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."
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).
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!
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.
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."