"Up to now Sweden has recorded 5,838 coronavirus deaths, giving it the fifth-highest per capita death rate in Europe, [...]"
Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino).
It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two microstates.
Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with 11th best in the world.
They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.
When is this end? After how many deaths do you throw in the towel and admit you fucked up? Is treating you country like a guinea pig really a good leadership idea?
It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance.
We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't but there's no political will to implement since most politicians care more about being reelected rather than making short term unpopular decisions that could save lives long term since most of their Average Joe voters care more about their freedom to go on vacation and not having to wear masks everywhere than stopping the virus.
The end is when COVID is either endemic in your country, or is no longer able to spread exponentially even without any non-permanent large-scale interventions.
Sweden can't "throw in the towel" and go back to before 2020 -- the people who have died have already died (and notably, more than half of the COVID-19 deaths so far in Sweden happened before May 1, and about 90% before mid June). Implementing lockdown measures now won't bring those people back to life, and since the number of cases is low and continuing to decrease now, also would have very little benefit otherwise.
Unless you're referring to stopping lockdown measures as "throwing in the towel and admitting you fucked up", in which case the answer is "definitely not before there's some plausible story you can tell about why it's fine to do that now but wasn't before". And any country that hasn't had widespread community spread like Sweden is likely to see the same sort of spread Sweden saw early on if they implement the same measures Sweden did.
When the virus is either under control or has become a normal part of the disease cycle like the flu. Right now all stats are incomplete and no one knows how the situation will develop based on the strategies.
> It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEOs performance.
Yes, it's like that if it was in the middle of a worldwide recession with incomplete numbers and all companies were dealing with similar issues. Sweden has done some things differently, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up when we eventually know enough to judge it.
> We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't
Do we? To me it seems like we have both successful and non-successful countries taking wildly different strategies and the long term effects on society are not known. Either you know something the rest of us don't or you're wrong.
Precisely, it’s pretty easy to tell from the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden that’s its reached a saturation point. The last few weeks have had < ~5 COVID-19 related deaths per day. It’s flat-lined, while many countries will continue likely having second, third, or even fourth waves. If a vaccine is developed and widely distributed, then that’d be a good stopping condition as well.
The health institute in Sweden isn’t by running an experiment anymore than the "experiments" running in say NY & CA. Every thing I’ve read indicates broad national Swedish support, of course there’s dissenters but news sources would indicate they’re in the minority. Compare that to the contention in say CA, or Germany over the lockdown/shutdowns of normal life.
In the grand scheme I believe most people will realize a total of 5,000 deaths in a country that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year isn’t extreme. Unfortunate, but not much different from most years (it’s possible Sweden will overall lose less people than the average on previous years). Just this cause has a lot of scary news behind it.
> Precisely, it’s pretty easy to tell from the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden that’s its reached a saturation point.
To be clear: I said no such thing. I think it's far to early to evaluate that. Currently things in sweden look pretty good IMO, but "currently" and "pretty good" can shift radically and fast.
> that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year
Seems like the normal deaths per year are around 95000.
My point is mostly that I think it will take at least a year for us to get stats that are comparable between countries since different countries track it differently and have different efficiency/centralization of tracking. What will be even harder will be to track secondary and societal effects of both the virus itself and the measures taken to prevent spread, which will probably have a ongoing effect for many years.
Oops, my bad, I misread your comment. I still agree with your point that it’s too early to draw complete cross comparisons. While also that it appears that Sweden has hit a saturation point. Other countries in Europe will take a while before things stabilize. Even then, there could be more outbreaks in either Sweden or other Western European countries so it’ll be a while yet before it’s really time to draw final conclusions. It’ll be years before we get truly thorough conclusions.
Also good to know the average numbers. I think even at about a hundred thousand yearly my point holds. It’s high enough that many wouldn’t agree too.
Anders Tegnell (current state epidemiologist of Sweden) said that the success of strategy can bee seen after a year or so. Tegnell's opinion is that Sweden failed to safeguard the elderly, and that's the cause of the high death rate at the beginning (this seems to be true).
> Is treating you country like a guinea pig really a good leadership idea?
How is indefinite house detention, destroying small business and lower levels of the economy, and ripping asunder the fabric of normal society any less "treating your country like a guinea pig"?
> It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance.
Ok let me try doing you: "I'm going to hold you hostage indefinitely...it's for your own safety!"
The disease will not be wiped out by masks and hand washing. Germany and other countries are finding their rates of infection increasing as people leave their bunkers. The model used by most of Europe is not sustainable. People can’t bunker down in their homes forever.
Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
Nobody in Europe is bunkered in their homes since March-April. The numbers have increased exactly because people are free to go anywhere on their summer vacation and party as they wish, causing new fires to erupt.
You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences).
Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1])
This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game.
So, it's pretty inaccurate to describe Germany's response as "masks and hand-washing".
Germany still has spikes they need to deal with, but is also doing really well, when in fact people in Germany are not bunkering down in their homes forever. Germany is currently way more open than the U.S. is and is doing way better at control of the disease.
Precisely becuase their response is not limited to "masks and hand-washing". "Masks and hand-washing" and "bunkering down" in fact describes the USA response better than it describes the German response. And Germany is doing a lot better than the USA.
The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position. Neither is actually an effective response; neither actually characterizes the response of countries like Germany who have been very effective in controlling the pandemic.
It is insanity, and we've been stuck in it for six months, I keep wondering when Americans will realize those aren't the only choices; apparently never? Maybe because some people still think there is going to be some magic bullet "when the vaccine" and we can just wait it out until then; that's not how it's going to work, we're going to be dealing with this for years, and need to be finding sustainable solutions, not arguing about whether we should do something insufficient and unsustainable OR do nothing at all.
What Germany's response has involved is massive testing, a quality healthcare system with universal access, supporting people in quarantine, supporting people financially so nobody has to go to work sick or in non-safe situations in order to stay secure financially, and it goes on from there. All of this is somehow unimaginable in the USA, where people can only conceive of "masks, hand-washing, and staying home", or "pretty much ignore it".
Up to 90% of the positive cases in the US would not be positive in Germany due to how PCR tests are performed in each country, and what countries code as coronavirus deaths also differs. Making comparisons between countries is hard. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin...
The excess mortality is harder to fake or mis-measure though. There are no perfect numbers here (a lesson about measurement in general), but there is no reasonable argument that the US is doing anything but much much worse than Germany.
And yet Germany is not currently "locked down". The argument that Germany is among the best of all countries at handling this is not an argument for "if everyone just wears a mask and doesn't leave their home forever" -- that is not what happened in Germany. At all.
That’s a weird retort. At least deaths should be reasonably robust and there is really no comparison there between Germany and the US.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. All the while measures have been relaxed way more here than in the US. “Lockdowns” were also never really harsh in Germany and only lasted a very short time.
Three factors are suspected to be at play there:
* very early testing that detected community spread with unknown origins very early on (using the influenza sentinel system for detection)
* luckily being late in importing the virus, which lead to …
* … politicians being able to “look into the future” by looking at Italy (a place that unluckily imported the virus quite a bit earlier)
As a result Germany relatively quickly (though Germany could have acted a bit faster and have been even more effective) implemented quite mild measures for a relatively short amount of time. Some of those measures are still in place, most were, however, lifted in the meantime.
This lead to a still enduring drop to very low numbers, extremely low numbers if you look at deaths. Even though measures at this point often are much milder than in the US.
Your defensive “numbers aren’t comparable” retort is bullshit. Mostly because, sure, the numbers aren’t comparable. Sure, that’s true. But we aren’t talking about orders of magnitude here.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. No matter what you measure, whether it’s infections, deaths, excess deaths, economic impact. You name it.
That is Wrong and the linked article does not support your Assertion. German Labs are running the same high (35+) number of cycles that US Labs are. The Discussion to define a cutoff Value is ongoing.
I recently got in a silly argument where the crux of my argument was that the reason the US is mishandling the situation is because the pandemic was politicized since day 1. The response I was met with was: "no, it's all Trump's fault".
> The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position.
In practice, what does this look like? You have Fox reporting on Nancy Pelosi's haircut everyday on the week. You have 1 op-ed from CNN. Both sides think the each other are bad actors. Funding that needs to go out to the people are held up for election purposes.
Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic. It leads to people, who might otherwise be rational people, doubling down to support their side. Whether or not they agree with it. Because both sides are polar opposites, there is no compromise for a middle ground solution.
> Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic.
On the flip side, one would think one’s opinion on how government handles things would have a rather large impact on one’s political affiliation, and the more significant those things are the stronger a factor it would be.
You're going to call this more "politicization" but the reality is the US government ignored and downplayed the pandemic until it was too late. This isn't really a debatable or left/right viewpoint. After that, criticism of the response was inevitable, leading to the claim that the pandemic was "politicized".
The only way it would have been not "politicized" was if the initial response had been even halfway competent.
No I'm not going to call your comment "politicization". Here is the government trying to act [1].
Both sides include poison pills that they know that the other side won't pass. Why is a new $2B FBI headquarter or SALT reform even in a COVID bill? They both agree to at least $300B directly to the people, just pass that. Now is the time to have unanimous agreement on things that will help, not include provisions to help your constituents.
Included by the White House, according to the article you posted. Which also mismanaged the initial response, so hardly surprising.
> SALT reform
According to the article, it was a temporary elimination on the SALT cap, not wholesale reform. Temporary tax relief during a recession should hardly be considered a poison pill.
Do you not see your own bias? I'm criticizing both sides for using a pandemic for political gain while you openly shun one side and trivialize the same behavior of the opposite.
Sure, I shouldn't have said reform. But are you seriously going to pretend that it isn't a political move by the Democrats when they were so vocal in 2018 in their opposition? [1]
Money quote:
"""
Cuomo said New York will challenge a provision of the law that limits how much Americans can deduct from their federal taxes for payments made to state and local governments. Many of the people most affected by that provision live in states run by Democrats, which tend to have higher state and local tax rates.
"""
The irony in all of this is that I'm not a US person. I can't vote and am not on the path to residency. I have no dog in this fight. This is a literal replay of the silly argument that I got into recently that started this thread.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm aware I'm biased. You just picked a bad example. Just because lifting the SALT cap temporarily is politically advantageous, doesn't mean it doesn't help lots of people. All kinds of tax relief are on the table[1][2][3] as part of the Covid response, so why call just this one "political"?
If you live and work in the US, you probably pay US taxes, so you do have a dog in this fight whether you like it or not.
You should follow through on some of those links to the actual papers. They have structural problems. The first assumed that there was a 50% chance of the individuals living to 100. That is not realistic. But the business insider article does allow for people to sensationalize and feel smug in their knowledge that the long term economic and existential damage from bunkering and collapsing the economy was all worth it.
Sweden and the US will likely have very front loaded death tolls. Other countries will either accept the reality that a vaccine is still far away, or they will yo-yo in and out of lockdown while wreaking economic carnage.
On the other hand, it looks like they're only slightly ahead of the U.S. in death rate and behind the UK, so... I'm not totally sure what that tells us, to be honest.
US and UK responses to the pandemic were probably the worst mismanaged in the developed world, so that’s not a peer group that Sweden would like to be in.
Isn’t the point that they didn’t close the country so that’s a massive up side.
Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway.
(For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)
They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.
Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.
I saw some research the other day that they think the decrease in death rate is because everyone is wearing masks and social distancing. Therefore anyone getting sick is getting a very low viral load compared to before. If comparing to flu we should compare to pre-lockdown, pre-mask death rate.
No, The decrease of death rate is because more testing done on more people. The more you test, the larger the number of asymptomatic/mild symptom case you have, thus decrease the death rate.
I could see both, and likely both would need to be part of estimation. It's not binary, but likely, 20% due to mask lowering viral exposure loads, 50% due to more healthy people (hence asymptomatic) getting the virus.
The UK has been characteristically incompetent; missing PPE, incoherent advice, incoherent track and trace (somewhat substituted by local authorities actions), pushing people into old people's homes without testing, and the Barnard Castle incident.
How many cabinet ministers have you seen in masks?
5th highest in europe is not that bad, considering they fucked their economy a lot less, and that more shit is coming (eg., most of the cancer detection programmes have stopped here in slovenia, so a bunch of people might die from undiagnosed, or treated-too-late illnesses due to lockdowns, and won't be counted anywhere).
About half of the wests population lives in countries with higher death rate than Sweden though. And if you count excess mortality which is a better measurement then Sweden is better than average in the west.
The difference is the death doesn't cause chaos or total economy collapse. Pretty much life is still normal for most people over there, so that is win for me.
GDP of Sweden still shrank by 8.6% in Q2 (compared to 12.1% for the Eurozone or 10.1% for Germany). It's true that they did better economically, but on the flip side, their death toll is rather high.
You will find that Sweden will still be near the top of the charts for lifespan 2020. 3.5% of GDP is 30-50% of the entire healthcare budget, you can buy a lot of extra lifespan for the population for that. Arguing that one way to increase lifespan (corona) is better than all other ways to increase lifespan without any proof is nonsense. As of now it looks like you would save more lives by mostly ignoring Corona and using that money to expand the healthcare sector or improving the diet of poor people or creating exercise programs etc.
They don't have something they call "lockdown" but they imposed many, many restrictions, and even more than that were self-imposed by Swedes. Their economy contracted almost as much as forced-lockdown countries, so it seems like almost no different at all.
You can't win the argument for quality of life vs. quantity of lives on this forum. I am with you.
It is better to get back to life as usual than to deal with Australia's, Britain's, and other countries' response that drastically reduced quality of life for people en masse in the name of saving a life or two.
Somehow, brutal lockdowns effect on people's lives is incomprehensible to people who spend most of their time in one room on a computer--what a surprise!
"Oh, suck it up, wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart, stay in your home, buy online, don't leave the country, and wait for a vaccine that will come, eventually."
A significant number of people won't get back to life as usual, because they'll be dead, or have one of the sets of long term symptoms.
It is absolutely worth continuously assessing whether the measures are necessary and what is and is not working, but that requires not throwing a huge number of people under the bus
> A significant number of people won't get back to life as usual, because they'll be dead, or have one of the sets of long term symptoms.
People keep parroting this out of fear.
Go ahead and take your best guess about the percentage of people that this will happen to. Are you ok with lockdowns to save .001% of the population from this? I've asked questions like this before but never received a response. Any type of real debate is simple ignored and downvoted. All emotions, never any debate.
Fear brings more upvotes than facts. A scary story will get 100+ upvotes but this story only got 7:
Lungs damaged by coronavirus can repair themselves in three months (telegraph.co.uk)
> Are you ok with lockdowns to save .001% of the population from this?
No. But that's a full 4 orders of magnitude off our best estimates of mortality which are around 1%. Do I support the limited lockdowns we've had, lasting only a few weeks, to allow breaking the exponential growth and not doubling our yearly mortality? Definitely yes.
Well, they are better off so far than France, Italy, the U.K., Spain, and Belgium, which is most of western Europe. So in other words, as good or better than most of western Europe.
Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.
France has 5X the population density of Sweden though, so maybe France did much better considering that. Sweden has lots of barren arctic area though so it may not be a fair measure. You'd want to know how many people the average person interacts with pre COVID or something.
One of the most populated reigons of sweden (skåne) has one of the lowest per capita infection rate. Globally (on a country level) there does not seem to be a strong correlation between density and infection. I think it will take years to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't and why.
I'm not sure what explains Skane being so low, but the highest per capita case county was also the county with the first case. So random seed case event timings seem to have been more important there: "On 31 January, the first Swedish case was confirmed in a woman in Jönköping who had travelled to Sweden from Wuhan, China, on 24 January directly from Wuhan. "
Leaving out Germany, which is the single most populous state in western Europe, is some world-class cherry picking. If you want to narrow it down, the next logical comparison would be to Sweden's neighbors, and that doesn't look good either. What's the rational reason for choosing the very unique sample that you did?
It isn’t cherry-picking to say “this European country has done better than <list of all European countries that are worse>”. The selection criteria is clear and consistent: you sort the countries and take the ones that are worse.
It’s cherry-picking to take two countries that did better, simply because you prefer that narrative.
> sort the countries and take the ones that are worse
Ranking items and then choosing the most favorable is exactly where the phrase came from. "Clear and consistent" is not sufficient. Any lie can be clear and consistent. There also has to be a reason beyond self-interest for limiting the sample to a particular subset.
Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.
If you want to go that way, it's better to look at integrated metrics instead of discarding data points (I only did so because I was lazy and didn't want to look up the data for all the countries with less than a city's woth of inhabitants).
So let's do that:
Sweden's death rate per 1k population is 0.58, whereas the average rate (averaged over population) for western Europe[1] is 0.42. Sweden just isn't doing as good or better than most of western Europe.
For reference, spread among countries is 0.025 (Monaco) to 1.24 (San Marino) with a median of 0.20 for the full list, and 0.028 (Greece) to 0.86 (Belgium) with a median of 0.30 for my restricted one. The median of your list is 0.52.
[1] Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
Well, they are better off so far than France, Italy, the U.K., Spain, and Belgium
What's your metric? Because in terms of deaths per capita, they are supposedly worse off than France - as well as the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Norway, and Greece. So far, Sweden is not doing as good or better than most of western Europe...
Italy, Spain and Switzerland were hit when nobody even knew what the virus was. By the time politics started to put measures into place, deaths already were starting to pile up. Sweden and other nations had time to prepare some kind of strategy, so I would put that gained time into equation as well. That's why the comparison to the neighbours is more appropriate. Also, their neighbours will have also more similar social patterns - and it's exactly on the social patterns that the whose Swedish strategy was built. What works for Sweden doesn't for others: you can't compare the human interactions in Stockholm with the interactions in Mallorca, so how could you even think to compare their approaches?
Switzerland? Deaths didn't "pile up" in Switzerland. Look at the excess death data. 2018 showed a bigger spike in deaths than 2020.
Sweden's strategy would have worked fine everywhere. Most deaths are in care homes, that general lockdowns don't protect, and anyway, remember that they were never advertised as reducing deaths? The virus just comes back when lockdowns are over, even if you assume they work.
Sweden is the winner of COVID, by far. It is indeed vindicated.
They had 5838 COVID deaths, and around 5900 excess deaths.
Portugal has 1800ish COVID deaths, 5800 excess deaths.
Yes, Sweden fucked up and Portugal is amazing! OR maybe, just maybe, either COVID deaths are counted differently OR the lockdowns caused people that wouldn't have died of COVID to die for other causes due to lack of treatment and support.
Do you happen to know how they got that data out of euromomo? https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ hides per-country absolute value of excess death, giving only z-score by country or the value for all of Europe.
You're cherry picking Portugal's screwup in general healthcare response when there are much better comparisons. The excess death rates in Sweden are much higher than all its neighbors which are much more comparable. At the peak z-scores of almost 15 in Sweden compared to less than 5 for Denmark, Finland and Norway. Right now Sweden is still of the 4 the one with more excess mortality.
I didn't cherry pick portugal. I used it as it is my country and I have the most data about it. I also used it because we were called 'the miracle' from media from Eastern Europe to even US media, and I didn't want to say anything about other countries that I could back up with evidence.
Today we had 680+ cases. Our ICU patients are increasing, but for 3+ months I heard how we were doing so much better than Sweden, how they were idiots, etc. But Since the beginning we had researches from the UK, our medical professionals, saying that we had too much excess deaths not being counted as COVID (statistically very improbably increase not being related) and we still kept acting like Swedish were idiots.
Now they have like 100 cases per day or so, with a test rate almost double that we have, when we are on average on 400, and climbing every week (was 200 daily average, then 250, 300 and now we are around 400).
They also has a 8% GDP drop vs 16% for PT, and we got into much more debt than they did to 'pay' for all the stopped economy, which they didn't (as much)
I'm also from Portugal and know our stats well. We're not doing well, and haven't really done all that well in the past either. Comparing Sweden to their 3 immediate neighbors makes a lot more sense.
I never understood that part (compare to neighbours).
There are so many different variables between countries, even neighbour ones, that it makes no sense.
Sweden old people homes are (from what I read) basically glorified death waiting rooms. People don't stay in them long (months vs years in other places). Also people movements during the high 'season' of covid spread is different (Students do different things in spring break between countries). etc etc etc etc.
Not saying Norway or whatnot is not doing better, just we don't really know. (Same as saying Portugal is doing great because look at it's neighbour spain kind of deal)
> Not saying Norway or whatnot is not doing better, just we don't really know.
But we do, excess deaths have all causes integrated. Comparing to the Nordic neighbors makes sense because they have more similarities than comparing to Portugal but feel free to compare to all the countries in that website. Sweden is worse than most.
You're being obtuse. If, in fact, they have reached herd immunity (and obviously that's a big if) and future case counts are near zero, while other countries continue to record thousands of cases, they will rapidly move down the mortality list.
I'd much rather be living in a country that's essentially done with the virus -- or at least isn't under perma-panic -- rather than one whose "experts" warn that kids won't be able to safely return to normal school for "years."
He's stating they are 11th in mortality without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths. It's like calling a horse-race at the quarter-pole (except this is a race you'd prefer to finish last).
I think my reading comprehension is good enough to say that you are wrong. In fact, it is more the opposite of how you interpreted what he said.
So, let's break it down. He said "...unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave".
And you're reading it as "without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths".
So, let's compare them. He presented it as a hypothetical about the future, and you presented it as fact about the future. So, the same sentiment, except you don't have the grounds for it. On top of that, you read it, and claimed he said the the opposite of what he did.
I'm left wondering if you didn't understand what he said, or perhaps have a different idea of what "obtuse" means. I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really need an answer, as I'm sure we are done here.
France recorded 80 covid deaths yesterday, Sep 11. Sweden recorded fewer than that in the past month. Those are facts (that I have "the grounds for"), not scenarios I "imagined." Sure, you need to adjust for population. Then, before long, France will pass Sweden in total mortality rate.
Germany is not under “perma-panic”. Your characterisation of what’s going on in the world is so weird.
It’s not true that there weren’t any measures in Sweden – there were quite a few – and it’s also not true that countries like Germany are still in lockdown. They are not.
Only the US with its absurd mishandling of the virus is in this self-inflicted state of permanent-panic.
If the point of their herd strategy involves front-loading deaths then the higher relative death count at this point is a necessary baked-in expectation, not a failure.
> But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky.
Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true.
If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.
No, it won't. Vaccines are irrelevant, they are far too slow to develop given the timelines of a virus. The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.
> The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.
Huh? The virus has not "gone," except perhaps in places that implemented actual lockdowns (not just stay at home orders) and maintain strict travel restrictions, like China.
For comparison: China's population is 136 times that of Sweden [1] and it has had fewer COVID deaths in absolute terms than Sweden (4,634 vs 5,846) [2]. Even assuming the true figure in China is 10x what the official number is, that's still far fewer deaths per capita. If China has had an equivalent per capita dealths, it would have had 800,000 dead from COVID [3].
Deaths dropped to ~zero months ago in much of Europe. There are still many PCR positives occurring, quite why this is the case is unclear as almost none of these people are unwell. Defined using the WHO pre-2009 definition (before they changed it so they could declare swine flu an epidemic), the epidemic is over. What's left is a 'ghost epidemic' of tests set to hair-trigger margins flagging a huge number of false positives where the virus is either not present or not doing anything, but that doesn't matter.
A very shallow analysis only compares reported deaths on the scoreboard. We need to looks into the deaths and find out how many were actually preventable and where they all occurred. In Sweden, the care homes were particularly hard hit. There’s also more to life than merely covid and must consider those factors in the whole cost/benefit exercise.
I’m not saying Sweden is better or worse, but an in depth analysis won’t be available for a while and especially while everything is still in chaos including our health care system which we were trying to save on the first place.
> Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino).
If you count excess mortality instead of registered deaths then Neatherlands is also worse than Sweden. And if you also consider that the countries that are above Sweden are on average larger than the countries below then there are about as many who lives in countries with worse results than Sweden as there are people living in countries with better results. So it is fair to say that they have pretty average resullts for Europe. If you also add USA and Canada and talk about the west then there is no contest since you add 340 million people living in a country with worse results.
Isn't it a bit early to say that? As I understand it, there is still so much we don't understand about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. I am not sure whether the other strategies were better either, I think it would be a little premature to vindicate any strategy.
I am merely speculating here, maybe due to the situation, Swedes had generally been more careful than their neighbours (i.e. Denmark, Norway and Finland), because their situation remained worse and worsened for longer, and they might be seeing a downturn in cases a few months later than neighbouring countries. Again, just speculating, but I also feel vindicating their strategy at this stage is doing exactly the same.
I think THIS may be the true secret to Swedish strategy, much like NYC -- it got so bad it really changed the conversation and people are still shell shocked and caution remains high to maintain social distancing, defer gathering in groups etc.
If they aren't really getting together much indoors, masks won't be necessary for now (may need to be outside once winter comes and UV drops precipitously).
Basically, the article is saying that they've achieved herd immunity. Is that correct? As soon as a month ago I believe the consensus was that they were far away from it, with the total percentage that have antibodies somewhere around 15%.
They also have significantly more deaths per capita than all but 3 EU countries (Italy, Spain and Belgium.) That said, I definitely don't think a country's deaths per capita necessarily indicate doing something totally wrong. Belgium, for example, has the 2nd worst number of deaths per capita - literally ten times more than many other EU countries - but they weren't materially different than their neighbors in their strategy, and indeed seemed to lock down harder...
Belgium is also reporting any potential death linked to COVID-19 as that. Effectively, almost all excess death in Belgium is reported as COVID-19, leading to a far higher death per capita reporting from Belgium. Other countries usually require a proof that it was COVID-19 before reporting it as such.
Right, but there's other evidence that even with that, their situation was particularly bad. If you go by the excess-death numbers, Belgium is still the 2nd worst in the world. Why them, and not their neighbors?
A small country or state has an higher chance of being an outlier. 11M people live in Belgium, and a lot of +/- 10M inhabitant regions in larger countries have an higher death rate (Paris, NYC, Lombardy, Madrid ...).
If you live in a large country, some highly impacted regions will be offset by less affected regions.
3x more people died than in places that did the consensus strategy. And they haven't stopped having more cases either. 4000 more people died than in the other strategy. It will take a long time before that difference disappears, if it ever does, and it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore. What exactly has been vindicated?
it's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore
Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore.
What exactly has been vindicated?
If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world. Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths, economic impact, and behavior restrictions.
4000 more people died than in the other strategy.
Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average, people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer, so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.
The idea that Sweden had no lockdown measures at all and other places had draconian lockdowns where the whole population was closed down for three months is a strawman. They are also near the bottom on all those indicators you mentioned. Doing better than the US or Brasil is a very low bar for this. And what we're discussing here isn't that their strategy is "obviously wrong" it's that it's very definitely not "vindicated".
The vindication - to my mind - is that if broad government enforced lockdowns were truly effective then Sweden should be an extreme outlier for their general region, which is Western Europe. They're not. They’re about middle of the pack there, and as others point out there’s chance involved to a large degree. Belgium introduced lockdowns but is much worse off than their bordering neighbors and Western Europe. Sweden has a large immigrant population which for various reasons have resulted in a lot of worse outbreaks like say Nothern Italy which had lots of immigrants from China and Wuhan. So essentially lockdowns don’t seem much more effective than chance in many measurements.
Sweden is not middle of the pack. They are in line with the worst death rates in Europe when their comparable neighbors have the best rates. And they achieved that while still doing quite a few lockdown measures, just less.
In numbers of cases we've already gone from high to low and back to high again in direct correlation to the lockdown measures that were taken. We've done that in multiple places and at different times. I don't see any way to argue that lockdowns are not more effective than chance. Not even Sweden argues that, they just think they can manage the extra cases and achieve herd immunity soon.
Just because your bordering countries do better, is a possible indicator there methods worked better but there’s a lot more confounding variables that would need to be isolated, as I mention in another comment. For example perhaps the Nordic countries have similar age distributions (or not). They do have what seems to about 1/3 more immigrants than the other nordics per capita (https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_...). Immigrants aren’t bad, just this particular virus hits elderly people more severely so having more elderly living in stratified homes means more elderly exposed.
Certainly stricter and government enforced lockdowns slow down progression rate of the disease for a while, but other factors also appear to have a larger cumulative effect. Timing, population composition, age distribution. It’s more akin to anti-depressants, as in clinical studies of many potential anti-depressants show they have similar rates of effect as placebos. The degree of the covid deaths per capita has as much to do with societal, geographical, and even luck in many countries.
I grant that well executed lockdowns have better success, especially in as in New Zealand, but they’re more of an anomaly I’d say. Now presuming, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy weren’t completely incompetent in their governmental lockdowns then other factors appear to be as big a factor as those policies. France from the Statista data only has a per capita mortality rate that 25% larger, which isn’t a large effect given the uncertainty of the data, and especially for epidemics which generally follow exponential curves (e.g. a tiny initial difference in starting conditions can lead to large differences very quickly). Take this (older graph) and it’d difficult to statistically say which countries have lockdowns or not. Again just including nearest neighbors isn’t sufficient since other neighboring countries like Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands have pretty big variations between them as large as Sweden to Norway. So do say the US and Canada.
I don’t believe the absolute number of COVID-19 cases matters as much given a virus where 5-80% of cases are mild or asymptotic (https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-a...). Many serological studies point to 10x the number of cases, which if so, all the cases numbers are off by an order of magnitude (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-sug...). A bit callous perhaps, but the more cases of sars-cov-2 overall with the same number of fatalities means the less deadly it is overall. Also, the countries that had/have stricter lockdowns will likely continue having larger waves of deaths until their overall numbers look more like Sweden (your point of achieving herd immunity sooner).
> According to this Statista data, they’re roughly in the middle for Western Europe
I stopped right here. You linked data that shows them 5th of a list of 31 countries, with values that are 5x larger than 2/3 of the list. You linked that to argue they are "roughly in the middle". At that point facts don't matter and there's no point in having a discussion.
> I stopped right here. You linked data that shows them 5th of a list of 31 countries, with values that are 5x larger than 2/3 of the list. You linked that to argue they are "roughly in the middle". At that point facts don't matter and there's no point in having a discussion.
The facts do matter, though your comment doesn't give my point fair consideration that I'd expect of a genuine discussion. I provided a link to raw data for all of Europe which requires a bit of interpretation since Statista doesn't have a convenient link for Western European. Croatia is not part of Western Europe by most metrics, so saying they're 5x smaller isn't a valid criticism.
For sake of completeness, I took data from the first Statista link and a common list of Western European countries: Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Italy, UK, Spain, Belgium. These lists vary of course, and if you were critiquing my argument that would be the best point, and I would concede that. For those countries I took the Statista at the time of this post (plus extra data for Swizterland of 23.57). Using the Excel quartile on these countries the quartiles are: 1st: 4.95-14.51, 2nd: 14.51-36.03, 3rd: 36.03-57.85, 4th: 57.85-86.4. Sweden at 56.89 falls into the 3rd quartile, though just barely. When speaking, I consider 2nd and 3rd quartiles to be "middle of the pack" as a general statement (rather than the median or average). As in if one were talking of say, student grades, or variations in parts productions I'd give them a "B" and say they're middle of the pack. Almost in the "A" group, but not quite. You could say it's close enough that it doesn't matter, but by the numbers and using quartiles the math would put it there. Personally I'm happy my eye ball estimation as it'd getting very close to where I'd say Sweden is in the top of the pack. A valid criticism would be that Belgium appears to be an outlier and likely counts their numbers differently (w/o Belgium Sweden is pushed into the bottom of the 4th quartile)), but I have not method to control for that nor the time to do so unfortunately.
To my overall point, despite being downvoted, I still consider Sweden's policy not a resulting in complete outlier to be a "win". It's close, but yes, that's my conclusion. If a vaccine had similar ratios of effectives vs no vaccine it'd likely not be considered an effective vaccine or deterrent. Unfortunately I've yet to see good thorough counter-arguments in this or in scientific arguments. Also, other arguments often don't consider what how policies in health care are or aren't generally considered effective.
Yes, their numbers are very similar, in some cases better, to the places in Europe that had the worst outbreaks. Meanwhile their much more comparable neighboring countries have 5 to 10x better outcomes.
Sweden is currently averaging around 170 new cases per day. Its populaton is 10.2 million. France is averaging 7,000 new cases per day. Its population is 67 million. But you said neighbors. Denmark's new case rate is around 150 per day, but with a population of only 5.8 million.
Sweden is currently seeing fewer new cases per capita than Denmark, Spain, and France, and Spain and France are surging.
My point is it's not clear that what medium hard lockdowns accomplished is sustainable.
Yeah, the current positive test rate is relatively low because much we already had 6k deaths (approximately 5x the death rate of our neighbours Norway, Denmark and Finland per capita, iirc) and loads of infected people at risk for chronical diseases. So yes - there is some level of herd immunity already (although mostly in Stockholm/Uppsala/Linköping/Göteborg).
We also do a lot less less tests than our neighbouring countries. Denmark in particular is really good at getting testing done, which is also a reason why they are seeing a spike in their results the past few weeks.
There is an important point to make here. Sweden doesn’t have any laws where the government can order a shutdown. So even if they wanted to do a lockdown they couldn’t. Doctors can order individuals to be quarantined but not the country as a whole.
No. A Swedish citizen is, in general, free to go wherever they want on Swedish soil, including private property. This is protected by the Swedish constitution and one of the oldest base laws[0]. Also one reason to the governments slow reaction was due to they had to figure out what laws they could use in a situation like this.
[0] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/vetenskap/darfor-kan-sverige-inte...
Although this is true, the government, with enough political will could make the necessary changes. So instead of scurrying to find actions allowed within existing laws, they very well could have gone the way Norway did in enacting special measures, making greater restrictions legal. Also, there is a very far stretch between what that article discusses, and the measures other Scandinavian countries took (closing schools, limiting size of congregations, etc). The greatest limitation of "free movement" in Norway at least, was the restriction of cabin use when that cabin was in a different municipality.
Well, you don’t change a base law just like that and to do that would require a lot of other laws to be changed. And I’m not sure they would have gathered enough political will to do those changes. And that’s also what the government concluded. It’s kind of what the 2nd amendment to a US citizen is, and an individual right to do whatever they please without having the government to interfere.
I can’t speak for all countries, but in this situation the Swedish government have purposely few laws where they can act, in general, against groups of citizens. Which is a problem with gang related crimes etc. In the case of a pandemic, the profession that handles it are doctors and their government body. But they only have the power for individuals and areas. Though even then the base idea of an individual right is heavier than the right to contain people. As such example, if an individual escapes from prison, the individual is not committing any crime. This is based on the idea of individuals freedom which is the base for all Swedish law.
Compared to their peers in northern Europe that fared far better, the data does not suggest vindication. They have 5x the number of cases per capita compared to countries with similar social/economic/geographic conditions.
This is The Times in the UK reporting here, wholly owned by News Corp (aka Fox News' parent). They're trying to paint the failures of Sweden (5th highest per-capita death rate in Europe) as a success the same way they do in the US.
Can you people please stop with this unhealthy attention.
You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to some kind of normalcy and humbleness.
What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries).
So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all other countries), it must be right.
I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets attention and talking points at the world stage.
This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall, because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed "marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super power", superior to other nations.
So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned.
When crushing the numbers and speaking with relatives in Sweden and Switzerland, it is striking to see that most of the dead counts are in house structures for elderly.
When going deeper, there are 2 parameters that seem to correlate with the dead rates:
1) Sweden is lacking medical employees, therefore the medical education of the staff in these structures is very low. Also the geographical death distribution in the country is a big debate because some reasons could be "hot potato" topic
2) "replacebility" of the elderly: in luxury private structures, the death rate is very low because they protect the one paying the bill (so all the procedures are very strict). In public structures, the gov is paying the bill, and as soon as someone dies, it frees a bed for the next "customer".
My father in law was in a public structure in Sweden and died this year. For several years we saw horrible things: medical staff/procedures does not care about deadly "common" viruses.
Sweden left its old and vulnerable people unprotected and thousands of them died. Now the virus is less deadly because there are fewer people left who are vulnerable to it.
At the start of the pandemic Anders Tegnel, the architect of Sweden's response to the virus, did not believe that asymptomatic carriers existed [1], so Sweden's Public Health Agency instructed health workers in care homes to only stay at home if they had symptoms and to not wear any PPE at work [2]. So they carried the virus into the care homes and a hecatomb of old people ensued.
Obviously, now that the most vulnerable are gone, the virus kills many fewer patients. Swedes don't even need to have immunity to the virus, as such. They just need to be young and healthy enough to survive it if they get it. Not so much heard immunity, as herd culling.
For comparison, let's take Greece, where I'm from and which is a country with a similar population to that of Sweden (about 10 million each). Greece imposed a draconian lockdown in early March, as soon as the severity of the pandemic became obvious (we are right next to Italy, after all). The result was about ~2500 infections and ~140 dead by 1st July when the lockdown was lifted [3]. Remember, that's in a country with a similar population as Sweden (but with a much more touchy-feely, huggy-kissy, family-dinner Mediterrannean culture than Sweden). Now we've opened our borders and we're doing business (= tourism) as usual. Infections have also risen, but deaths are still very low, in the single or low double digits daily, so that about 300 people have died since the start of the pandemic. It's all pretty manageable and our health system is not overwhelmed.
We had a total lockdown, lost very few people, but we're back in action and deaths are low despite rising infections. And without letting our old and vulnerable die in their thousands. We lost 300, Sweden lost 6,000. If Sweden's approach was vindicated- Greece's approach was vindicated tenfold.
There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms.
The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the “spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share” of those who get infected.
Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in the home they have reason to suspect is infected.
Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay home if they detect any symptoms in themselves.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadYes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino).
It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two microstates.
Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with 11th best in the world.
They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.
It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance.
We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't but there's no political will to implement since most politicians care more about being reelected rather than making short term unpopular decisions that could save lives long term since most of their Average Joe voters care more about their freedom to go on vacation and not having to wear masks everywhere than stopping the virus.
Sweden can't "throw in the towel" and go back to before 2020 -- the people who have died have already died (and notably, more than half of the COVID-19 deaths so far in Sweden happened before May 1, and about 90% before mid June). Implementing lockdown measures now won't bring those people back to life, and since the number of cases is low and continuing to decrease now, also would have very little benefit otherwise.
Unless you're referring to stopping lockdown measures as "throwing in the towel and admitting you fucked up", in which case the answer is "definitely not before there's some plausible story you can tell about why it's fine to do that now but wasn't before". And any country that hasn't had widespread community spread like Sweden is likely to see the same sort of spread Sweden saw early on if they implement the same measures Sweden did.
> It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEOs performance.
Yes, it's like that if it was in the middle of a worldwide recession with incomplete numbers and all companies were dealing with similar issues. Sweden has done some things differently, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up when we eventually know enough to judge it.
> We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't
Do we? To me it seems like we have both successful and non-successful countries taking wildly different strategies and the long term effects on society are not known. Either you know something the rest of us don't or you're wrong.
The health institute in Sweden isn’t by running an experiment anymore than the "experiments" running in say NY & CA. Every thing I’ve read indicates broad national Swedish support, of course there’s dissenters but news sources would indicate they’re in the minority. Compare that to the contention in say CA, or Germany over the lockdown/shutdowns of normal life.
In the grand scheme I believe most people will realize a total of 5,000 deaths in a country that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year isn’t extreme. Unfortunate, but not much different from most years (it’s possible Sweden will overall lose less people than the average on previous years). Just this cause has a lot of scary news behind it.
To be clear: I said no such thing. I think it's far to early to evaluate that. Currently things in sweden look pretty good IMO, but "currently" and "pretty good" can shift radically and fast.
> that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year
Seems like the normal deaths per year are around 95000.
My point is mostly that I think it will take at least a year for us to get stats that are comparable between countries since different countries track it differently and have different efficiency/centralization of tracking. What will be even harder will be to track secondary and societal effects of both the virus itself and the measures taken to prevent spread, which will probably have a ongoing effect for many years.
Also good to know the average numbers. I think even at about a hundred thousand yearly my point holds. It’s high enough that many wouldn’t agree too.
How is indefinite house detention, destroying small business and lower levels of the economy, and ripping asunder the fabric of normal society any less "treating your country like a guinea pig"?
> It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance.
Ok let me try doing you: "I'm going to hold you hostage indefinitely...it's for your own safety!"
Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1])
This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5
Germany still has spikes they need to deal with, but is also doing really well, when in fact people in Germany are not bunkering down in their homes forever. Germany is currently way more open than the U.S. is and is doing way better at control of the disease.
Precisely becuase their response is not limited to "masks and hand-washing". "Masks and hand-washing" and "bunkering down" in fact describes the USA response better than it describes the German response. And Germany is doing a lot better than the USA.
The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position. Neither is actually an effective response; neither actually characterizes the response of countries like Germany who have been very effective in controlling the pandemic.
It is insanity, and we've been stuck in it for six months, I keep wondering when Americans will realize those aren't the only choices; apparently never? Maybe because some people still think there is going to be some magic bullet "when the vaccine" and we can just wait it out until then; that's not how it's going to work, we're going to be dealing with this for years, and need to be finding sustainable solutions, not arguing about whether we should do something insufficient and unsustainable OR do nothing at all.
What Germany's response has involved is massive testing, a quality healthcare system with universal access, supporting people in quarantine, supporting people financially so nobody has to go to work sick or in non-safe situations in order to stay secure financially, and it goes on from there. All of this is somehow unimaginable in the USA, where people can only conceive of "masks, hand-washing, and staying home", or "pretty much ignore it".
And yet Germany is not currently "locked down". The argument that Germany is among the best of all countries at handling this is not an argument for "if everyone just wears a mask and doesn't leave their home forever" -- that is not what happened in Germany. At all.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. All the while measures have been relaxed way more here than in the US. “Lockdowns” were also never really harsh in Germany and only lasted a very short time.
Three factors are suspected to be at play there:
* very early testing that detected community spread with unknown origins very early on (using the influenza sentinel system for detection)
* luckily being late in importing the virus, which lead to …
* … politicians being able to “look into the future” by looking at Italy (a place that unluckily imported the virus quite a bit earlier)
As a result Germany relatively quickly (though Germany could have acted a bit faster and have been even more effective) implemented quite mild measures for a relatively short amount of time. Some of those measures are still in place, most were, however, lifted in the meantime.
This lead to a still enduring drop to very low numbers, extremely low numbers if you look at deaths. Even though measures at this point often are much milder than in the US.
Your defensive “numbers aren’t comparable” retort is bullshit. Mostly because, sure, the numbers aren’t comparable. Sure, that’s true. But we aren’t talking about orders of magnitude here.
Germany is doing fantastically better than the US. No matter what you measure, whether it’s infections, deaths, excess deaths, economic impact. You name it.
What does that mean? How did it lead to a bad outcome?
> The USA is being hobbled by a strange belief that the only options are "masks, hand-washing and bunkering down must be done forever and are sufficient", or "ignore it and just let as many people get infected as will under business as usual." With one of those seen as a "left" position and the other as a "right" position.
In practice, what does this look like? You have Fox reporting on Nancy Pelosi's haircut everyday on the week. You have 1 op-ed from CNN. Both sides think the each other are bad actors. Funding that needs to go out to the people are held up for election purposes.
Your political affiliation should have no bearing on your thoughts on how to handle a pandemic. It leads to people, who might otherwise be rational people, doubling down to support their side. Whether or not they agree with it. Because both sides are polar opposites, there is no compromise for a middle ground solution.
On the flip side, one would think one’s opinion on how government handles things would have a rather large impact on one’s political affiliation, and the more significant those things are the stronger a factor it would be.
The only way it would have been not "politicized" was if the initial response had been even halfway competent.
Both sides include poison pills that they know that the other side won't pass. Why is a new $2B FBI headquarter or SALT reform even in a COVID bill? They both agree to at least $300B directly to the people, just pass that. Now is the time to have unanimous agreement on things that will help, not include provisions to help your constituents.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/30/upshot/corona...
Included by the White House, according to the article you posted. Which also mismanaged the initial response, so hardly surprising.
> SALT reform
According to the article, it was a temporary elimination on the SALT cap, not wholesale reform. Temporary tax relief during a recession should hardly be considered a poison pill.
Sure, I shouldn't have said reform. But are you seriously going to pretend that it isn't a political move by the Democrats when they were so vocal in 2018 in their opposition? [1]
Money quote:
""" Cuomo said New York will challenge a provision of the law that limits how much Americans can deduct from their federal taxes for payments made to state and local governments. Many of the people most affected by that provision live in states run by Democrats, which tend to have higher state and local tax rates. """
The irony in all of this is that I'm not a US person. I can't vote and am not on the path to residency. I have no dog in this fight. This is a literal replay of the silly argument that I got into recently that started this thread.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/01/03/cuomo...
If you live and work in the US, you probably pay US taxes, so you do have a dog in this fight whether you like it or not.
1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/memorandum-d...
2. https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/new-employer-tax-credits
3. https://www.irs.gov/coronavirus/coronavirus-tax-relief-for-b...
No. It isn't just 2 years off some elderly people who were going to die soon anyway (not that that isn't an extremely callous position to hold):
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/study-finds-that-people-w...
Many countries do not have that experience.
Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway.
(For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)
However, that doesn't invalidate the overall comparisons. Countries like Sweden have a lowering death rate despite no broad mask wearing (https://fortune.com/2020/07/29/no-point-in-wearing-mask-swed...). You can see an example graph here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
How many cabinet ministers have you seen in masks?
They don't have lockdown
You will find that Sweden will still be near the top of the charts for lifespan 2020. 3.5% of GDP is 30-50% of the entire healthcare budget, you can buy a lot of extra lifespan for the population for that. Arguing that one way to increase lifespan (corona) is better than all other ways to increase lifespan without any proof is nonsense. As of now it looks like you would save more lives by mostly ignoring Corona and using that money to expand the healthcare sector or improving the diet of poor people or creating exercise programs etc.
Citation needed.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
https://www.thelocal.se/20200713/new-stats-reveal-growing-un...
It is better to get back to life as usual than to deal with Australia's, Britain's, and other countries' response that drastically reduced quality of life for people en masse in the name of saving a life or two.
Somehow, brutal lockdowns effect on people's lives is incomprehensible to people who spend most of their time in one room on a computer--what a surprise!
"Oh, suck it up, wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart, stay in your home, buy online, don't leave the country, and wait for a vaccine that will come, eventually."
It is absolutely worth continuously assessing whether the measures are necessary and what is and is not working, but that requires not throwing a huge number of people under the bus
Stop spreading fear.
People keep parroting this out of fear.
Go ahead and take your best guess about the percentage of people that this will happen to. Are you ok with lockdowns to save .001% of the population from this? I've asked questions like this before but never received a response. Any type of real debate is simple ignored and downvoted. All emotions, never any debate.
Fear brings more upvotes than facts. A scary story will get 100+ upvotes but this story only got 7:
Lungs damaged by coronavirus can repair themselves in three months (telegraph.co.uk)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/06/lungs-damaged-co...
The online fear factory is similar to the old school media fear factor but the online one is self perpetuating.
No. But that's a full 4 orders of magnitude off our best estimates of mortality which are around 1%. Do I support the limited lockdowns we've had, lasting only a few weeks, to allow breaking the exponential growth and not doubling our yearly mortality? Definitely yes.
Edit: No, better is correct, missed the switch from 11th in europe to the 10th in the world.
Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.
It’s cherry-picking to take two countries that did better, simply because you prefer that narrative.
Ranking items and then choosing the most favorable is exactly where the phrase came from. "Clear and consistent" is not sufficient. Any lie can be clear and consistent. There also has to be a reason beyond self-interest for limiting the sample to a particular subset.
Observing where an item lies in a ranked list is no more or less biased than picking a median.
Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are indeed worse off than Sweden, and it isn’t selective to point it out. That’s all I’m saying here.
Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.
If you want to go that way, it's better to look at integrated metrics instead of discarding data points (I only did so because I was lazy and didn't want to look up the data for all the countries with less than a city's woth of inhabitants).
So let's do that:
Sweden's death rate per 1k population is 0.58, whereas the average rate (averaged over population) for western Europe[1] is 0.42. Sweden just isn't doing as good or better than most of western Europe.
For reference, spread among countries is 0.025 (Monaco) to 1.24 (San Marino) with a median of 0.20 for the full list, and 0.028 (Greece) to 0.86 (Belgium) with a median of 0.30 for my restricted one. The median of your list is 0.52.
[1] Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom
What's your metric? Because in terms of deaths per capita, they are supposedly worse off than France - as well as the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Norway, and Greece. So far, Sweden is not doing as good or better than most of western Europe...
Sweden's strategy would have worked fine everywhere. Most deaths are in care homes, that general lockdowns don't protect, and anyway, remember that they were never advertised as reducing deaths? The virus just comes back when lockdowns are over, even if you assume they work.
Sweden is the winner of COVID, by far. It is indeed vindicated.
Portugal has 1800ish COVID deaths, 5800 excess deaths.
Yes, Sweden fucked up and Portugal is amazing! OR maybe, just maybe, either COVID deaths are counted differently OR the lockdowns caused people that wouldn't have died of COVID to die for other causes due to lack of treatment and support.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
They mentioned euromomo but also have countries not in it, so I assume they use various sources?
https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
And yet we keep hearing the same argument. You just wait and enough people will die in all those places to make up the difference.
Today we had 680+ cases. Our ICU patients are increasing, but for 3+ months I heard how we were doing so much better than Sweden, how they were idiots, etc. But Since the beginning we had researches from the UK, our medical professionals, saying that we had too much excess deaths not being counted as COVID (statistically very improbably increase not being related) and we still kept acting like Swedish were idiots.
Now they have like 100 cases per day or so, with a test rate almost double that we have, when we are on average on 400, and climbing every week (was 200 daily average, then 250, 300 and now we are around 400).
They also has a 8% GDP drop vs 16% for PT, and we got into much more debt than they did to 'pay' for all the stopped economy, which they didn't (as much)
There are so many different variables between countries, even neighbour ones, that it makes no sense.
Sweden old people homes are (from what I read) basically glorified death waiting rooms. People don't stay in them long (months vs years in other places). Also people movements during the high 'season' of covid spread is different (Students do different things in spring break between countries). etc etc etc etc.
Not saying Norway or whatnot is not doing better, just we don't really know. (Same as saying Portugal is doing great because look at it's neighbour spain kind of deal)
But we do, excess deaths have all causes integrated. Comparing to the Nordic neighbors makes sense because they have more similarities than comparing to Portugal but feel free to compare to all the countries in that website. Sweden is worse than most.
I'd much rather be living in a country that's essentially done with the virus -- or at least isn't under perma-panic -- rather than one whose "experts" warn that kids won't be able to safely return to normal school for "years."
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/cor...
So, let's break it down. He said "...unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave".
And you're reading it as "without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths".
So, let's compare them. He presented it as a hypothetical about the future, and you presented it as fact about the future. So, the same sentiment, except you don't have the grounds for it. On top of that, you read it, and claimed he said the the opposite of what he did.
I'm left wondering if you didn't understand what he said, or perhaps have a different idea of what "obtuse" means. I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really need an answer, as I'm sure we are done here.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
It’s not true that there weren’t any measures in Sweden – there were quite a few – and it’s also not true that countries like Germany are still in lockdown. They are not.
Only the US with its absurd mishandling of the virus is in this self-inflicted state of permanent-panic.
Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true.
If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.
Huh? The virus has not "gone," except perhaps in places that implemented actual lockdowns (not just stay at home orders) and maintain strict travel restrictions, like China.
For comparison: China's population is 136 times that of Sweden [1] and it has had fewer COVID deaths in absolute terms than Sweden (4,634 vs 5,846) [2]. Even assuming the true figure in China is 10x what the official number is, that's still far fewer deaths per capita. If China has had an equivalent per capita dealths, it would have had 800,000 dead from COVID [3].
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+population vs https://www.google.com/search?q=china+population
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=sweden+covid+deaths vs https://www.google.com/search?q=china+covid+deaths
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=(5846+%2F+10.23+million)+*+1...
I’m not saying Sweden is better or worse, but an in depth analysis won’t be available for a while and especially while everything is still in chaos including our health care system which we were trying to save on the first place.
If you count excess mortality instead of registered deaths then Neatherlands is also worse than Sweden. And if you also consider that the countries that are above Sweden are on average larger than the countries below then there are about as many who lives in countries with worse results than Sweden as there are people living in countries with better results. So it is fair to say that they have pretty average resullts for Europe. If you also add USA and Canada and talk about the west then there is no contest since you add 340 million people living in a country with worse results.
I am merely speculating here, maybe due to the situation, Swedes had generally been more careful than their neighbours (i.e. Denmark, Norway and Finland), because their situation remained worse and worsened for longer, and they might be seeing a downturn in cases a few months later than neighbouring countries. Again, just speculating, but I also feel vindicating their strategy at this stage is doing exactly the same.
If they aren't really getting together much indoors, masks won't be necessary for now (may need to be outside once winter comes and UV drops precipitously).
They also have significantly more deaths per capita than all but 3 EU countries (Italy, Spain and Belgium.) That said, I definitely don't think a country's deaths per capita necessarily indicate doing something totally wrong. Belgium, for example, has the 2nd worst number of deaths per capita - literally ten times more than many other EU countries - but they weren't materially different than their neighbors in their strategy, and indeed seemed to lock down harder...
A small country or state has an higher chance of being an outlier. 11M people live in Belgium, and a lot of +/- 10M inhabitant regions in larger countries have an higher death rate (Paris, NYC, Lombardy, Madrid ...).
If you live in a large country, some highly impacted regions will be offset by less affected regions.
That's really bad news regarding herd immunity IMHO.
The other 60-70% of the country is dry as tinder.
I feel like lives lost is perhaps the better metric of success.
Judging by some of the comments here, News Corp's ability to spin gold out of shit.
Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore.
What exactly has been vindicated?
If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world. Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths, economic impact, and behavior restrictions.
4000 more people died than in the other strategy.
Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average, people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer, so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.
In numbers of cases we've already gone from high to low and back to high again in direct correlation to the lockdown measures that were taken. We've done that in multiple places and at different times. I don't see any way to argue that lockdowns are not more effective than chance. Not even Sweden argues that, they just think they can manage the extra cases and achieve herd immunity soon.
Just because your bordering countries do better, is a possible indicator there methods worked better but there’s a lot more confounding variables that would need to be isolated, as I mention in another comment. For example perhaps the Nordic countries have similar age distributions (or not). They do have what seems to about 1/3 more immigrants than the other nordics per capita (https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/_...). Immigrants aren’t bad, just this particular virus hits elderly people more severely so having more elderly living in stratified homes means more elderly exposed.
Certainly stricter and government enforced lockdowns slow down progression rate of the disease for a while, but other factors also appear to have a larger cumulative effect. Timing, population composition, age distribution. It’s more akin to anti-depressants, as in clinical studies of many potential anti-depressants show they have similar rates of effect as placebos. The degree of the covid deaths per capita has as much to do with societal, geographical, and even luck in many countries.
I grant that well executed lockdowns have better success, especially in as in New Zealand, but they’re more of an anomaly I’d say. Now presuming, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy weren’t completely incompetent in their governmental lockdowns then other factors appear to be as big a factor as those policies. France from the Statista data only has a per capita mortality rate that 25% larger, which isn’t a large effect given the uncertainty of the data, and especially for epidemics which generally follow exponential curves (e.g. a tiny initial difference in starting conditions can lead to large differences very quickly). Take this (older graph) and it’d difficult to statistically say which countries have lockdowns or not. Again just including nearest neighbors isn’t sufficient since other neighboring countries like Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands have pretty big variations between them as large as Sweden to Norway. So do say the US and Canada.
I don’t believe the absolute number of COVID-19 cases matters as much given a virus where 5-80% of cases are mild or asymptotic (https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-a...). Many serological studies point to 10x the number of cases, which if so, all the cases numbers are off by an order of magnitude (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-sug...). A bit callous perhaps, but the more cases of sars-cov-2 overall with the same number of fatalities means the less deadly it is overall. Also, the countries that had/have stricter lockdowns will likely continue having larger waves of deaths until their overall numbers look more like Sweden (your point of achieving herd immunity sooner).
I stopped right here. You linked data that shows them 5th of a list of 31 countries, with values that are 5x larger than 2/3 of the list. You linked that to argue they are "roughly in the middle". At that point facts don't matter and there's no point in having a discussion.
The facts do matter, though your comment doesn't give my point fair consideration that I'd expect of a genuine discussion. I provided a link to raw data for all of Europe which requires a bit of interpretation since Statista doesn't have a convenient link for Western European. Croatia is not part of Western Europe by most metrics, so saying they're 5x smaller isn't a valid criticism.
For sake of completeness, I took data from the first Statista link and a common list of Western European countries: Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Italy, UK, Spain, Belgium. These lists vary of course, and if you were critiquing my argument that would be the best point, and I would concede that. For those countries I took the Statista at the time of this post (plus extra data for Swizterland of 23.57). Using the Excel quartile on these countries the quartiles are: 1st: 4.95-14.51, 2nd: 14.51-36.03, 3rd: 36.03-57.85, 4th: 57.85-86.4. Sweden at 56.89 falls into the 3rd quartile, though just barely. When speaking, I consider 2nd and 3rd quartiles to be "middle of the pack" as a general statement (rather than the median or average). As in if one were talking of say, student grades, or variations in parts productions I'd give them a "B" and say they're middle of the pack. Almost in the "A" group, but not quite. You could say it's close enough that it doesn't matter, but by the numbers and using quartiles the math would put it there. Personally I'm happy my eye ball estimation as it'd getting very close to where I'd say Sweden is in the top of the pack. A valid criticism would be that Belgium appears to be an outlier and likely counts their numbers differently (w/o Belgium Sweden is pushed into the bottom of the 4th quartile)), but I have not method to control for that nor the time to do so unfortunately.
To my overall point, despite being downvoted, I still consider Sweden's policy not a resulting in complete outlier to be a "win". It's close, but yes, that's my conclusion. If a vaccine had similar ratios of effectives vs no vaccine it'd likely not be considered an effective vaccine or deterrent. Unfortunately I've yet to see good thorough counter-arguments in this or in scientific arguments. Also, other arguments often don't consider what how policies in health care are or aren't generally considered effective.
They have fewer new cases than Spain and France.
Sweden is currently seeing fewer new cases per capita than Denmark, Spain, and France, and Spain and France are surging.
My point is it's not clear that what medium hard lockdowns accomplished is sustainable.
We also do a lot less less tests than our neighbouring countries. Denmark in particular is really good at getting testing done, which is also a reason why they are seeing a spike in their results the past few weeks.
(I do recognize this argument from when arguing about this with swedish leftists.)
In the US, at least, the government's behavior has only a loose asociation with "the law"
This is all on the current swedish social democratic government.
[1]: https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024
You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to some kind of normalcy and humbleness.
What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries).
So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all other countries), it must be right.
I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets attention and talking points at the world stage.
This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall, because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed "marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super power", superior to other nations.
So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned.
When going deeper, there are 2 parameters that seem to correlate with the dead rates:
1) Sweden is lacking medical employees, therefore the medical education of the staff in these structures is very low. Also the geographical death distribution in the country is a big debate because some reasons could be "hot potato" topic
2) "replacebility" of the elderly: in luxury private structures, the death rate is very low because they protect the one paying the bill (so all the procedures are very strict). In public structures, the gov is paying the bill, and as soon as someone dies, it frees a bed for the next "customer".
My father in law was in a public structure in Sweden and died this year. For several years we saw horrible things: medical staff/procedures does not care about deadly "common" viruses.
At the start of the pandemic Anders Tegnel, the architect of Sweden's response to the virus, did not believe that asymptomatic carriers existed [1], so Sweden's Public Health Agency instructed health workers in care homes to only stay at home if they had symptoms and to not wear any PPE at work [2]. So they carried the virus into the care homes and a hecatomb of old people ensued.
Obviously, now that the most vulnerable are gone, the virus kills many fewer patients. Swedes don't even need to have immunity to the virus, as such. They just need to be young and healthy enough to survive it if they get it. Not so much heard immunity, as herd culling.
For comparison, let's take Greece, where I'm from and which is a country with a similar population to that of Sweden (about 10 million each). Greece imposed a draconian lockdown in early March, as soon as the severity of the pandemic became obvious (we are right next to Italy, after all). The result was about ~2500 infections and ~140 dead by 1st July when the lockdown was lifted [3]. Remember, that's in a country with a similar population as Sweden (but with a much more touchy-feely, huggy-kissy, family-dinner Mediterrannean culture than Sweden). Now we've opened our borders and we're doing business (= tourism) as usual. Infections have also risen, but deaths are still very low, in the single or low double digits daily, so that about 300 people have died since the start of the pandemic. It's all pretty manageable and our health system is not overwhelmed.
We had a total lockdown, lost very few people, but we're back in action and deaths are low despite rising infections. And without letting our old and vulnerable die in their thousands. We lost 300, Sweden lost 6,000. If Sweden's approach was vindicated- Greece's approach was vindicated tenfold.
____________
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x
There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly small compared to people who show symptoms.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-swede...
The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the “spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share” of those who get infected.
Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in the home they have reason to suspect is infected.
Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay home if they detect any symptoms in themselves.
[3] https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece