[geoffreymcgill]

If France and Sweden were the same population, here's a chart of confirmed cases (7 day average) and total deaths.

https://i.imgur.com/oiybcsx.png

Sweden will easily pass France in the next few days, yet new infections are now 500% greater than those of France.

Again, please keep in mind this is a per capita chart.

[liquidise]

Sweden's approach is clearly one focused on long-term results. If Covid sees a resurgence in the fall or as nations return to relative normalcy, we can expect the infection and death counts to be multi-modal in most nations, while Sweden's might be a bell curve.

For this reason alone, we are unlikely to know the effectiveness of Sweden's herd immunity for months if not years.

[legulere]

It would take years with current infection rates in Sweden to get herd immunity. If the plan is to reduce pension costs it seems to work.

[sampo]

> If the plan is to reduce pension costs it seems to work.

We don't know. Covid19 leaves some people with long-term, perhaps permanent damage. You might lose working-age tax-paying people from workforce, having to pay them disability allowance, and this might offset part or all of your savings in pensions.

[natch]

Taking years is generally the case with long term strategies.

[thu2111]

You're assuming current understandings of herd immunity and epidemiology are correct, which by empirical observation they aren't.

The epidemic is already over in Sweden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#De...

(more up to date graph: https://lockdownsceptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG_...)

Yet a much lower level of infected population than conventionally understood has been reached. The models that assume the virus will continue to grow until 60%-70% have been infected are therefore wrong, reality itself is proving that.

There are now a whole lot of theories being explored as to why this is.

[edit: someone complained about the original graph link not matching worldometers. It's worldometers that's wrong so I replaced it with a Wikipedia link, which sources its data direct from Swedish health authorities. I left the lockdownsceptics link because it's a bit fresher]

[legulere]

I don’t know where “lockdown sceptics” got their data from but for me the current numbers look like a constant infection rate and only slightly reduced death rate that is also not falling: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

[Ma8ee]

But Sweden isn't trying to stop the infection with herd immunity.

[raverbashing]

I'm not sure of how much of the "long-term results" was historical revisionism, but I can understand some of it.

Sweden (or any other country to be honest) is nowhere near herd immunity, which kicks in at 60% (though some studies seem to have pointed to a lower number around 45%/47% something like that, anyway), Stockholm I think is around 10%, maybe 15%

And even when you reach 60%, there's still an infection inertia

I think it's fine for Sweden to have tried their approach, at these times, there are no real right or wrong answers, and Sweden's population probably is a little more sensible than most other countries.

[rumanator]

> Sweden's approach is clearly one focused on long-term results. If Covid sees a resurgence in the fall or as nations return to relative normalcy, we can expect the infection and death counts to be multi-modal in most nations, while Sweden's might be a bell curve.

Other than geometric tidiness I see no point in your comment.

In fact, it ignores the denial of service impact that an epidemic has on a national health service, and plays down how it advocates for a population culling.

Perhaps it's time to relearn the basic principles and merits of "flattening the curve", not to mention the benefits of gaining some time until a vaccine is developed.

[oxymoron]

Sweden’s hospitals hasn’t been besieged in the way seen in Italy, though, so I’m not sure that is true either. https://www.svt.se/datajournalistik/corona-i-intensivvarden/

[glangdale]

There were a few articles that went by that indicated that they were being pretty cold-blooded in terms of triaging older people away from ICUs and ventilators. This isn't totally unreasonable, but it is weird from a "try to save everyone" perspective and does raise some awkward questions about their rather premature victory lap - "our ICUs aren't overloaded therefore we're OK".

[oxymoron]

The picture here is unclear. Public news interviewed several dozen doctors across hospitals in Stockholm. Some of them had the impression that they were preemptively turning patients away from intensive care units, but a substantial fraction of doctors also said that these are patients that wouldn’t have been put there under normal circumstances either. I think the truth is somewhere inbetween, but it’s clear that there hasn’t been the deluge of severe cases observed out of southern Europe.

[legopelle]

Ventilators are extremely intensive treatment.i It's forced breathing. If you're old and frail, it will kill you.

[ptero]

Good points, but we still do not know how the second wave will look like in the countries that had quarantine (or in Sweden). We should revisit in a year. And there are other factors -- I personally know people whose cancer treatments were pushed out "because COVID" (for 1 and 2 months so far and counting). It is hard to quantify such things as there is no significant statistics, but lockdowns contribute to deaths, too.

[notahacker]

> It is hard to quantify such things as there is no significant statistics, but lockdowns contribute to deaths, too.

There are systematic statistics on overall excess deaths which will include people whose deaths are a short term response to lockdown, so we can pretty conclusively say that lockdowns reduced short term excess deaths. They don't account for future excess deaths due to situations like cancelled operations you mentioned or different responses to a second wave, but they don't account for future deaths of COVID survivors where cardiac and lung damage caused by the disease is a comorbidity either.

[tonyedgecombe]

Some of those cancer treatments would have been stopped whether there was a lockdown or not. Chemo becomes much riskier when Covid is working its way through the hospital.

[dpau]

on the other hand many places recorded record low injuries and fatalities from car crashes due to quarantine. i wonder how it balances out in the end.

[usaar333]

When comparing policies, you have to factor in the costs though.

As a more straightforward example, it's simpler to compare countries with closed pandemics - say Iceland or New Zealand. Iceland has much higher deaths per capita, but they didn't lock down nearly as hard (groups limited to 10, schools open for kids below age 10, etc.). If you do the math, Iceland lost about 120 extra years of life, or something like ~3 hours per person. Is depriving everyone of additional liberties for a month worth increasing life expectancy by 3 hours?

The case for France vs. Sweden is a bit more complex, since Sweden, even though it isn't locked down, will be "unsafe" for large numbers of people longer. The raw math and projection models suggests Sweden will lose an extra 1-2 days of life per person, but more analysis is needed to really understand benefits and costs.

[rumanator]

> If you do the math, Iceland lost about 120 extra years of life

The problem with "extra years of life" metrics is that they artificially play down the death wave on older segments of the population, as if those dying from covid19 who happen to be older than 40yo should not matter to society.

The consequences of this nonsensical pick of statistics indicators is that a death wave of thousands of people per day that happens to hit harder on the > 40yo segment is watered down with "all this just to gain 3 hours of life" nonsense, as if all the coffins were only piling up because instead of being delivered on scheduled they needed to be delivered 3 hours earlier.

[mewpmewp2]

So someone with 1 day left in their life is equal to someone with 70 years?

It does seem to me that a more just system would consider "time lost" as a metric since surely it can't be binary.

[rumanator]

> So someone with 1 day left in their life is equal to someone with 70 years?

You're the one trying to quantify the value of life.

To me, my parents and grandparents are more important than your 1yo son/daughter, so YMMV.

Still, you're missing the whole point. The point is that it makes absolutely no sense to downplay an epidemic just because it hits hardest on those suffering from pre-existing medical conditions or being over 40. The coffins piling up on makeshift morgues make it quite obvious that the real effect of the death wave is not anticipating death by a couple of hours, and it matters nothing if those doing the dying are sick, old, or disabled.

[mewpmewp2]

So are you saying it's entirely binary? It's either terrible and should be avoided at all costs, or it's no-one dying?

You are bringing out facts such as "coffins are piling up" etc, this fact could be true if in one morgue in two places in the world there were coffins piling up. Maybe these morgues can only handle 5 deaths at once and now there's 5 more for each?

You need to quantify things to understand how bad they are. Otherwise these statements are meaningless.

You are essentially quantifying - any statement you do you is actually quantifying. For instance if you bring out the argument about coffins piling you seem to be considering potentially 10 deaths (which could cause coffins piling) to be the same as the whole world population dying.

[rumanator]

> So are you saying it's entirely binary?

I'm stating the exact opposite: that crudely abusing statistics to pretend that people over 40 don't count for nothing because they will die in a few years is abhorrent, and downplays the real impact of the whole covid death wave.

[randomsearch]

Wow, you’d sacrifice a 1yo to save your grandparents? I find that genuinely shocking.

[simiones]

That is not what was being said - they said that they personally value the lives of their own parents more than the life of someone else's child; this in the context of someone trying to argue that the life of a 1 year old is inherently more valuable than the life of a 60 year old because the 1 year old can expect 79 more years of life, while the 60 year old can only expect 20 more.

And otherwise, assume there is a fire and you are in the middle of a corridor. On one end there is your mother, on the other there is some 1 year old you don't know in any way. Which would you rush to save first? I know I would rush to save my mother before the 1 year old.

[colde]

I think the argument is more akin to not sacrificing anybody, and trying to save everyone.

[rlkf]

> Is depriving everyone of additional liberties for a month worth increasing life expectancy by 3 hours?

This analysis is flawed, because it compares the entire cost to only parts of the gain. Economic depression because no-one dares to go outside of fear for their lives, has for instance negative value too.

[mewpmewp2]

I never thought of it this way. This is a really good observation in my opinion.

There's a lot of math and viewpoints that should be considered here. It does not seem to me that proponents of lockdowns are even doing any maths, it seems like they take it for guaranteed that lockdowns are the only choice.

[rob74]

No, they just treat human life as valuable and tend to err on the side of caution - reducing people to numbers is a slippery slope, because you can prove almost any point with statistics. Then you end up with [Star Trek-style dystopias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Ne...) like euthanising everyone at the age of 60 - after all, society as a whole is better off if you do that...

[mewpmewp2]

But when you are calculating active cases and death rates you are also reducing people to a number, it's just binary in this case, 1 = death, 0 = no deaths.

[CathedralBorrow]

Are you open to the possibility that those proponents actually have considered those viewpoints and come to a different conclusion than you for reasons other than being too stupid to understand math?

[natch]

> Iceland has much higher deaths per capita

We can’t know this number conclusively until a few years from now. The pandemic is still ongoing and does not have a flat distribution of impact over time.

So all this analysis is based on a false premise.

[mantas]

1 death is a tragedy, thousands of deaths is statistics.

That "3 hours" mean that you're likely to loose one of the relatives or friends who are in high risk group. Suddenly a month of lockdown is worth to give your loved ones years or even decades.

[Semaphor]

> That "3 hours" mean that you're likely to loose one of the relatives or friends who are in high risk group

Not arguing one way or the other, but I most certainly would not call it likely. Germany had more deaths than Iceland per capita and none of my relatives or friends are or know anyone even infected, let alone dead.

In Germany, you’d need to know about 440 people to even know someone who has been confirmed infected, in Iceland still around 200. To know someone who died, you’d need to know 9,661 in Germany and 36,363 in Iceland.

[matwood]

I don't live in one of the US hotspots, yet I personally know a person who had COVID (and lived), and have multiple friends who have had relatives die from COVID.

I have a feeling as things open up, more people are going to have my experience.

[Semaphor]

Of course some people will know someone. I’m not arguing against the danger, or changes, or anything but that it’s "likely to know someone".

[mantas]

Anecdata vs statistics? Some people did die. Some do know them. If no people you know died, does it makes it a media hoax?

[Semaphor]

Yes, I used statistics. You said it’s likely. I gave numbers on how many people you’d need to know to, on average, know someone who died. Which, considering how high that number is, does not make it seem "likely"

Edit:

> does it makes it a media hoax

Honestly, you completely lost me there. Did you read some other comment and attributed it to me?

edit2: FWIW, I wear a mask when going to the store despite it being only required inside, one of maybe 5% of people who do that. And that’s in a city of 200k with 0 known active cases.

[matz1]

Sure its sucks for some people who die or know people who died but for most other people they won't even notice.

[mantas]

What's what I said up the thread. It's a tragedy for people directly involved even though averaged-out it becomes a cold statistics.

Personally I'd rather not gamble wether I'd end up on tragedy or statistics side.

[thaumasiotes]

> That "3 hours" mean that you're likely to loose one of the relatives or friends who are in high risk group. Suddenly a month of lockdown is worth to give your loved ones years or even decades.

Not even close. For example, no one I know has been directly hurt by the coronavirus. And neither has anyone they know, including my friend from Wuhan.

(Why "directly"? I do know someone who had a mental breakdown related to isolation.)

[sukilot]

Most people know more people than the average HN commenter.

I suspect you don't know the fate of everyone known by everyone you know.

[thaumasiotes]

> I suspect you don't know the fate of everyone known by everyone you know.

Certain information is significantly more likely than average to be broadcast. Do I know what those people are doing? Do I have any idea who they are? No.

But I do know they haven't been hurt by the coronavirus.

[mantas]

If your personal experience doesn't match statistics, are statistics wrong?

[kqr]

I read something different from that same graph. Assuming the French lockdown does not get rid of the virus/sickness completely, the "cases" line shows the speed at which the virus burns through the population. Sweden will have gone through its population long before France has, and will France be able to keep functioning under strict lockdown for all those months? Or even years, at the present rate?

Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually, it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl. Sure, you have to impose some restrictions in order not to overload hospitals and whatnot, but anything beyond that is just extending the suffering (both making living harder and ensuring it will go on for a longer duration), is it not?

[asciimo]

Delaying the spread also buys time to develop therapies and vaccines.

[BillyTheKing]

exactly, we've also learned that not all lockdowns are equal. Super-spreader events seem to be the driving force behind this pandemic, using effective measures we can avoid and learn to deal with super-spreader events while also allowing society to continue at a more normal rate.

[kqr]

Yes, absolutely true and I'm glad you brought it up. I should have mentioned that in my comment too.

[rumanator]

> Delaying the spread also buys time to develop therapies and vaccines.

I would also add that delaying the spread also contributes to making it progressively harder to get the disease to spread.

[chimprich]

> and will France be able to keep functioning under strict lockdown for all those months?

France has already lifted many of their lockdown restrictions.

> Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually,

That's a big assumption, and not necessarily correct.

First, we won't all get it - herd immunity means infection rates max out at something like 60% to 90% of the population. I understand this maximum is to some extent a function of how fast your infection rates rise due to a sort of momentum effect.

Second, we may be able to suppress maximum infections indefinitely (or until we get a vaccine or treatment) with tracing, local lockdowns and so on. It's not clear if this is an effective long-term strategy, and is disputed by some epidemiologists, but seems to be the leading preferred strategy by most experts.

> it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl

The problem is that you can't really adopt half measures. That's linear thinking, and it's an exponential curve. You either keep the reproduction rate above 1 or below 1. Above 1 you get an accelerating increase and eventually overwhelmed hospitals. Below 1 your infection rates start halving.

Luckily, the measures required for keeping R<1 don't seem to be too intolerable. Spain, Italy, France etc. have managed to squash their epidemics and are getting close to having something like normal society back.

[WildParser]

Btw. The statistics to calculate herd immunity to 60-90% were extremely flawed. They used numbers that came right out of superspreader-events. The most likely thing for COVID-19 is, that it has R0 < 1. It will spread by using a series of superspreader-events and will disappear after a while. Check out Michael Levitt for some understanding of the mathematics of COVID-19... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aHrx68IT7o

[chimprich]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If R0 was <1 then we would never have had an outbreak in the first place.

I don't believe Levitt's interpretation. I certainly hope it's true, but I don't think it is. He seems to believe containment measures have no effect, which is implausible to me.

He's just talking about the stats, without giving a biological hypothesis for why infections would top out - that seems to be coming in an upcoming video that hasn't been released yet.

[WildParser]

With local superspreading-events you can get an outbreak without needing R0 > 1. There can be fire without the world burning down. Levitts math works extremely good - you can calculate the entire German death-curve perfectly. In fact there is no constant R - the model is completely different.

I'm also a bit sceptical about his conclusions. The effects of containment measures aren't really visible in the curve, but e.g. Sweden has a much worse exponent - increasing the chance for more outbreaks will also change the parameters for Levitts curves. I think Germanys curve got very slightly worse recently (shops opening - masks didn't compensate). But I'm not sure if masks did anything at all - there is no clear trend-break in the growth-rate of Germany. Also masks may just keep a local population infectious for a longer time - increasing the risk for visitors.

One biological hypothesis is that covid-19 spreads in local clusters - and has a hard time to move to other places. (e.g. it might need 20 minutes of close-contact talking) The growth-rate is shrinking exponentially (something that Levitt noticed, and can be seen everywhere)- each outbreak locally is trapped and doomed to fizzle, because it is competing with itself - it's just not mobile enough to move to another location before it burns out to maintain a constant R=1.

[PeterisP]

At this rate, Sweden will take years until they "have gone through its population".

"Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually" is not a reasonable assumption - it was the worst case scenario that the world has avoided and (as it seems) will continue to avoid. It's reasonable to expect that if we solve this issue through a vaccine in 2021, then by that time perhaps 10% of the world's population will have contracted COVID-19 and almost everyone else will not. And the expected difference between Sweden and France is going to be that by the time that we have a solution, one of them will have burned through more of their population for no good reason.

[kalleboo]

Epidemiologists have been saying that per-capita comparisons don't make sense, since if you start with 10 cases, and have an Rt of 2, you get 20 cases, no matter if your population is 1 or 100 million.

[jcims]

At 90 days some their first 100 cases, Sweden has half the cases of China. Does that mean they have been twice as effective at fighting the disease? Half as impacted?

[atemerev]

Chinese statistics is unreliable. It makes sense to compare Western countries, but not Western countries to China.

[jcims]

OK Sweden has fewer confirmed cases (40k) than most if not all of Western Europe.

[thomasz]

Sweden doesn't test nearly as much as other countries in Western Europes. Comparing deaths is already complicated, comparing "confirmed cases" is completely useless.

[atemerev]

Compared to population?

[kgwgk]

And if you start with X cases, and have and Rt of 2, you get 2X cases, no matter if X is 10 or 1000.

[ptx]

Perhaps it didn't make sense in the beginning, when outbreaks are sparse, but now that it's spread everywhere and it's a matter of suppressing it, that changes things, doesn't it?

If you start with 10 cases and immediately take action like Taiwan, you have 7 dead. If you start with 10 cases and do nothing like Sweden, you have 4500 dead.

[svrtknst]

Sweden hasn't "done nothing", please don't make things up.

[new2628]

In some cases they did worse than nothing, like when advising people not to wear masks.

[geoffreymcgill]

Sweden passed France in relative Total Deaths the very next day.

https://i.imgur.com/2iBcWi2.png

[nickthemagicman]

France just lifted its quarantine now it's doing exactly what Sweden is doing as every country in the world.

It couldnt feed its citizens without an economy.

Also note there's no exponential explosion in the rate of infection in Sweden or anywhere else that is opened its economy like the model for quarantine predicted to flatten the curve.

It's reached a steady-state in all of these places.