[bowyakka]

Counter arguments:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.10.20096909v...

https://covid19-projections.com/denmark vs https://covid19-projections.com/sweden

Its also possible Sweden just got lucky with the prevalent strain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.03.233866v1....

I would love it if Sweden was right and tackled this in a way that does look like a seasonal flu, but I think the science is still out on that. It does seem the science points mildly towards it being quite as deadly as initially thought, but I would not the Swedish death rate a total win.

<snark> Forget all that Sweden is the best approach, we should copy it in America especially the very solid social health care system :) </snark>

[refurb]

Your first paper isn't a counter argument at all. It's just a measure of excess deaths (which the doctor never claimed weren't happening).

[bowyakka]

true that.

I guess my counter would be:

* It was solved at a greater expense of human life, its easy to say "those people would have died" but that is harder to prove ethically. Could the excess deaths have lived on _longer than a flu season_?

* Is there a good argument that it is in fact over in Sweden?

* Are there other variables that might have made Covid-19 not so bad in Sweden?

If I was to take more direct counters to the article:

> I am willing to bet that the countries that have shut down completely will see rates spike when they open up. If that is the case, then there won’t have been any point in shutting down in the first place, because all those countries are going to end up with the same number of dead at the end of the day anyway.

Maybe, but that could also be a case of thinking that the death rate is a fairly simple linear model, which would fly in the face of the various epidemiological models that we use (not just for covid but since the 1920s)

> No, because influenza has been around for centuries while covid is completely new. In an average influenza year most people already have some level of immunity because they’ve been infected with a similar strain previously, or because they’re vaccinated.

Is Covid-19 completely new? By this reasoning it would as stated be more infectious due to a lack of known immunity. With this line of reasoning why wouldn't a _different_ cornovirus also give a more uniform immunity? Why would a novel Cornovirus strain have a greater impact over a novel Influenza strain?

I could go one but I feel like I am sniping.

Personally I dont think the world wide response has been great, I do think we have overreacted but I also would argue that its not just another influenza and should be ignored as such.

[d1zzy]

Plus, just because some policy works for some country (for some specific time period) it doesn't mean it will work for another. There are way too many differences in factors that affect virus propagation for the same policy to be effective in most other places, healthcare being, like you mentioned, just one of them.