unfortunately, like Sweden, MA was not able to prevent COVID19 from spreading to nursing homes with over 64% of deaths (6K+) occurring in long term care (LTC) facilities alone. In fact MA was #1 in the US for deaths in LTC homes with 12.35% of the _entire_ LTC population in the state dying from COVID19 and #3 in the US for COVID19 infections in LTC homes with 35% of _all_ LTC residents contracting COVID19 [2]. This is really a terrible, awful (and avoidable) failure on the Commonwealth's part. [0] https://www.mass.gov/news/life-expectancy-rises-in-massachusetts-breaking-with-national-trend https://www.mass.gov/news/life-expectancy-rises-in-massachus... [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/massachusetts/ [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ [3] https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bkwz-xpvg https://data.cms.gov/stories/s/COVID-19-Nursing-Home-Data/bk...

ardy42 6y ago

> I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries. Seems to me like the worst of both worlds. Because a lot of people, mainly for ideological reasons, would have preferred the US and the rest of Europe have done similar. A key part of justifying that view is to be convinced it was a success, true or not.

troughway 6y ago
To put it in a _slightly_ more direct way: HN is just as delusional as the rest of the world, more so in topics they have no understanding of whatsoever.
- kalaido 6y ago
  Agree. Obama stopped testing for swine flu - pandemic gone.
- rtp 6y ago
  It's amazing how quickly people forget about Dunning-Kruger effect and how often people widely acclaimed for their academic prowess will reveal themselves ignorant when trying to act as an authority outside their field.d
  - troughway 6y ago
    Turns from amazing to expected after awhile. The more I read the comments the more I agree with the Gell Man Amnesia Effect. I don't trust HN with any commentary about anything anymore - not even software development.
    - dang 6y ago
      HN is an internet forum. Obviously you shouldn't trust it.
  - Loughla 6y ago

eightysixfour 6y ago

Not only that, but according to the JHU dashboard, the number of infections are increasing again and not that far off of their previous peak, unlike their neighbors whose new peaks appear to be lower so far. Dashboard here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...

ketamine__ 6y ago
They had zero deaths yesterday. Sweden is not aiming for a suppression strategy with cases like New Zealand and Australia.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- eightysixfour 6y ago
  I understand, and there's not going to be a way to judge the outcome until after this is all "over." I think articles saying that they've been successful are premature, for the reasons I mentioned before, but it is too early to call it a loss either. My personal forecast is that by the end I think they're going to have similar levels of economic damage (can't export to closed countries) and higher death rates than their direct neighbors who implemented more restrictive policies and we will never have a clear way to decide if that was better or worse because there is no answer to "how many deaths are worth it?"
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >there is no answer to "how many deaths are worth it?" And, in many cases, there may not be a clear answer to why outcomes were so good in Place A and so poor in Place B.
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    It depends on how you define success. How about happiness and freedom of movement?

claudeganon 6y ago

Or compared to Vietnam, which has 100 million people and less than 40 deaths. People have just hung their hat on Sweden’s approach out of some ideological attachment that’s completely independent from how countries across the world have performed.

lsllc 6y ago
Vietnam is interesting, they initially were very successfully contained COVID, but have had a resurgence over the summer that they put down to a "more infectious" strain (the "G" strain that has been prevalent in the US, Italy/Europe vs the supposedly less infectious "D" strain in Asia): https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-fights-new-COVID-19-strain-with-higher-infection-rate https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-fights... https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-deploys-elite-team-to-Danang-to-curb-new-wave-of-COVID-19 https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Coronavirus/Vietnam-deploy... But regardless, Vietnam has done quite well.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  You need to look the excess death. The only true indicator. There might be hidden deaths, keeping in mind that Vietnam is not a country where the press is free.

mabbo 6y ago

It's because they loudly didn't do what experts recommended, and things turned out okay. Just like sometimes when you drive drunk, you don't die in a horrible accident and actually get home safely. Doesn't mean you did the right thing.

epistasis 6y ago
I think that the OP's point is that they are emphatically not OK, and worse in every way.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

The comparatively higher death rate was mainly elderly in care homes. Some are simply OK with sacrificing the elderly to avoid restrictions on the lives of younger generations. Others would hold that, yes, failing to protect care homes was a screwup on the part of the Swedish authorities, but the avoiding of a lockdown still seems sound.

twblalock 6y ago
> The comparatively higher death rate was mainly elderly in care homes. The same was true in New York, which locked down.
- finder83 6y ago
  New York also sent the elderly with covid back into their nursing/care homes. So New York probably isn't the best example, since they handled the elderly situation so poorly
  - Loughla 6y ago
    This is exactly why I have zero faith in any substantive knowledge coming from this pandemic until, what, a hundred years afterward? So many variables that change the narrative if ignored. This is going to be like everything else (at least in the US). People will seek out sources that confirm their already established belief. It's hard being positive about, well, anything right now. Is this depression, or is this just a realistic view of humanity?
    - finder83 6y ago
      Unfortunately I think that's the current state of things. It takes a lot of work to get any semblance of the truth, and even then it's extremely localized. IMHO, C19 was WAY more politicized than it should have been, which caused a lot of the misinformation. For me to be less despaired, I give up on things like national news (or severely limit it), and hang around positive people, particularly ones doing good things in the community. There are still good people out there doing great things. I don't think that the media portrayal of many things is a realistic view of reality in most places.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jamescontrol 6y ago

Exactly, and news headlines praise them for not having the same second surge of cases as denmark right now. While 5800 people dies versus 650 in Denmark.

twblalock 6y ago

> The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries. So far. Lockdown strategies will always look better than Sweden's strategy at the beginning, because Sweden's strategy gets most of the deaths over with in the first few months. If a vaccine takes long enough, the countries that locked down might eventually catch up to Sweden's per-capita death rate, although it's worth noting that some of them have already surpassed it. If you look at the charts here, you will see that Sweden had a big spike in deaths at the beginning of the outbreak and now it's daily death rate is far below that of most other countries: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?country=~SWE#daily-confirmed-deaths-are-countries-bending-the-curve https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr... Sweden's approach looks better relative to other countries with every passing day. The longer it takes for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, the better Sweden's strategy will look. People who insist that Sweden made a horrible mistake are overconfident. Whether or not it was a mistake really depends on how long the pandemic lasts.

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Pretty safe to say we're far enough along to be able to declare it a failure.
- twblalock 6y ago
  By what metric? The metric that matters to me is this: what was the death rate, per capita, in a country during the entire duration of the pandemic? Since the pandemic is not over yet, and may not be over for another year or even more, it is far to early to tell. We may still be in the first half of the duration of the pandemic.
rndmio 6y ago
You seem to falsely assume that all the deaths Sweden has suffered so far would have happened at some point regardless. Given the development of better treatments already some of those who died would, if they had caught it later, have survived. Given three GDP hot is similar to their neighbours all they've done is needlessly kill some of their population.

rossdavidh 6y ago

Well, a few reasons. One is that their death rates per capita were better than several major western European countries, such as Spain, Belgium, Italy, and the U.K., that did a lot more lockdown, and this suggests that the "if you don't lock down you get more deaths" idea cannot be right. The other is that, for example, Denmark opened up their elementary schools again in late April, and Finland in early May. So even the comparison to other Scandinavian countries is missing a lot of nuance. Plus, I am led to believe that Sweden DID close their high schools and colleges, since it was easier for older kids to do distance learning. The nasty secret that neither most news articles, nor this one, admits to is that, if you take all available evidence, national policy doesn't seem to have mattered much one way or the other. Sweden is in the middle of the pack among western Europe. Belarus is in the middle of the pack among Eastern Europe. Japan is in the middle of the pack (or better) in east Asia. If national policy were important, they all should be either the best or the worst. I think maybe we just did stuff, pretending it would matter, while the virus went about its normal pandemic business, and nothing we did really mattered that much.

ajmurmann 6y ago
I wonder if another interpretation might be that culture matters regardless what policies get enforced. I hear that people in Sweden stayed at home more and distanced themselves regardless of enforcement. Similarly asian countries likely already had higher acceptance of mask wearing regardless of what was enforced and so on. The praising of swedish policies seems to largely come from folks in the US wear we have no social/cultural consensuses because the country is so divided
- ghaff 6y ago
  You're still making an assumption that those culture matters have an effect. For pretty much any country (or smaller region) it's easy to construct an after the fact rationalization of the outcomes. Asia did better because people accept mask wearing--true but it's still pretty minimal in normal times. But somehow lack of mask wearing probably didn't matter in Sweden--but that's because they hate getting anywhere near another person anyway. But in the US Trump supporters not wearing masks is a big problem. Etc. I'm not going to argue that nothing matters. (Certainly protecting especially vulnerable populations is something a lot of places totally whiffed on early.) But I expect that some things people are really polarized about don't matter much.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwawaysea 6y ago

Focusing on comparisons to geographically nearby countries doesn't make sense to me, and feels arbitrary. That's also not controlling for all the factors that differ between the countries. Reducing the conversation to total deaths and unemployment rates also doesn't give credit for the various benefits of having permissive COVID guidelines. Sweden had a big spike in COVID deaths very early on, and it was in large part from adult nursing homes, where appropriate precautions were not taken. As of late July, 70% of COVID deaths in Sweden were from adult nursing homes (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7369443/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7369443/). But they first hit no excess mortality in early June (https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-records-first-week-no-155441443.html https://news.yahoo.com/sweden-records-first-week-no-15544144...), while still retaining many of their freedoms. That's noteworthy. As for unemployment - making a comparison across countries doesn't control for all the other confounding factors that are relevant to economic health. And in a globalized economy where we have suppliers and customers in foreign countries, it is hard to remove all exposure to OTHER countries' COVID economic impacts. Perhaps if more countries implemented Sweden's plan, everyone's economic outcomes would be better. Getting back to the unrecognized value of Sweden's approach: there is value in having the freedom to move around, in holding gatherings, in patronizing businesses, in having kids receive a normal education, and so forth. I am shocked Americans have accepted top-down authoritarian restrictions on their lives so readily, as the goals changed from flattening the curve to seemingly trying to save every last life. I would rather individuals make decisions about their own lives while assessing the risks for themselves. Those who are risk averse are free to restrict their own lives - but they shouldn't impose restrictions or demand actions of others. We can't operate society around trying to save every last life. If that is the bar, then even in a typical flu season we should be keeping everything on lockdown. Could you imagine living like that permanently? Clearly that isn't acceptable. But if THAT isn't acceptable, then we are already saying that there is a finite value in saving a life (rather than infinite), which has to be taken in balance against the value in everything else. Moreover, given how low the infection mortality rates are for those under 70 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...), we are simply robbing the young [of socialization, education, summer vacations, memories with their family, etc.] to keep the old alive longer. I don't think that tradeoff makes sense, and we should simply ask those at risk to stay home while others are free to go about their lives.

codeulike 6y ago

Sweden seems to have become a Dem/Rep arguing point in the USA and unfortunately that means you can't discuss it anywhere online without loads of hot takes. But I think there is stuff worth looking at in Sweden's approach. It certainly can't be dismissed as trivially as you are trying to dismiss it. Here's a Guardian article from a few days ago https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/15/sweden-records-its-fewest-daily-covid-19-cases-since-march https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/15/sweden-records... And here's a blog post giving some pro-swedish-approach arguments https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-thing-about-sweden-and-coronavirus.html https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-thing-a... However, here's a good twitter thread about how you can't really translate Swedens approach to the USA https://twitter.com/ChrChristensen/status/1309668851387334663 https://twitter.com/ChrChristensen/status/130966885138733466... [Sweden’s COVID] policy can only be understood as inseparable from Sweden’s developed welfare state, social system: universal healthcare, paid sick leave, paid leave to care for sick kids, subsidized daycare & pre/after-school care.

JoshuaDavid 6y ago

Do you expect the 10x number to still be true 6 months from now?

surfsvammel 6y ago

The numbers cannot really be compared. In Sweden they count any death where the patient had the virus, or had it in the last two weeks, as a COVID death. The other countries count differently. Most deaths in Sweden where in care homes of elderly. In Finland, for example, I believe only deaths at hospitals are counted as COVID deaths. We will see in a couple of years what is up and what was down of this whole debacle.

mcguire 6y ago
Yep. It ain't over 'till the fat lady sings. Where "fat lady" is probably a vaccine and "sings" means generally available.

5thaccount 6y ago

There is an idea many hold that we all knew how to fight COVID and for various reasons simply failed to implement it. The reality is that we didn't know much about it, there was no overt strategy forward, and like all good science, we need controls to understand what happened and what the affect of various policies are. There are lots of variables at play here, and understand the affects of different policy is important. Countries that did the exact same thing have a natural control for activity, meaning differences in outcome should be environmental, Milan vs Rome, structural, Norway vs Sweden, and/or genetic differences, Norway vs Vietnam. Things like population density, multi-generational homes can be better understood, as can racial and environmental differences (theories that some countries had a COVID-19 precursor that provided some immunity). This is also true for regions within a country, e.g. Milan vs Rome. Where responses vary, we get a data point for the response's effectiveness. This is true right down to specifics e.g. a 50 person group limit vs 25. Sweden is a different data point, and that is extremely valuable, not just short term but longer term as well. In 2-10 years, the death rate for COVID in Scandinavia vs GDP growth will be useful to compare. I am thankful Sweden chose a different path. It took courage, as choosing a safe middle of the road path would teach us little, and given how little we know about pandemic response, the long term value of better understanding could potentially save millions over the next 100 or so years of human existence.

juancn 6y ago

Really? Because they're back to normal while the rest of us don't have lives anymore. There's so much fear of dying that nobody is living, we survive and endure, but that's about it. There are worse things than dying, life is risk.