Item — HN Reader

>Rural areas are supposed to be where you go to escape a pandemic. How do you turn rural areas into places that are hardest hit?

Density doesn't matter much for a virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2. Very few people live in the mountains or on farms and only come into town every six months.

In retrospect I think everyone should have taken the Swedish approach (the one the UK was following until the scary Imperial College projection came out), and plan on everyone catching the disease sooner or later.

1 comments

> In retrospect I think everyone should have taken the Swedish approach

Sweden is now backing out of that plan.

Also, there’s a gradient of response to the virus: some people die, some people survive but suffer long term symptoms/damage and some people appear to simply go back to normal. These survivors are not distributed (by age, other comorbidities) the way fatalities are.

>Sweden is now backing out of that plan.

If you read Hacker News for any length of time, each week there will be multiple "Sweden proves its strategy worked" articles competing with multiple "Sweden's strategy proven to have failed" articles.

>Also, there’s a gradient of response to the virus: some people die, some people survive but suffer long term symptoms/damage and some people appear to simply go back to normal. These survivors are not distributed (by age, other comorbidities) the way fatalities are.

One thing I have not yet seen on Hacker News or anywhere else is convincing evidence that such "long-term symptoms/damage" are substantially greater in number or intensity[1] than for any other respiratory disease that can occasionally kill, especially given how novel (wording intentional) SARS-CoV-19 is.

[1] Except a somewhat higher percentage of fatalities than the flu, depending on whether you define death as a long-term symptom

I didn't assert "proven to have failed" I said they are backing out of their plan.

I'm sorry the only articles I could find for you are behind a paywall or from secondary sources, but here's a WSJ article on the topic https://archive.is/OGN9Q#selection-2811.75-2811.130 and FT: https://archive.is/56yQu

Schools are closed, and the PM gave an address telling people how dangerous the virus is that was deliberately scheduled at the same time as Tegnell's regular address.

I don't have hard data on the consequential tail of infection and would be interested to see it. What I commented on is the false binary characterization of "it kills old people, everyone else is fine." Even if that were true, pushing grannie out on the ice floe has rarely been an acceptable strategy and if it does become an accepted decision criterion I look forward to the many other optimizations it would unlock.