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>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 se

>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.
  - jariel 7y ago
    Here's an article discussing different epidemiologists, the UK is estimating 0.8-0.9 percent. [1] NY city numbers are 0.8. Risk is the issue, it's irresponsible to risk the lives of an entire nation when that number is still unknown - even at 0.8% that's pretty high to try for herd immunity. [1] https://unherd.com/2020/04/which-epidemiologist-do-you-believe/ https://unherd.com/2020/04/which-epidemiologist-do-you-belie...
    - mikem170 7y ago
      It's funny that I may be reading the same data and coming to a different conclusion. Sweden has had a couple thousand covid deaths, less than 25% of NYC in a comparably sized population, both currently finding that around 25% of their populations seems to have antibodies. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21240381/coronavirus-sweden-death-rate-cases-new-york https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21240381/coronavirus-sweden-de... They seem to be as far as long as NYC towards herd immunity, with just under 25% of the deaths. The above article characterizes the Swede's plan as a failure based on comparisons of their death rate to the less-affected entire US population, but I'm not sure if that's a valid comparison, in that the Swedes will benefit from herd immunity before anyone else. Plus there are benefits to not having to lockdown. I am left wondering why Sweden has so much lower a death rate than NYC, with similar antibody counts. I agree with your statement that risk is the issue, something that our brains are not always wired to correctly evaluate.
      - jariel 7y ago
        Yes, you are right to point out the official 'death rate' is useless, because policies for testing are different. Sweden does very little testing so their 'death rate' will look high. BUT - we can compare deaths to 'actual antibody rate' when doing broader sampling. For NYC we have 12K dead as of 2 days ago (and it will be 15K even with 0 more cases, because it takes time for people to die). They had a 20% 'antibody rate' in the city from a report released a few days ago. NYC proper is 9M people, so that's 1.8M positive, 15K/1.8M is 0.8% 'true death rate'. Which is not that far from the earlier estimates of 1-4%. Germay is saying 0.58% based in their random smaples. The Swedish Ambassador said 1/3 of Stockholm has it. Stockholm is 900K people so that's 300K. They have 1K dead, will be about 1.3K so that's about 0.4% 'true death rate'. 0.4% is nicer lower then NY and Germany it seems, but it's not like Swedes are special beings, we can't assume they're going to be too-too far off other, similar places. So the 'true death number' is probably somewhere in the range of 0.4-0.9% as of the information we have right now. This is kind of a high number to be shooting for 'immunity' especially when A) We didn't have that number before B) We still are not sure of the number now C) We don't know if people will be immune (are asymptomatic people immune?) or how long that will last. And of course, those are big numbers. 0.6% of Americans is a little over 2 Million people. That's a lot of people. Finally, there is no doubt that some countries have had success. Taiwan, Korea, NZ, even Australia have done really well with it. Swedes are smart, wealthy people, they literally talk about themselves as being 'humanitarian superpowers' it seems reasonable that intelligent people would use effective measures to protect their own population.

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.
- jariel 7y ago
  Here's an article discussing different epidemiologists, the UK is estimating 0.8-0.9 percent. [1] NY city numbers are 0.8. Risk is the issue, it's irresponsible to risk the lives of an entire nation when that number is still unknown - even at 0.8% that's pretty high to try for herd immunity. [1] https://unherd.com/2020/04/which-epidemiologist-do-you-believe/ https://unherd.com/2020/04/which-epidemiologist-do-you-belie...
  - mikem170 7y ago
    It's funny that I may be reading the same data and coming to a different conclusion. Sweden has had a couple thousand covid deaths, less than 25% of NYC in a comparably sized population, both currently finding that around 25% of their populations seems to have antibodies. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21240381/coronavirus-sweden-death-rate-cases-new-york https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21240381/coronavirus-sweden-de... They seem to be as far as long as NYC towards herd immunity, with just under 25% of the deaths. The above article characterizes the Swede's plan as a failure based on comparisons of their death rate to the less-affected entire US population, but I'm not sure if that's a valid comparison, in that the Swedes will benefit from herd immunity before anyone else. Plus there are benefits to not having to lockdown. I am left wondering why Sweden has so much lower a death rate than NYC, with similar antibody counts. I agree with your statement that risk is the issue, something that our brains are not always wired to correctly evaluate.
    - jariel 7y ago
      Yes, you are right to point out the official 'death rate' is useless, because policies for testing are different. Sweden does very little testing so their 'death rate' will look high. BUT - we can compare deaths to 'actual antibody rate' when doing broader sampling. For NYC we have 12K dead as of 2 days ago (and it will be 15K even with 0 more cases, because it takes time for people to die). They had a 20% 'antibody rate' in the city from a report released a few days ago. NYC proper is 9M people, so that's 1.8M positive, 15K/1.8M is 0.8% 'true death rate'. Which is not that far from the earlier estimates of 1-4%. Germay is saying 0.58% based in their random smaples. The Swedish Ambassador said 1/3 of Stockholm has it. Stockholm is 900K people so that's 300K. They have 1K dead, will be about 1.3K so that's about 0.4% 'true death rate'. 0.4% is nicer lower then NY and Germany it seems, but it's not like Swedes are special beings, we can't assume they're going to be too-too far off other, similar places. So the 'true death number' is probably somewhere in the range of 0.4-0.9% as of the information we have right now. This is kind of a high number to be shooting for 'immunity' especially when A) We didn't have that number before B) We still are not sure of the number now C) We don't know if people will be immune (are asymptomatic people immune?) or how long that will last. And of course, those are big numbers. 0.6% of Americans is a little over 2 Million people. That's a lot of people. Finally, there is no doubt that some countries have had success. Taiwan, Korea, NZ, even Australia have done really well with it. Swedes are smart, wealthy people, they literally talk about themselves as being 'humanitarian superpowers' it seems reasonable that intelligent people would use effective measures to protect their own population.