
Stockholm expected to reach herd immunity in May, Swedish ambassador says - dr_dshiv
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/26/845211085/stockholm-expected-to-reach-herd-immunity-in-may-swedish-ambassador-says
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detaro
Just a few other recent Sweden coronavirus discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22982885](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22982885)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919074)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944891)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908103)

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jariel
Sweden only has 18K reported cases which is obviously nowhere near 30% of
Stockholm, and there doesn't seem to be any public data indicating otherwise,
please include a reference to data points if there's anything out there to
substantiate the claims by the Ambassador.

~~~
matt_the_bass
Great points. I’d love to hear counterpoints from those who downvoted.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Antibody studies have proven that the headline numbers in pretty much every
country are extreme underestimates.

~~~
DanBC
For Stockholm to reach herd immunity they'd need about 580,000 - 600,000
people to have had the infection and recovered. This is about 60% of the
population.

They haven't got anywhere near that. And none of the flawed antibody studies
show anything like this level of infection.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Sorry, I've been in this loop before, where I provide exhaustive evidence for
the proposition and then people show up to ask what agenda I'm pursuing since
everyone knows that already. I'm just not up for another round right now.

~~~
maxander
Surely, if you’ve been putting up exhaustive evidence many times before, you
could take a second to link to one of these studies you mention? Otherwise
your comment carries much less weight, and you should expect the sort of
response you just got.

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vikramkr
Thank you Sweden for running a giant, country wide experiment to see if
immunity is actually conferred after Covid infection. We all appreciate you
using your citizens as Guinea pigs to see if we can try and collect evidence
that shows whether herd immunity will occur or whether reinfection is likely.
May the odds be in your favor, for your own sake.

"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected: WHO:
[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-
id...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-
idUSKCN2270FB)

~~~
JPKab
The cognitive dissonance I'm seeing in the tech community on this issue is
interesting.

None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different paths,
some erring more on the side of caution. I agreed with these efforts
personally, because the little data we did have at the time supported these
actions of "locking down."

More time has passed, more data has come in. Increasingly, I'm starting to be
convinced that I was incorrect in my original assessment, and that the
lockdown wasn't necessary in the broader United States and Europe, outside of
dense urban areas. (It should be noted that if you remove NYC from the
equation, the US really has had no issues with hospitals being remotely close
to capacity.)

Sweden ran an experiment, and so did the rest of the world. It could have gone
either way.

My oldest brother owns a small business, as a professional dog trainer for
high-end clients. He had just expanded into a new facility with much more
capacity, hiring employees and taking on a lot of debt. His new facility is
idle now, and his business is in trouble. He is personally distraught. The
lockdowns were an experiment on what would happen to a society if you shut
down most commerce, except for the lucky few like HN readers who get to work
from a laptop.

I'm pretty appalled at the unwillingness of HN readers to, like me, admit that
maybe, just maybe, we all made decisions with little data, and that the
increasing data and time elapsed is showing that most of us, myself included,
were incorrect. That's ok, because it's really not anything people should be
blamed for. However, it is a very bad thing to be unwilling to change one's
mind after new data comes in.

This is where the politicization of the issue is problematic. Leaders feel
like they are betraying their "tribe" if they change their mind. At this
point, continuing the lockdowns without acknowledging nations that didn't
lockdown and are doing well is a form of generational warfare: wealthier
people, often older and at higher risk and with little to lose economically,
against poorer, younger people in the midst of their prime working years.

We, the HN readers, are in the managerial/professional class elites who don't
get hurt the same way other people our age are getting hurt. But don't worry,
if we keep this up, it's going to get all of us as well.

~~~
greedo
We don't know what would have happened in the US if we hadn't locked down.
Considering the human cost so far _with_ a lockdown, I think 20/20 hindsight
indicates that we made the right choice. We can't just assume that things
would have remained the same without a lockdown.

And if things had become worse than now, how would that have impacted the
economy?

~~~
JPKab
Actually, your kind of wrong.

The USA didn't lock down. Individual states locked down, at different rates.
Some didn't lock down at all.

Take a look at the data and see if you can find a difference between the early
and late lockdown states, particularly the ones that border each other.

I'm amazed at how blind people on HN are to the fact that the entire nation
didn't take a homogenous approach to this at all. We have 50 different
strategies that we're deployed.

~~~
greedo
You can be pedantic all you want, but there was a lockdown. It wasn't
Federally initiated, and each state locked down to differing degrees, at
different times, but they locked down. No one said it was homogenous; it's
amazing how blind people on HN are to strawman arguments.

Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate
reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is
free.

~~~
JPKab
I'm not being pedantic. In this case, a relevant factor that you consider
irrelevant out of convenience is being ignored. Call it pedantic all you want.
It matters.

Not all states locked down, at all. That matters. Travel between states, for
the most part, fell to record low rates. This happened voluntarily, before
legally mandated lockdowns were triggered.

You asked "what would have happened if we hadn't locked down."

I pointed out that not all places locked down, and many locked down later.

"Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate
reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is
free"

It's not hard to look at the Johns Hopkins data set, which contains data at
the county level for the US. Not much "teasing out" to do there. It's right
there. If we use admitted cases as a benchmark for actual infections, assuming
it's proportional at a relatively constant level, it's not hard to do.

