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>"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected Isn't temporary immunity the norm for these types of viruses? There's not reason to think

>"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected Isn't temporary immunity the norm for these types of viruses? There's not reason to think this virus is different, is there? I think it's great what Sweden is doing. I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong. Their hospitals are not overwhelmed. Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually. They've only slowed it down a bit, not stopped it. It doesn't appear that it can be stopped, there will not be a vaccine in time. The same people will die in the end, right?

jariel 7y ago
"Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually." Actually a few have done that. Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives. FYI Korea has done it without harsh social distancing. New Zealand with similar advantages to Taiwan looks to be approaching this as well. "I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong." The issue is risk - their current daily-case rate is still growing somewhat and it's been shown that 'social distancing alone' doesn't fully flatten the curve. They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high. Any real data point to support the 30% rate for Stockholm would be a big deal because officially the country only has 18k cases.
- FrojoS 7y ago
  All of these countries (South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand) lack frequently commuted land borders.
  - jariel 7y ago
    Fair point, but Sweden can effectively lock it's borders pretty well. They are surrounded by legit entities with managed borders. If they put up barriers, those barriers would effectively be respected, it's not like they're sitting on the Med with boats sneaking across daily.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  The idea of "official" case counts is largely fabricated. The reported number is a count of people who have tested positive, and like many countries, Sweden doesn't give coronavirus tests to everyone who's likely to have it. It's not intended to be an estimate of how many people are infected.
- mikem170 7y ago
  >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.
  - jariel 7y ago
    "I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus." The 'hard data problem' with their strategy is that they are willing to write of x% of their population without knowing what the real death rate is, which is obviously very risky. They went ahead with this plan it seems some time before we even had good visibility into this number. The Ambassador isn't releasing any data to back her claims, which is not good, but Stockholm has had 1K deaths which mean we can infer the Swedes think the 'true death rate' is 0.3%. But other nations put it higher, in some places above 1%. If it's 1% ... that would mean 3.4M dead Americans. About 100K dead Swedes. That's big. They are hoping for more like 20-30K dead which even then seems like a large number for a place like Sweden. Again - Korea is holding Coronavirus at bay and very few have died. Obviously, no land borders, but neither does Sweden really (or they could/have closed them).
    - mikem170 7y ago
      It was known at the time that the virus did not affect the young and healthy the same as it did the old and vulnerable, and Sweden did recommended that vulnerable people self-isolate. They had a plan, it was to get to herd immunity as quickly as possible. I haven't heard of any current data that supports a 1% death rate, the numbers I see lately seem to be around .2%, which is 1 in 500 people, and have been getting lower as more data comes in. This just doesn't seem to be as bad as was first feared. Unless South Korea can deploy a vaccine in the next couple months it doesn't look like they'll be able to stop the virus eventually going through their population like it will everywhere else. It does not appear that the enough of any population wants to live for a couple years in lockdown waiting for a vaccine to save 1 in 500 people, or less, who didn't have long to live anyways.
- ksk 7y ago
  >Actually a few have done that. >Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives They haven't actually done it, they're trying to do it. We can only determine if they're successful once its over. Even if you temporarily reduce the spread by forced quarantine/lock-down, you have to also look at the natural reservoirs for the virus, human or otherwise that will ensure that the disease doesn't go away. It originally started will a few people, and now the entire world is affected. That can still happen again in a local setting. This thing spreads like crazy as we all know. The vaccine talk is not realistic IMHO. It will be at-least a year (likely a LOT longer), there is no way Korea (or any country) is going to be in a lock-down for an indeterminate period.
Grustaf 7y ago
"Their hospitals are not overwhelmed." They most definitely are. They don't even administer oxygen to patients, they old, uninfected people die because they don't want to use the extremely few respirators we have. Sweden's death rate per day per capita is an order of magnitude higher than any neighbouring country, and is not decreasing, unlike our neighbours'. There's absolutely no reason to believe that there will be mass death in e.g. Finland later.
- malandrew 7y ago
  > than any neighbouring country every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think that people are moving the goalposts to support their conclusion. Yes, it's important to recognize comparables, so we can learn something, but we're not just looking for approaches to this dilemma that work in Scandinavian countries. Sweden is worse health-wise and better economically than countries most similar that totally shut down, but they are doing a lot better than other countries both health-wise and economically than other countries that shut down. Choosing only their direct comparables, and someone will come to their conclusion that their solution was a failure, when the truth is that it was neither a total failure nor total success and we should look into it in more detail to extract some lessons that can be applied more broadly. Dismissing Sweden as a failure would be like Alexander Fleming discarding the penicillin contaminated petri dish as a failure instead of observing more closely and learning something valuable.
  - Grustaf 7y ago
    The thing is that Sweden’s numbers are not just slightly worse, they’re catastrophically worse than comparable countries. They’re also much worse than a lot of not directly comparable countries, but if I would bring that up then people would just dismiss it as not comparable. The bottom line is that the swedish strategy doesn’t work in Sweden and nothing indicates that it would work anywhere.
    - JPKab 7y ago
      NYCs numbers are catastrophically worse than Utah's numbers here in the US. Utah never did a lockdown at all and New York City did an aggressive one. The difference is obviously due to the fact that New York City is a global destination with huge inflows of people in and out of it. do you think that other Scandinavian countries are getting nearly as much travel in and out as Sweden is? I highly doubt it and I think that you are cherry picking to support your own agenda. Sweden should be compared to other global centers of commerce not to back waters like Finland and Norway. No offense to those countries but they don't register as a blip economically compared to Sweden and we all know it.

jariel 7y ago

"Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually." Actually a few have done that. Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives. FYI Korea has done it without harsh social distancing. New Zealand with similar advantages to Taiwan looks to be approaching this as well. "I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong." The issue is risk - their current daily-case rate is still growing somewhat and it's been shown that 'social distancing alone' doesn't fully flatten the curve. They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high. Any real data point to support the 30% rate for Stockholm would be a big deal because officially the country only has 18k cases.

FrojoS 7y ago
All of these countries (South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand) lack frequently commuted land borders.
- jariel 7y ago
  Fair point, but Sweden can effectively lock it's borders pretty well. They are surrounded by legit entities with managed borders. If they put up barriers, those barriers would effectively be respected, it's not like they're sitting on the Med with boats sneaking across daily.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
The idea of "official" case counts is largely fabricated. The reported number is a count of people who have tested positive, and like many countries, Sweden doesn't give coronavirus tests to everyone who's likely to have it. It's not intended to be an estimate of how many people are infected.
mikem170 7y ago
>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.
- jariel 7y ago
  "I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus." The 'hard data problem' with their strategy is that they are willing to write of x% of their population without knowing what the real death rate is, which is obviously very risky. They went ahead with this plan it seems some time before we even had good visibility into this number. The Ambassador isn't releasing any data to back her claims, which is not good, but Stockholm has had 1K deaths which mean we can infer the Swedes think the 'true death rate' is 0.3%. But other nations put it higher, in some places above 1%. If it's 1% ... that would mean 3.4M dead Americans. About 100K dead Swedes. That's big. They are hoping for more like 20-30K dead which even then seems like a large number for a place like Sweden. Again - Korea is holding Coronavirus at bay and very few have died. Obviously, no land borders, but neither does Sweden really (or they could/have closed them).
  - mikem170 7y ago
    It was known at the time that the virus did not affect the young and healthy the same as it did the old and vulnerable, and Sweden did recommended that vulnerable people self-isolate. They had a plan, it was to get to herd immunity as quickly as possible. I haven't heard of any current data that supports a 1% death rate, the numbers I see lately seem to be around .2%, which is 1 in 500 people, and have been getting lower as more data comes in. This just doesn't seem to be as bad as was first feared. Unless South Korea can deploy a vaccine in the next couple months it doesn't look like they'll be able to stop the virus eventually going through their population like it will everywhere else. It does not appear that the enough of any population wants to live for a couple years in lockdown waiting for a vaccine to save 1 in 500 people, or less, who didn't have long to live anyways.
ksk 7y ago
>Actually a few have done that. >Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives They haven't actually done it, they're trying to do it. We can only determine if they're successful once its over. Even if you temporarily reduce the spread by forced quarantine/lock-down, you have to also look at the natural reservoirs for the virus, human or otherwise that will ensure that the disease doesn't go away. It originally started will a few people, and now the entire world is affected. That can still happen again in a local setting. This thing spreads like crazy as we all know. The vaccine talk is not realistic IMHO. It will be at-least a year (likely a LOT longer), there is no way Korea (or any country) is going to be in a lock-down for an indeterminate period.

Grustaf 7y ago

"Their hospitals are not overwhelmed." They most definitely are. They don't even administer oxygen to patients, they old, uninfected people die because they don't want to use the extremely few respirators we have. Sweden's death rate per day per capita is an order of magnitude higher than any neighbouring country, and is not decreasing, unlike our neighbours'. There's absolutely no reason to believe that there will be mass death in e.g. Finland later.

malandrew 7y ago
> than any neighbouring country every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think that people are moving the goalposts to support their conclusion. Yes, it's important to recognize comparables, so we can learn something, but we're not just looking for approaches to this dilemma that work in Scandinavian countries. Sweden is worse health-wise and better economically than countries most similar that totally shut down, but they are doing a lot better than other countries both health-wise and economically than other countries that shut down. Choosing only their direct comparables, and someone will come to their conclusion that their solution was a failure, when the truth is that it was neither a total failure nor total success and we should look into it in more detail to extract some lessons that can be applied more broadly. Dismissing Sweden as a failure would be like Alexander Fleming discarding the penicillin contaminated petri dish as a failure instead of observing more closely and learning something valuable.
- Grustaf 7y ago
  The thing is that Sweden’s numbers are not just slightly worse, they’re catastrophically worse than comparable countries. They’re also much worse than a lot of not directly comparable countries, but if I would bring that up then people would just dismiss it as not comparable. The bottom line is that the swedish strategy doesn’t work in Sweden and nothing indicates that it would work anywhere.
  - JPKab 7y ago
    NYCs numbers are catastrophically worse than Utah's numbers here in the US. Utah never did a lockdown at all and New York City did an aggressive one. The difference is obviously due to the fact that New York City is a global destination with huge inflows of people in and out of it. do you think that other Scandinavian countries are getting nearly as much travel in and out as Sweden is? I highly doubt it and I think that you are cherry picking to support your own agenda. Sweden should be compared to other global centers of commerce not to back waters like Finland and Norway. No offense to those countries but they don't register as a blip economically compared to Sweden and we all know it.