Come on. He's pointing out both an explanatory factor, i.e. larger groups of vulnerable clustered together, and also saying that the total deaths may end up being very similar between countries and that it is too early to tell. Without a vaccine or effective treatment, there's no long term alternative to something akin to the Swedish strategy.
>They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high.
This was my understanding, also. I gathered the thinking was that they are seeing deaths up front instead of stretching the curve and seeing the deaths spread out over a longer period of time.
I assume that as time goes on there will be more accurate counts of covid deaths and infection rates.
I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus.
The point this guy is trying to make is that Sweden appears to be quite close to herd immunity, considering both infections and deaths are apparently declining by itself now. What makes you think this is impossible?
> Sweden's approach is clearly one focused on long-term results. If Covid sees a resurgence in the fall or as nations return to relative normalcy, we can expect the infection and death counts to be multi-modal in most nations, while Sweden's might be a bell curve.
Other than geometric tidiness I see no point in your comment.
In fact, it ignores the denial of service impact that an epidemic has on a national health service, and plays down how it advocates for a population culling.
Perhaps it's time to relearn the basic principles and merits of "flattening the curve", not to mention the benefits of gaining some time until a vaccine is developed.
> Seems like Sweden is on track to hit herd immunity long before everyone else
There's zero evidence of that. At this time, officially less than .5% of the population has been infected, so you'd have to postulate something like 99% of cases being asymptomatic.
> Their daily new case count has been mostly plateaued for weeks
Case count depends a lot on amount of testing (In which Sweden lags behind even the US) and testing criteria. Their death count does not look great.
> creating herd immunity, similarly to Sweden.
> ...
> The problem is that it's impossible to have an intelligent discussion over this.
As far as I can tell the Swedish government never had this plan. It was mentioned in an interview and dismissed as unworkable, journalists misunderstood.
On the other hand the UK government appears to have had no plans whatever until jolted into action by the fear that public opinion would turn against them.
What Sweden has done is similar to Norway, where I live, which relies largely on voluntary changes in behaviour and temporary closure of institutions and businesses that require close contact between employees and customers. But Sweden took longer to implement those measures and also Swedish society is different from Norway, anecdotally Swedes seem to me to be more urban people than Norwegians and more gregarious.
Exactly why Sweden has a much higher death rate, 36/100k inhabitants versus 4.3/100k in Norway, is unclear at the moment partly because of different definitions but also because of differing conditions, and the epidemic being at different stages in the two countries.
>> How is 4.500 dead, beeing worldwide #1 in deaths pr capita 2 weeks running, allround #7 in deaths and climbing, not qualify as catastrophic?
Looking at graphs of excess deaths compared to previous years the graph for Sweden is pretty much identical to most Europen mainlaind countries. It spikes at the same time, and it goes down at about the same rate at the same moment, which is when the governments of some countries went into lockdown, while Sweden just advised social distancing etc. But the effect was pretty much the same as e.g. here in the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Germany, France, Switzerland, etc.
I get this feeling some people really want to rake Sweden over the coals because their policy is supposedly 'killing more people', but the numbers only show this when you compare against direct neighbors, and not at all when you compare to EU mainland countries. Coincidentally, Sweden was one of the first countries that had its first confirmed cases, way before other countries, and way before everyone realised this was going to get bad. So it's very likely that the high number of early infections that went undetected lead to a later spike similar to countries in mainland EU, and, as a result of that, similar statistics in terms of excess deaths. Other nordic countries may have dodged the bullet simply by virtue of a having a little more time before the exponential increase in infections started to get out of hand.
Also (and this seems to be an unpopular opinion around here), maybe we should accept the fact that a certain number of deaths/capita will be inevitable, even for those countries like Norway/Denmark etc, at least in their more densely populated areas. Countries like Netherlands and Sweden had a big spike where many people died in a short time, the vast majority being old (80+ year old) people and people with one or more comorbidities. In the past three weeks, the excess deaths here have been negative compared to other years, and if you look at the area under the graph for total excess deaths for this year so far, it's not that much higher than for the 2018 flu season, which was a much lower spike but it lasted for much longer. It's very likely that over the next months, barring a vaccine, excess deaths in countries that have very few corona fatalities so far will go up and linger higher for a long time.
There was a study posted here recently that showed a very high correlation between the chance of dying from corona now and the 'normal' (ie: before-corona) chance of dying in the next year, through different age groups, health risk factors and some other variables. I think it's fair to say we have to wait for at least one or two years before we can draw any conclusions at all about which countries handled this right and which didn't, or if it even mattered at all. One data point that indicates that maybe there wasn't really a way to prevent all these deaths, is that when you compare countries where the number of hospitalized corona patients spiked similarly before any measures were taken, it seems there is next to no difference in the progression of infections and deaths between countries with ultra-strict lockdown measures and countries that were a little less strict. Things like face masks, closing schools or banning outside activities appear to have had no effect whatsoever.
> Worth noting also that Sweden has the 6th highest case fatality rate in Europe (other Nordic countries are near the bottom of that list).
It's very hard to make any proper comparisons of numbers before this has run its course. What if Sweden doesn't have a second wave but other countries do?
This would indicate that the swedish response is among the worst. Several countries with comparable health systems have a death rate which is many times lower, for example Germany. This saved many thousands of lives.
> In Stockholm about 20% of the population now have antibodies, despite a lot social distancing.
Maybe ... it's because of this:
> No one is using face masks and the official consensus is that it doesn't provide enough contamination protection to be currently worthwhile.
All the evidence I've seen is quite clear; masks are effective.
And let's consider that the U.S., seen by many to be the worst handler of this pandemic thus far, is currently only ~8% of the way done. Yet Stockholm has already _blown_ through 33%.
Sweden, on the whole, is at 9.4%; again surpassing the U.S. by a good chunk.
I feel like the point of your comment was to suggest that Stockholm is doing well. The data is clear that they are not. In fact, they are doing quite poorly. I would take a good hard look at anyone in your government not vehemently pushing for mask use.
> I'm far removed from the belief that we need a rushed vaccine to cope with this pandemic.
I cannot for the life of me fathom why the impending death of 60,000 fellow citizens, and 600,000 disabled with chronic illness wouldn't convince someone that a vaccine is needed ASAP.
> The reason COVID hasn't been so bad is because of all the special preventative measures.
If that's the case, then why is Sweden's population-level mortality (578 per million) lower than the USA (642 per mission) or Spain (nearly 700), or several other lockdown states? Sweden didn't close restaurants or schools for a day.
Sweden's rate is also flat, while the USA and Spain are still increasing.
> sends 10% of people to hospital, and is killing 1-2% of people.
Can you provide a source for these strange figures? The last several dozen papers on serological prevalance have found the IFR to be nearly an order of magnitude lower than you're saying it is.
> In retrospect I think everyone should have taken the Swedish approach
Sweden is now backing out of that plan.
Also, there’s a gradient of response to the virus: some people die, some people survive but suffer long term symptoms/damage and some people appear to simply go back to normal. These survivors are not distributed (by age, other comorbidities) the way fatalities are.
> The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries.
So far.
Lockdown strategies will always look better than Sweden's strategy at the beginning, because Sweden's strategy gets most of the deaths over with in the first few months.
If a vaccine takes long enough, the countries that locked down might eventually catch up to Sweden's per-capita death rate, although it's worth noting that some of them have already surpassed it.
If you look at the charts here, you will see that Sweden had a big spike in deaths at the beginning of the outbreak and now it's daily death rate is far below that of most other countries: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden?countr...
Sweden's approach looks better relative to other countries with every passing day. The longer it takes for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, the better Sweden's strategy will look. People who insist that Sweden made a horrible mistake are overconfident. Whether or not it was a mistake really depends on how long the pandemic lasts.
> - Has had 0 covid deaths in the last couple weeks.
Deaths per week are a function of previous deaths and population distribution. If more people die at the beginning, then fewer are left to die later. That's how dying works. Sweden's weekly per capita deaths peaked much higher than in the US or EU overall, and they've lost more people per capita than their neighbors.
A person who cares about numbers should be looking cumulatively, not just within some specific narrow window.
> Are we also forgetting about Iceland / Israel which are among the most vaccinated countries in the world
Israel isn't even in the top 30 and their vaccinations flatlined back in February, they prematurely declared victory, and people went back to licking doorknobs. But let's ignore all of that for now.
Congratulations, people faffed around fighting against restrictions and vaccination for so long that now we have successfully developed a mutation that achieves viral escape. Go team! Yay! Mission accomplished!
Vaccines and lockdowns and mask mandates still appear to prevent deaths and hospital overflow. How do we know? Because deaths and ICU bed percentages go down during lockdowns and go up when lockdowns end and because a tiny fraction of the people dying are vaccinated.
Keep in mind also that Iceland still has one of the lowest total per capita COVID death rates of any place in the world. It's also a weird little volcanic island with everyone living in only a few places with a major international transit hub between Europe and North America. The few places in the world doing better than Iceland are places which also lock down quickly.
> Going back to common sense
Except that your "common sense" tells you that Sweden has done great and that Israel and Iceland are doing poorly when compared to other countries the opposite is true. How then should we assess the accuracy of your common sense?
My common sense says that people who refuse the vaccine should just be refused access to hospital resources if they get sick. It would neatly address a lot of issues.
> Its neighbours have managed death rates of nearly one TENTH of Sweden. The difference in timing of the outbreaks was one or two weeks. That certainly should not account for a factor of ten difference.
How can you be so certain of that, considering the dynamics of the infection rate are exponential. If you look at the curve for the Netherlands it went from 'nothing serious, its just 1 or 2 hospitalizations a day' to full-blown 'within 10 days all hospitals will be overloaded'-panic literally within one week. Add one 'super-spreader' event into the mix like the soccer match in north Italy and you create a huge spike that is only seen two weeks later when its already too late.
The exact same thing happened in all of the countries that had the longest lead time between 'nothing to see here' and 'this is really bad we have to do something', the shapes of the excess deaths graphs for these countries are all the same, lock-down or no lock-down. Which makes sense because these were the result of not doing anything for weeks because no-one was taking this seriously yet. I think you cannot just point to the numbers now and conclude the policy in Sweden is to blame for their high numbers of deaths. Especially not considering countries have been opening up for ~3 weeks now, moving more towards the model Sweden has had since day one, and so far no effect on infections or hospitalizations have been observed.
> Sweden's gamble made very little sense when it was made. I will say one thing for Anders, his position is that if you make this gamble, you must stick with it. There is no point taking such a gamble and then chickening out after a week or two as some countries did. That makes sense, but it was a bad gamble.
There was a huge part of our deaths that were caused by lack of protection and procedures in the elderly homes at the start of the outbreak. This isolated event skews the numbers very much. Looking at the whole picture where we're approaching something around 50% immunity (T-cell plus antibodies). Compare this to nations around us experiencing second and third waves and not getting close to our immunity numbers. But sure, you can look at the numbers as they are, I wouldn't judge you, it's too bad that such an outlier event has such power on the numbers though.
Your Finland comparison misses the author's argument. His claim is not that they haven't had many more deaths than Finland, but that Finland will catch up with Sweden. His theory seems to be that there will be a more-or-less fixed number of deaths per million, unless countries are willing to wait for a vaccine (which he thinks they won't do).
> This is a big part of why I think we could have exposed much more people to the virus with only marginal increase in hospitalizations, by encouraging those who are not at risk to live as normally
This is largely what Sweden has been doing. They've succeeded in that they've kept a healthy margin of hospital/ICU beds free, but people are unhappy with the overall number of deaths. They've also largely failed at keeping the spread out of nursing homes (they have a similar 50% deaths-from-nursing-homes ratio to other countries).
The article straight up mentioned arguments against what you're saying. Sweden has more deaths per million than their neighbors and it's only getting worse as the confirmed number of cases grow.
Your idea of a level-headed response is letting people die straight up to the coronavirus.
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