"as the weather got warmer, people in the capital were beginning to ignore social-distancing rules"
So much for the argument that Sweden's approach was working because Swedes are so much better than the rest of world at voluntary compliance. Overall, it looks like Sweden is moving toward doing the same as every other country, but quietly so they don't have to admit it's a change of course.
Yeah I don't know where that sentiment came from. Imho people here in Sweden just hadn't felt the heat from the fire yet.
That's the main reason why most of them are out and about, enjoying the spring weather after a long and dark winter.
Once this virus starts affecting people you know, that's when folks will start to react.
Me personally I haven't heard of a single case until last week when I heard that one of my co-workers had it, along with his wife. They had it, and overcame it. But they live in another city and we had already started working from home at that point. So I never saw him other than on Teams.
Driving people inside is probably precisely the problem here - coronavirus, like other diseases, doesn't seem to transmit well at all outdoors, especially in warmer weather.
Well in a normal winter, people are driven inside places full of other people. In a coronavirus "winter", people simply stop going anywhere or associating with anyone they don't already live with.
Sweden's strategy isn't only about deaths by Covid-19. It's about preventing total number of deaths including deaths caused by the things we do to prevent the spread of the virus. The line is to keep things as open as possible. Quarantine is problematic if you take things such as suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, child and spouse abuse and depression into account. The list goes on.
I'd have thought it would be the opposite. People use public transport instead of walking in the cold, people stay inside pubs and bars instead of spreading out outside.
we would only know which approach worked best after the end of pandemic. An integral (e.g. total number of deaths) of the curve matters as much if not more as its shape.
Alternative one can see it as they first tried the carrot, and now when there is sign that some people did not get the message they are using the stick.
It should be noted that this is just the capital, which currently has something like 10x infection compared to most other areas of Sweden, and almost 20x the number of dead. To give some number, Stockholm has in the latest report 7k infected and 1200 dead. Malmö (or rather the region around it), which is Sweden third largest city, has 600 infected and 60 dead. Population wise, Stockholm has about 2x compared to Malmö.
People are not sure why stockholm has the number it has compared to other regions.
I think overall size of a population and population density have to be the contributing factors. More people means more people have traveled there from other places to spread the virus. More density means a higher R value.
The death rate per capita in Sweden is not much higher than the US. At ~33x the population the US has ~25x the deaths. Given the US had only double the total cases on March 6 as Sweden that seems like a positive indicator for Sweden's approach. It's like saying it doesn't really matter what you do so you might as well stay open. The timeline of when you started taking things seriously is also a big factor of course. I think it's way too early to declare anything yet, but I think it's good there are different approaches being taken to learn from.
Stockholm has a lot of affluent people who went skiing in Italy and brought covid home. So many that contact tracing was very quickly overwhelmed. Government warned about traveling to Italy way too late.
With 1200 dead, that means on the order of 100k cases. Stockholm has about 1-2m people depending on how you count. It cannot grow exponentially for much longer, so the peak is close.
This is the most logical time to take measures, except for maybe the very beginning when it could possibly have been stopped.
The big problem with Sweden's approach, is that the duration of immunity is entirely unknown when it comes to SARS-CoV-2. We don't yet know what antibody level is required to generate that hypothetical immunity, including whether asymptomatic and mild-case persons (which will be the vast majority of Sweden's herd) are going to have the required level of antibodies.
They're taking a swing in the dark, with the potential risk of a very high per capita mortality rate. If the duration of immunity is short, they could kill a lot of people for little gain. They're currently running at seven times the per capita mortality rate of Finland.
In Malmö you have no (proper) metro. The Stockholm metro had about 800k trips per day iirc.
IF you work in Stockholm you probably commute by commuter train and or bus into the city, where in Malmö you can walk through the city center in 15 minutes so biking or owning a car to commute with is the norm.
In Malmö most stores close at 5pm, and malls much earlier than in Stockholm so they are visited on weekends instead of whenever (this also sucks since there is nothing to do after work), FNM starts at something like 15:30.
It's just a lot fewer crowds and situations with close contact in general.
I suppose one caution on this would be "capital/world city explodes, then growth shifts to the regions" is a pretty common pattern worldwide, for whatever reason.
On a per capita basis, some days this week where sweden had 172 and 180 deaths in a day would be the equivalent of the US having 5600 and 6100 deaths a day.
Their approach is absolutely not working.
I agree with the sentiment that Sweden isn't handling it particularly well, the writing on the wall was showing that a full lockdown has been a good idea for quite some time.
That said, the US is a great example of how to handle the situation absolutely terribly - with a major political party probably funding and at least endorsing movements violating the lockdown and terribly unclear messaging.
No, I don't like the US's approach. Canada has had it's good and bad points and Vancouver was basically acting like Florida for a while, but the governments response has been well focused, even if we don't have the resources to throw at the problem that the US does - and the messaging has been extremely comforting and clear.
As I've had to point out many times, "get to herd immunity faster" doesn't just mean let everyone get sicker sooner. The whole "flattening the curve" thing is not about an alternative to herd immunity. It's about getting there in a humane way that doesn't overwhelm health care and disproportionately affect some groups - the elderly, minorities, people with other health conditions, people who have no choice but to work and expose themselves more. "Let the chips fall where they may" is a recipe for excessive and unevenly distributed suffering. And worst of all, it might not even help reduce the total deaths over the long term. That's highly speculative and dependent on other factors.
People keep pointing to Swedish death numbers as a sign that “the approach are not working”. But lockdown measures in so many countries are not designed to avoid every single fatality as much as to keep the health system from being overwhelmed.
If Sweden has had a fairly sizable amount of deaths – of mainly elderly people, as we see – but its health system has not been overwhelmed for the bulk of the population and the economy has not greatly suffered, then things are arguably working out better than in countries which have minimized fatalities but are dealing with greater economic (and psychological) fallout.
It depends on what you are aiming at. If you are aiming for the herd immunity then the best approach is to get there as quickly as you can, while keeping within the limits of your health care capacity and protecting those with highest risk of severe outcomes. Certain amount of deaths is inevitable.
We really need to wait a year or two before we can tell which strategy was the best. It is not clear if the countries which managed to limit the infections will do any better in the long run than for example Sweden.
Those numbers are impossible to compare because countries are one different points one the infections-per-capita scale which is not know to us because we can't test all the population all the time.
It's important to note that there are discrepancies between countries in how the deaths are reported. Interesting read regarding unexplained increases in the number of deaths in some countries here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
The argument wasn't that fewer people would die. It's that everyone who was going to die would do it sooner. The Swedish gamble is that this is an unstoppable disease that will go to completion in every country anyway.
I think the argument was that Sweden doesn't have a legal avenue towards general lockdown - only quarantines of specific facilities - and since they assumed everyone was going to get it anyway, voluntary compliance would be good enough, so they didn't regard it as a particular priority to change their law or even constitution. There wasn't any Sweden exceptionalism in the official characterisations I've heard - maybe in the mouths of some redditors.
There were a lot of early clickbaity conclusions that frankly seemed like someone just logiced it out in their head got a lot of attention... but IMO didn't really have much data to support them in any way.
Lots of "Why in this country is?" "This place is doing well because."
And then a few weeks later the data shows that's simply not the case and you realize the concussions in those articles had little to zero data supporting it.
Personally I look forward to hearing about good data years from now about this pandemic.
That's what's so tough: we're all flying blind, but our actions have very, very real consequences.
In the Lombardy region of Italy, they kept the bars and restaurants open and had this Milano non si ferma! (Milan doesn't stop!) campaign. The results are tragic.
In the Veneto region of Italy, the governor listened to some experts, and the results have been significantly better.
I don't know. Can't know. At least one had a possibly-Swedish name, but that doesn't mean all that much. I do suspect that more are Americans, momentarily enamored of Sweden because of this one issue. I'm even more sure that any such will forget their love of Sweden as soon as they realize that Swedish attitudes on just about any other politico-economic subject aren't so convenient to their cause.
>[...] but quietly so they don't have to admit it's a change of course.
Where exactly does this come from? Sweden has no need to save face. We've been transparent and had open discussion from the beginning with the spoken assumption that we may, in fact, not be doing the right thing and that we may have to alter course as the situation changes.
The ones who need to save face are the ones which are committing to full lockdown right now. They're the ones who are making a big sacrifice and need to motivate it with the fact that "it's a necessity", seeing Sweden succeed otherwise would be a big blow to their egos and their personal sacrifices.
I will also say that voluntary compliance is still occurring here, which is notable both in what private companies are doing in adapting to the situation, and how the average person has changed their behaviour. This doesn't mean 100% compliance for everyone, which is unfortunate.
Just like abortion or guns, Republicans vs Democrats, there are 2 chunks of people on opposite sides that have staked out their bunkers. They are now at war.
It is absolutely not the same, since Sweden may change their position because they are not inherently opposed by some inherent moral absolutism to do so.
> The ones who need to save face are the ones which are committing to full lockdown right now.
That's quite the assertion. The very word quarantine comes to us from when there was a Republic of Venice. The notion of shutting things down in times of plague is an old one.
Yes, it's a very blunt instrument, and you'd hope we could do better these days - and some places like South Korea and Taiwan appear to be managing that - but locking things down works.
I'm not saying that because the lockdown has been a failure you need to save face. Is there something unclear in my reasoning from the rest of my comment that you'd like me to re-word?
Saving face refers to trying to recover from screwing something up. Perhaps it's possible that something will come to light showing that lockdowns were not the best way of handling things, but they're a very good default when you don't really know what's going on, but can't afford to wait for data. I would have used a different phrase.
It's also illegal to bomb buildings, rob people and smoke outside restaurants but that doesn't prevent the Swedes pretending their country isn't a third world country.
They won't do anything, call their bluff by putting an Afghani or Palestinian flag up and you'll see them break world records in excuses.
Seems like Sweden is on track to hit herd immunity long before everyone else, with minimal economic damage. Their daily new case count has been mostly plateaued for weeks, like many other places in full lockdown.
I'm not sure that's fair. I've only seen anger from the same set of people who write angry rants about how everyone wants to kill grandma. Most opinions range from curiosity how conventional wisdom can be so different in Sweden to quiet resignation that the rest of us might have made the problem significantly worse.
Not really, if age separation can be achieved efficiently, herd immunity wouldn't be impossible.
The problem is that you really need an advanced country to organize separating people by age (making young people get through the virus without passing it to older people).
I would have significantly more respect for the Swedish approach if they had protected their elderly and other vulnerable communities. The fact is that the weak do not account for an unavoidable minority of the deaths.
The Swedish approach may get them out the other end before any country aside from China and Vietnam, but the Swedish execution did not save lives by protecting the vulnerable.
I agree with you totally. In Hungary our first hospitalization was because of a guy who lives in UK and travelled to Hungary to visit his parents. Of course it was his father who went to hospital, not him.
That was the intention, and the actions where designed for it. However, the care of elderly are handled by the municipalities, who didn’t have any readiness for handling it properly. Hopefully some of those mistakes can be avoided outside of Stockholm by more extensive testing of personell.
Being on the other side of the opinion spectrum, I see what looks like wishful thinking on the part of the "Herd Immunity" adherents, with a lot of goal post moving.
Two weeks ago, many of them lionized Dr. Knut Wittkowski. But now that his forecast of 10000 (sic!) deaths in the US has proven somewhat optimistic, I haven't seen any followups where he explains what he got wrong in his model, and what adjustments to it he's making.
1. We realize that the shutdown had a small effect, because a) the virus is already widespread due to easy transmission and b) the mortality rate is much lower than previously thought. Thus, we don't need to continue the shutdown.
2. The virus turns out to be as bad as feared, and things get much worse in Sweden (and elsewhere). The shutdown needs to continue indefinitely.
I'm leaning toward #1, but I think it's still too early to rule out #2. If we are living in the first scenario, I wonder how long it will take for the general public to realize that's the case.
I do think that a combination of political jockeying and mass hysteria have placed us into the position we're in now. If that's true, then the worst thing about this virus will certainly be the economic impact which has a number of far reaching effects.
Here's an actual science-based report detailing how we can start to reopen with proper testing and tracing. I think Germany is doing something along these lines?
New York City is increasingly providing a lower bound for mortality rate in a population with relatively high infection rates, and it's not all that low. You would have to postulate some mechanism like Herd Immunity Through Blondness to expect a substantially better outcome for Sweden.
I guess everything is relative, but I'm not sure I would say the economic damage is minimal. Maybe in comparison with other countries, but I'm not sure how clear that is. Especially if other countries can go South Korean style and get back to full speed faster, Sweden could very well be left behind in terms of the economy as well.
Number of deaths so far is very high compared to the neighbouring countries, and there is still a long way to go before herd immunity.
In general, it seems to me quite insane that Sweden already in the beginning of March basically had decided to infect millions of people with a virus we only had a month of experience with or something like that.
Like every other time people talk about economic damage and "letting the cure be worse than the disease" the specific dog whistle above is talking about the impact to companies, in particular the banks which rely on rent and loan payments, which has been heavily targeted for indirect subsidy in the US - compared to talking about the damage this does to individuals and their well being, all of which can be well supported through this crisis with an approach like that taken by Denmark.
I think what he meant that the increase has platued, meaning a linear growth in infected, as opposed to exponential.
Other than that the numbers of people in intensive care and the deaths per day has been decreasing during last week, something that in my eyes are even more positive.
They have more than 5x the deaths relative to population than Norway has, and more than 7x the deaths of Finland, and it seems those would be reasonable benchmarks to compare against.
Average time between infection and death from COVID-19 is 23 days, and 18 days average from first symptoms to deaths (1) A country can be a week or two into the overload level before it shows up in the ICUs
I'd be happy to believe that Sweden has found a better way to deal with things, but at the moment they have 5x the number of deaths per population of California (2150/10.1 million vs. 1500/40.0 million). That's not great.
I also think there's unacknowledged element of luck in a lot of these outcomes. A few infected individuals a month or so back in the wrong time/place makes a huge difference in the progression of the disease. Likewise when testing is relatively sparse, it's easy to get a mistaken view on where things stand.
Their gamble is that it will come out in the wash - in the first period they will have scary, unpleasant numbers. But as the disease progresses through every community will have the same scary, unpleasant numbers - but in Sweden the economy will be able to reopen fully and finally in a month or two after everyone is recovered. But for the rest of us, it'll take an extra six months or a year; the same amount of people will die[] it's just a matter of how fast or slow.
[] in the non trivial sense, since obviously we'll all die; but presumably we won't all die from this pandemic.
They're definitely stressed but not overloaded. Still we don't know how long the medical personnel will find this stress tolerable. Right now they are using a emergency provision that enables them to order workers to work 48 h a week but for much higher pay.
This assumes conditions don't change. With enough time, a treatment or cure can be found.
In the future, hindsight will be 20/20 but right now the wisest is to buy time to understand the spread and disease better.
Don't expect a miracle cure soon. Covid-19 is very similar to other coronavirus, in particular the one that caused the SARS outbreak a few years ago. If there is a better treatment, we probably would have discovered it a few years ago to treat SARS.
There might be something to that element of (bad) luck: a large number of people in the Stockholm region seemingly timed their ski trips to Italy at just the wrong time: plenty of infectious people but before social distancing / quarantine measures.
> I don’t want to see any full open-air restaurants
What??? Isn't that precisely _the best_ option intuitively? I'd much rather be outdoors with a high rate of air flow than inside. No idea if this has been studied but it seems obvious.
I don't get why people don't just buy their own beer and go sit in nature. You can even bring some friends. It is large masses of unknown people that we should avoid.
It is that things are bad and avoiding a lock down didn't work - unfortunately any tactical decision you make takes about three weeks to really show evidence of efficacy.
I don't know what your new sources are. The rates of death and infection vary a lot between regions in Sweden so any significant herd immunity is probably regional.
A recent estimate puts R at around 0.92-0.98 in Sweden, which means that it’s right around the treshold of sustained epidemic vs staying under control. If people start to become more lax around social distancing restrictions, it could shift the balance back up over the treshold.
There is very substantial evidence of that. A random sample was taken of 700 inhabitants in Stockholm, which came in at 2.5% positive at that time. Based on that, they model that around 600 000 people have been infected.
600000 people is 6% of the Swedish population. So Sweden would be maybe... 10% of the way to herd immunity? That does not really count as close in my book.
That estimate is exclusively for Stockholm which is ahead of the rest of Sweden. Stockholm has ~2 million inhabitants, so that’s 25%+. That said, the key aspect is of course whether the intensive care units can keep up with the needs. So far, that has been true for Stockholm, which ptobably means that the measures are adequate for Swedish circumstances. Notably, the number of cases for Stockholm is projected to have peaked around April 10th.
I stand corrected regarding their prediction. I don't understand much Swedish, so I could not follow their model. But it appears to rely on an extrapolation of data from late March. Do they include any cross-validation of the model with current data?
April 9, 10, 11: 200, 148, 240 new cases were reported in Stockholm
April 21, 22, 23: 163, 289, 281 new cases were reported (and might still be subject to upward revision)
As we both agree, reported cases is a fairly uncertain metric, but I don't see a peak on April 10. Do you?
The model is calibrated based on the study from late march, which randomly sampled 700 individuals in Stockholm. From that they can infer the number of infected people at that point in time. They use two separate variables to track unknown infections and known infections (hospitalizations), so from that study and hospital data they get a baseline. They can then verify how the model holds up for the group of hospitalized cases.
There are charts towards the end of the paper which shows the real data plotted compared to the predictions, with confidence intervalls. The data is obviously very noisy, but it seems to track reasonably well, and is expected to taper of only slowly. The expected decline is not by any means drastic.
Swedish officials do believe that something like 95% of their coronavirus cases aren't reflected in the official count. Most countries are undercounting by at least an order of magnitude, and as you say Sweden isn't doing a ton of testing, so this makes sense.
Herd immunity might not even be possible.
Other coronavirus immunity lasts on average a year. There are other viruses like HIV where you can't get herd immunity.
> so you'd have to postulate something like 99% of cases being asymptomatic.
No, that's not how it works. There are plenty of people who have had and do have symptoms but have not been counted. Seeking care and getting counted is a last resort here.
> Most people who use "flatten the curve" nowadays insist that it is about an alternative
That has absolutely not been my impression, but they're probably both matters of perspective - who we talk to, what sources we read, and so on. To the extent that people do think of it as an alternative, that makes me sad.
There's nothing "undercounted" about the confirmed cases number. To be confirmed, one must be tested and to be tested one must seek medical attention. People are encouraged not to seek medical attention unless it is necessary. There is even a nationwide advice nurse number that people are instructed to call in order to screen them before they do so.
They aren't claiming that the number of confirmed cases is that number of people who have or have had the virus, which is something they've pointed out in several of the press conferences, it's just the number of confirmed cases.
The difference you're seeing is the difference in conditions under which people get tested.
116 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadSo much for the argument that Sweden's approach was working because Swedes are so much better than the rest of world at voluntary compliance. Overall, it looks like Sweden is moving toward doing the same as every other country, but quietly so they don't have to admit it's a change of course.
That's the main reason why most of them are out and about, enjoying the spring weather after a long and dark winter.
Once this virus starts affecting people you know, that's when folks will start to react.
Me personally I haven't heard of a single case until last week when I heard that one of my co-workers had it, along with his wife. They had it, and overcame it. But they live in another city and we had already started working from home at that point. So I never saw him other than on Teams.
This of course is unsurprising. Even random street violence drops during winter, as cold temperatures drives everyone inside and away from each other.
And yeah, people are idiots for going to bars.
It should be noted that this is just the capital, which currently has something like 10x infection compared to most other areas of Sweden, and almost 20x the number of dead. To give some number, Stockholm has in the latest report 7k infected and 1200 dead. Malmö (or rather the region around it), which is Sweden third largest city, has 600 infected and 60 dead. Population wise, Stockholm has about 2x compared to Malmö.
People are not sure why stockholm has the number it has compared to other regions.
The death rate per capita in Sweden is not much higher than the US. At ~33x the population the US has ~25x the deaths. Given the US had only double the total cases on March 6 as Sweden that seems like a positive indicator for Sweden's approach. It's like saying it doesn't really matter what you do so you might as well stay open. The timeline of when you started taking things seriously is also a big factor of course. I think it's way too early to declare anything yet, but I think it's good there are different approaches being taken to learn from.
This is the most logical time to take measures, except for maybe the very beginning when it could possibly have been stopped.
They're taking a swing in the dark, with the potential risk of a very high per capita mortality rate. If the duration of immunity is short, they could kill a lot of people for little gain. They're currently running at seven times the per capita mortality rate of Finland.
IF you work in Stockholm you probably commute by commuter train and or bus into the city, where in Malmö you can walk through the city center in 15 minutes so biking or owning a car to commute with is the norm.
In Malmö most stores close at 5pm, and malls much earlier than in Stockholm so they are visited on weekends instead of whenever (this also sucks since there is nothing to do after work), FNM starts at something like 15:30.
It's just a lot fewer crowds and situations with close contact in general.
What matters is deaths overall, not deaths per day.
That said, the US is a great example of how to handle the situation absolutely terribly - with a major political party probably funding and at least endorsing movements violating the lockdown and terribly unclear messaging.
No, I don't like the US's approach. Canada has had it's good and bad points and Vancouver was basically acting like Florida for a while, but the governments response has been well focused, even if we don't have the resources to throw at the problem that the US does - and the messaging has been extremely comforting and clear.
Time's already up.
As I've had to point out many times, "get to herd immunity faster" doesn't just mean let everyone get sicker sooner. The whole "flattening the curve" thing is not about an alternative to herd immunity. It's about getting there in a humane way that doesn't overwhelm health care and disproportionately affect some groups - the elderly, minorities, people with other health conditions, people who have no choice but to work and expose themselves more. "Let the chips fall where they may" is a recipe for excessive and unevenly distributed suffering. And worst of all, it might not even help reduce the total deaths over the long term. That's highly speculative and dependent on other factors.
If Sweden has had a fairly sizable amount of deaths – of mainly elderly people, as we see – but its health system has not been overwhelmed for the bulk of the population and the economy has not greatly suffered, then things are arguably working out better than in countries which have minimized fatalities but are dealing with greater economic (and psychological) fallout.
We really need to wait a year or two before we can tell which strategy was the best. It is not clear if the countries which managed to limit the infections will do any better in the long run than for example Sweden.
Deaths per day is on a downward trend right now. Two weeks ago the maximum on a day was 108.
Lots of "Why in this country is?" "This place is doing well because."
And then a few weeks later the data shows that's simply not the case and you realize the concussions in those articles had little to zero data supporting it.
Personally I look forward to hearing about good data years from now about this pandemic.
In the Lombardy region of Italy, they kept the bars and restaurants open and had this Milano non si ferma! (Milan doesn't stop!) campaign. The results are tragic.
In the Veneto region of Italy, the governor listened to some experts, and the results have been significantly better.
I haven't heard a single swedish person utter this nonsense IRL. Sounds like a clickbait headline from Vice or something similar.
Where exactly does this come from? Sweden has no need to save face. We've been transparent and had open discussion from the beginning with the spoken assumption that we may, in fact, not be doing the right thing and that we may have to alter course as the situation changes.
The ones who need to save face are the ones which are committing to full lockdown right now. They're the ones who are making a big sacrifice and need to motivate it with the fact that "it's a necessity", seeing Sweden succeed otherwise would be a big blow to their egos and their personal sacrifices.
I will also say that voluntary compliance is still occurring here, which is notable both in what private companies are doing in adapting to the situation, and how the average person has changed their behaviour. This doesn't mean 100% compliance for everyone, which is unfortunate.
That's quite the assertion. The very word quarantine comes to us from when there was a Republic of Venice. The notion of shutting things down in times of plague is an old one.
Yes, it's a very blunt instrument, and you'd hope we could do better these days - and some places like South Korea and Taiwan appear to be managing that - but locking things down works.
They won't do anything, call their bluff by putting an Afghani or Palestinian flag up and you'll see them break world records in excuses.
The problem is that you really need an advanced country to organize separating people by age (making young people get through the virus without passing it to older people).
The Swedish approach may get them out the other end before any country aside from China and Vietnam, but the Swedish execution did not save lives by protecting the vulnerable.
https://babylonbee.com/news/infographic-common-covid-19-talk...
Two weeks ago, many of them lionized Dr. Knut Wittkowski. But now that his forecast of 10000 (sic!) deaths in the US has proven somewhat optimistic, I haven't seen any followups where he explains what he got wrong in his model, and what adjustments to it he's making.
Richard Epstein is at least making revisions to his estimate, but unfortunately, he's making them retroactively as well: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/04/the-hoover-institute...
A few weeks ago, the UK briefly flirted with a herd immunity strategy. Would anybody today argue that these days were wisely spent?
Now, the benchmark du jour is Sweden. Will Sweden still be the benchmark a month from now? Would be nice if it were, but I'm not confident.
1. We realize that the shutdown had a small effect, because a) the virus is already widespread due to easy transmission and b) the mortality rate is much lower than previously thought. Thus, we don't need to continue the shutdown.
2. The virus turns out to be as bad as feared, and things get much worse in Sweden (and elsewhere). The shutdown needs to continue indefinitely.
I'm leaning toward #1, but I think it's still too early to rule out #2. If we are living in the first scenario, I wonder how long it will take for the general public to realize that's the case.
I do think that a combination of political jockeying and mass hysteria have placed us into the position we're in now. If that's true, then the worst thing about this virus will certainly be the economic impact which has a number of far reaching effects.
https://www.nga.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/NGA-Report.pd...
It's by the national governors association in the US and seems pretty well done.
Number of deaths so far is very high compared to the neighbouring countries, and there is still a long way to go before herd immunity.
In general, it seems to me quite insane that Sweden already in the beginning of March basically had decided to infect millions of people with a virus we only had a month of experience with or something like that.
https://studylib.net/coronavirus#country-se
their case count is steadily climbing, as is their CFR.
Other than that the numbers of people in intensive care and the deaths per day has been decreasing during last week, something that in my eyes are even more positive.
(data according to FOHM, Swedish CDC kinda)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/new-covid-deaths-per-mill...
The rolling 7 day average shows they're still on a bit of an up-tick.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
However, if you normalize for start time they're not really doing any worse than a lot of other countries.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
Average time between infection and death from COVID-19 is 23 days, and 18 days average from first symptoms to deaths (1) A country can be a week or two into the overload level before it shows up in the ICUs
https://twitter.com/michaeljswalker/status/12454153391497052...
Here's another paper from a orofessor of mathematics at Stockholm University who has appeared in the media as a subject matter expert: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066050v...
Meanwhile, there's a hint of a decline in the number of patients in Intensive Care in Stockholm, as seen here, although it's a still a bit early to tell: https://www.svt.se/datajournalistik/corona-i-intensivvarden/
Meanwhile, there is reason to believe that Sweden is better than other countries at attributing the cause of death correctly: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
I also think there's unacknowledged element of luck in a lot of these outcomes. A few infected individuals a month or so back in the wrong time/place makes a huge difference in the progression of the disease. Likewise when testing is relatively sparse, it's easy to get a mistaken view on where things stand.
A recent study by the Public Health Agency of Sweden came to a similar conclusion.
[] in the non trivial sense, since obviously we'll all die; but presumably we won't all die from this pandemic.
What??? Isn't that precisely _the best_ option intuitively? I'd much rather be outdoors with a high rate of air flow than inside. No idea if this has been studied but it seems obvious.
Which is it?
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publ...
April 9, 10, 11: 200, 148, 240 new cases were reported in Stockholm
April 21, 22, 23: 163, 289, 281 new cases were reported (and might still be subject to upward revision)
As we both agree, reported cases is a fairly uncertain metric, but I don't see a peak on April 10. Do you?
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...
There are charts towards the end of the paper which shows the real data plotted compared to the predictions, with confidence intervalls. The data is obviously very noisy, but it seems to track reasonably well, and is expected to taper of only slowly. The expected decline is not by any means drastic.
Well, maybe if we had just engaged in a vigorous program of needle sharing and unprotected sex, we'd eventually have gotten there.
No, that's not how it works. There are plenty of people who have had and do have symptoms but have not been counted. Seeking care and getting counted is a last resort here.
That has absolutely not been my impression, but they're probably both matters of perspective - who we talk to, what sources we read, and so on. To the extent that people do think of it as an alternative, that makes me sad.
This is also supported by their low testing per capita number.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
They aren't claiming that the number of confirmed cases is that number of people who have or have had the virus, which is something they've pointed out in several of the press conferences, it's just the number of confirmed cases.
The difference you're seeing is the difference in conditions under which people get tested.