[jonplackett]

They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.

[elcritch]

Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.

[jonplackett]

I saw some research the other day that they think the decrease in death rate is because everyone is wearing masks and social distancing. Therefore anyone getting sick is getting a very low viral load compared to before. If comparing to flu we should compare to pre-lockdown, pre-mask death rate.

[matz1]

No, The decrease of death rate is because more testing done on more people. The more you test, the larger the number of asymptomatic/mild symptom case you have, thus decrease the death rate.

[elcritch]

I could see both, and likely both would need to be part of estimation. It's not binary, but likely, 20% due to mask lowering viral exposure loads, 50% due to more healthy people (hence asymptomatic) getting the virus.

However, that doesn't invalidate the overall comparisons. Countries like Sweden have a lowering death rate despite no broad mask wearing (https://fortune.com/2020/07/29/no-point-in-wearing-mask-swed...). You can see an example graph here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...