[drtillberg]

This.

Sweden's path has been conventional. The attention is coming from nations that executed extreme and even revolutionary policies of universal home arrest, "shutting" an entire nation like a coffee shop, and sending a 30%+ of the workers onto unemployment.

This ultimately comes back to the so-called "Trolley problem,"[1] which some posters in this thread have brilliantly acknowledged. Would we throw the whole world out of work, or imprison them, or bankrupt them, to save 1 life? If not, what is the limit or deciding principle?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

[craigsmansion]

> This.

You say "this", and then proceed to state the exact fallacy the OP made as a truthful observation.

> Sweden's path has been conventional.

Yes. Sweden's path has been conventional. Italy's path has been conventional as well.

There is this whole wave of misapprehension and misunderstanding on HN, especially when it comes to the pandemic: "My opinion is backed by facts, therefor all other opinions must be political and I do not need to think about them because my opinion is correct", which is a form of circular reasoning.

> This ultimately comes back to

This ultimately comes back people whose day-job entails shoveling data with computers and being (or at least feeling) smarter than average, and as such feel at least somewhat qualified as a statistician/epidemiologist.

One of the few things that is clear is that the spread and the course of the disease has an enormous amount of unknown confounding factors.

This means that any approach within general ethical boundaries is valid: from making future prediction based on the most advanced epidemiological data to date, to a system-wide shutdown of "doing the things that are very likely to worsen the situation".

None of the scientific advisors to the various democratic governments are complete idiots, and even none of the elected government officials involved are out to willfully wreak havoc on their populations.

Find out what works. Find out what doesn't work and why it doesn't work even though it seems to work elsewhere.

Sweden's approach is valid. Italy's approach is valid. The chances of any one person getting it exactly right the first time are negligible, so there is no point in cheering for what one believed to be the "winning team".

To spell it out for you: you are not right. You are, at best, less wrong. And to paraphrase the OP, "it is about their own opinions, trying to prematurely pat themselves on the back for believing the right thing."

[goodcanadian]

Find out what works. Find out what doesn't work and why it doesn't work even though it seems to work elsewhere.

Absolutely. The trouble is that there is no consensus on what "working" means. Is it minimising short term deaths? Well, then it is easy to see what worked and what didn't, but is that the correct metric? Perhaps, it is minimising impact on society? Well, it is less easy to see, but there is enough information to make some reasoned statements. However, you will probably come up with a different answer than you had for the previous question. And are we talking about short term or long term impact? Perhaps the goal is to minimise long term deaths and suffering? I don't think that we can begin to claim to have enough information to make any definite statements on that (though, of course, I have my opinions).

[thu2111]

Italy's path has been conventional as well.

Conventional in what sense? They did hard lockdown which I believe has never been tried before, outside of Mexico, once, for a few days. This type of long term shutdown is entirely new.

None of the scientific advisors to the various democratic governments are complete idiots

Given their behaviour a lot of people have concluded otherwise.

Sweden's approach is valid. Italy's approach is valid.

Nobody is arguing about validity, which is undefined here and thus meaningless anyway, but cost and proportionality.

The stated justification for lockdowns was to avoid overflowing hospitals. Sweden avoided this despite taking far less harsh measures than Italy. This automatically makes Sweden's approach better than Italy's (or "more valid" if you like).

In Belarus they locked down less than Sweden, and still didn't see hospital overflow. Presumably that means Belarus is even less wrong than Sweden!

[smallnamespace]

Italy’s starting point was that they were in the midst of getting overwhelmed (and were already over capacity in some regions) when they executed their shutdown.

Sweden had a better starting point and more time and room to maneuver.

[sampo]

> revolutionary policies of universal home arrest

Quarantine is an age-old method of disease prevention. There is nothing revolutionary about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine#History

[Mattasher]

Quarantine for the sick is an age-old method. Lockdowns of entire populations for extended periods is a massive experiment, and the closest analogy we have is the wholesale internment of Japanese Americans in WWII, based on the idea that some of them might pose a danger.

[oblio]

In 1918 they did the exact same thing, they shut stuff down : https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/03/how-citie...

[lowdose]

> Weekly deaths per 100,000 from 1918 pandemic above the expected rate.

The 1918 with worst cities 400+ Weekly deaths per 100.000 people are not comparable with the following numbers of COVID-19. Note that covid numbers not weekly but total.

> The Johns Hopkins University looked into the number deaths per 100,000 of the population in the top-10 countries worst affected by COVID-19. Belgium had over 57,000 cases on May 25 but it had the highest number of deaths per 100,000 of its inhabitants at 81.53. By comparison, badly-hit Spain and Italy had 57.43 and 55.64 deaths per 100,000 people respectively. The U.S. has surpassed 1.5 million cases and its deaths per 100,000 inhabitants stood at 30.02 on May 25.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/2117...

[oblio]

The 1918 flu was awful, however Covid is nothing to sneeze at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPCkVrdZVjM

Keep in mind that the graph from that video looks the way it does despite almost the entire world taking measures to prevent the spread of Covid ;-)

[zosima]

Quarantine is only for the healthy.

The sick are isolated.

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

And quarantines have been used since the earliest times. In Boccacio's Decamerone the protagonists escape to the countryside.

[akiselev]

> The quarantine against chol era has been lifted in the Black Sea port of Odessa, Pravda re ported today, but Soviet travel organizations said they were still limiting travel to the city.

From the New York Times archive, 1970 [1]. The Soviet government quarantined Odessa in 1970 during the cholera outbreak in a rather cruel way - information about the outbreak was suppressed but since it was a popular vacation spot, people kept coming only to be trapped there [2]. It's hard to find much information on the event due to the iron curtain but I've heard several personal accounts and the similarities are striking.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/21/archives/cholera-quaranti...

[2] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/chorela-quarantine-odess... - My apologies for a long form article but search for "quarantine" deeper into it.

[oska]

There is nothing 'extreme' or 'revolutionary' about adopting strong containment (quarantine) measures during a pandemic. That has been established human practice for millennia. What is extreme is not doing so.

And your mention of the trolley problem is bogus. Early containment measures would have saved lives and the economy. There was no dilemma there.

[spacemanmatt]

It's like the trolley problem, but Sweden pulled the lever that sends the trolley over lots of people rather than just a few.

I think you used the right ethical analysis tool, but I think you got the ethical analysis wrong.

[natch]

Sweden’s position is that the trolley in this set of choices is eventually going to roll over roughly the same number of people no matter which lever is pulled. The timing varies in different scenarios, not the total numbers.

It just appears that the numbers are worse for them because the scenario hasn’t fully played out yet in all countries, and they chose the lever that has them taking their hits early. Comparisons with other countries aren’t appropriate, they would say, until all trolleys have stopped rolling.

And they are choosing their strategy deliberately, because they think there are various benefits (including epidemiological ones) of this path.

>rather than just a few

No. It looks like just a few. But that’s a false conclusion, taken only because we are still in the early stages. Other countries will catch up to their numbers.

[matthewdgreen]

> Other countries will catch up to their numbers.

The fatality rate seems to be declining globally, in part due to improved treatment. Even if that was the only objection to your claim, it would be a serious objection. In addition to that, we're also rapidly learning lessons about how to protect vulnerable patients in care homes (part of the "learning" here is just manufacturing enough PPE to do the job). Many of the elderly patients who died in Sweden's first wave might have been saved if they'd delayed the infections enough to apply what we've learned.

[new2628]

By this logic any great loss can be rationalized as the prelude to some even greater win.

At the moment the best we have are the current numbers. By that measure, Sweden looks terrible.

Comparisons between counties of similar population are quite informative: https://i.imgur.com/do9Zbvn.png

[jimmyswimmy]

I think that's not quite correct. Sweden didn't pull any lever at all. They advised their citizens but left them individually free to choose their own path, or pull their own lever. I would argue that's a different ethical choice than what most other countries made.

[cowbellemoo]

> Sweden didn't pull any lever at all

Your analysis of their passivity does not acknowledge the assumptions underlying an individualist strategy. The lever Sweden pulled was permitting the atomization of a collective public health problem.

[mikem170]

>The lever Sweden pulled was permitting the atomization of a collective public health problem.

Did that happen? I didn't hear that their health system broke under the load.

To the contrary, everyone else atomized their economies and still had the virus go through their populations.

Per-capita Sweden did about the same as France, and better than Italy, UK, and Spain.

[alkonaut]

> over lots of people rather than just a few.

This is too soon to say

- We don't know whether different actions would have produced a very different outcome (I don't beleive a Norwegain strategy would have yielded significantly better outcome, for example).

- More importantly it's too soon to say given we don't have the effects of public health on other mitigations which come much later (e.g. GDP for healthcare spending etc). We also aren't even nearly through the pandemic. More outbreaks are likely, and we don't know how much effect the places with 10%, 20% or 30% immunity will have compared to places with places that have a much lower immunity.

[matz1]

There is no wrong answer in the trolley problem, ethics are subjective.

[literallycancer]

>Sweden's path has been conventional. The attention is coming from nations that executed extreme and even revolutionary policies of universal home arrest, "shutting" an entire nation like a coffee shop, and sending a 30%+ of the workers onto unemployment.

As opposed to abusing the situation to rebalance a ponzi scheme pension system? After all, most of the people dying have stopped contributing taxes, so nothing of value was lost. Right?

Another thing to note is that most countries didn't just cause a huge number of people to lose their jobs with no plan, only US did that (because it's a 3rd world country). Normal people use the QE money to keep everyone safe and healthy until the danger passes. Which it does, if you take proper measures and close down travel from red zones.

Viruses don't become benign just because people aren't in the mood to deal with them anymore.