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One thing missing from this report is that a large proportion of the deaths were in care homes, and ministers have publicly stated that not entirely locking dow

One thing missing from this report is that a large proportion of the deaths were in care homes, and ministers have publicly stated that not entirely locking down care homes from the outset was a big mistake. If they had done this, the figures may well not look nearly as bad. Also, what will count is not the first few months but the entire lifetime of this pandemic. I'll be interested to see where countries are a year or two from now. This isn't to say I support the Swedish government's strategy - I don't feel like I know enough to say what the best strategy is, although I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA and UK.

systemvoltage 6y ago
A very large percentage of US deaths are also from the same type of residents - care homes, elderly communities and such. I read that it was as much as 40%. I need to find source.
- ziga 6y ago
  43% according to NYT (includes residents and workers): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nurs... 55k+ deaths, 296k+ cases, staggering numbers. Out of a 1.3M nursing home population (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm), which makes you wonder if the recent decrease in deaths is driven by the fact that the majority of the susceptible nursing home population has already been affected.
bhupy 6y ago
> I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA The USA does not have "no strategy", it just depends from State to State[1]. Every state has had some form of lockdown and school closure. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...
- triceratops 6y ago
  That is the same as "no strategy". Without coordination of the lockdowns, travel monitoring, national testing and contact tracing, you're just going to have shifting hotspots of infection. This also leaves behind an embittered population whose lockdown sacrifices were for nothing.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    That's not the same as "no strategy", because this level of decentralization is how nation-states work today. It's also, incidentally, how the EU works. There are open borders between member states — and while some member states "closed" their borders, this has been largely unenforceable in land crossings because there are no border patrol agents between every single land crossing between EU member states. Border enforcements have only been enforced at airports. In the US, nationwide air travel came to a near complete stand-still during the outset of the pandemic, so inter-state travel was already at the same levels you had in the EU. The US's strategy has been the same as the EU's, and it has been to let the member States define the strategy. As of right now, 36 out of 50 US states have a lower per capita death rate[1] than France, Sweden, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland[2]. 15 States have a lower per capita death rate than Germany and Denmark, who have seen the best COVID outcomes in the EU. The US, to date, has administered more tests per capita than Belgium, Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Sweden (to name a handful). This is not because the US has a nationwide testing regime, rather it's because testing systems have been administered at the State level, with varying strategies (some focusing on nursing homes, some focusing on drive-thru testing etc). [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
    - aazaa 6y ago
      > That's not the same as "no strategy", because this level of decentralization is how nation-states work today. It's one thing to leave pandemic response to member countries like the EU does. Each country knows it's responsible for its own response. Money is budgeted and spent specifically for this purpose. That's not the system in the US - or hasn't been. The Federal government maintains what, until recently, was the world's premier infectious disease-fighting organization - the CDC. The implication was that pandemic response occurs through this organization. In the past, this is exactly what happened. You may recall the one state (Washington) earlier this year whose brave scientists decided to test for COVID on their own. They were told in no uncertain terms from the feds to stand down or else. So the idea that this pandemic response is up to the states doesn't hold water. Had the states known that they'd be left twisting in the wind, they could have taken steps beforehand. That's one likely outcome of this event (assuming it has a clean endpoint): states realizing they really are on their own - and acting like it.
celticninja 6y ago
I'm not sure that the UK has had no strategy, it's just that the strategy they chose may possibly be worse than no strategy at all.
- frereubu 6y ago
  As someone more erudite than me put it, the UK has "government by press release". They may have tactics, but no strategy.
heavyavocado 6y ago
Swede here. The leadership in Sweden has consistently tried to find different ways of justifying the strategy. Blaming the results on failing elderly care has been one such tactic. When you compare the raw numbers the proportion of elderly care deaths is actually in line with (or even less than) neighboring countries.
- addicted 6y ago
  I feel like Tegnell’s original mistake was his disbelief that asymptomatic spreaders existed. His entire strategy was based on this and worse, he loudly and publicly criticized other countries that chose to lockdown because unlike him they were fully convinced about the existence of asymptomatic spreaders. Once his strategy to protect the vulnerable failed dramatically due to asymptomatic carriers (and the fact that people make bad decisions), it was too late for him to back down and it’s been Iraq war all over again. One day he is criticizing other countries saying that what they are doing is not sustainable and then in the next breath complaining that his strategy has been misrepresented and what he is doing isn’t different from what the rest of the world is doing. It’s been unfortunate to watch his inability to admit his initial mistake lead to so much unnecessary suffering and pain.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    He's made a long string of bad judgement calls and spurious statements. However, I'm more appalled by the government's complete mismanagement. They have completely pushed responsibility onto this single man, who cannot be held accountable in public elections. His job is to be a key advisor. The politicians are the policymakers and the only enforceable decisions they've made is pretty much to prohibit gatherings of more than 50 people and close down high schools.
    - tjomk 6y ago
      To a degree, they did a sane thing: listened to the advice of an expert. Now if you look at the other side of the ocean where the orange man didn't listen to the advice of an expert, look what happened. I don't know how these things work in government, but relying on the opinion of just a single expert might not be the best strategy to win here. It's unlikely though that policy makers will come out in the worse shape here than they were before because even though they might have failed (a big if in the long run), they've relied on the advice of the experts rather than their beliefs.
makomk 6y ago
This. It's pretty obvious at this point that a general lockdown is worthless as a replacement for locking down care homes specifically - Spain had one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe but massively screwed up their handling of their care homes, and ended up with an even worse per-capital death toll than Sweden. Unfortunately, mainstream media publications have been spinning this instead as evidence that herd immunity wouldn't work by taking the incredibly high infection fatality rate from Spain, scaling it up, and claiming this is the best measure of how many people would die to achieve herd immunity.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Right. From what I've read, it seems like the most effective strategy would be locking down elder care homes tightly. And also tightly locking down staff at elder care homes. Because once one resident gets infected, there's no way to prevent other residents, and staff who care for them, from getting infected. At least, short of staff wearing ebola level protection, and changing between residents. Which would be impossibly expensive and time consuming. Others in the general population who are at serious risk of complications, such as elderly and those with preexisting conditions, should also isolate themselves. As I gotta say, I have done. But I suspect that it will turn out that general lockdown is neither good enough, nor worth the long term economic consequences. Except of course that those long term consequences will arguably mitigate global climate change.
  - simonh 6y ago
    > But I suspect that it will turn out that general lockdown is neither good enough, nor worth the long term economic consequences. Hang on, this is an article showing that a looser lockdown still ends up with your economy hammered anyway. This should not be surprising, analysts if the Spanish Flu pandemic showed that cities that locked down later and lighter actually suffered more economically. This is because the higher infection and death rate, and larger number of people caring for sick relatives. People ended up Locking themselves down anyway out of fear, and the epidemic dragged on for longer. Now we know this wasn’t due to special conditions back then, it’s true now too. There simply isn’t an option to ‘choose the economy’.
usrusr 6y ago
How do you completely lock down a care home? It's a labor-intensive industry and you can't just put care on hold for a few weeks like you could with an assembly line. The only way to keep a virus like this away from care homes is to keep it away from friends and families of caretakers and from their friends and families. You can't focus prevention when you are dealing with presymptomatic spread.
- frereubu 6y ago
  Ban visits, quarantine any goods coming into the building for three days, strict hygiene requirements for staff entering and existing the building. It would be really difficult, but when the other alternative is letting a highly contagious virus spread rapidly through a susceptible population I'd say that's worth it. As others have pointed out in this thread, strict lockdowns haven't prevented a horrifying number of deaths in care homes.
  - atourgates 6y ago
    I don't think it was really possible in the early stages of the pandemic, and might not be possible now. Care workers have to go in and out of elderly care facilities. We still don't have much data on how good COVID-19 testing at tracking pre-symptomatic cases, but the data points at "certainly not 100% accurate". Even if you tested _every_ care worker before they entered the building, you'd likely miss some asymptomatic cases who could go on to transmit to the elderly. Nevermind the fact that earlier in the pandemic, the kinds of near-instant tests we have now (allbet with unimpressive reliability) weren't available.
    - frereubu 6y ago
      Sure, it's not going to be perfect. But at the other end of the scale in the UK, for example, they were discharging people they knew to be infected into care homes. If you tested everyone you would miss some, but you'd catch some. You'd provide proper PPE to everyone (that is, if you hadn't cancelled pandemic preparedness measures as in the US and UK) and so on. The risk wouldn't be eliminated, but you could at least reduce it with some relatively simple measures.
microtherion 6y ago
> a large proportion of the deaths were in care homes … which is no different from other countries. I seem to recall articles comparing the numbers, and the proportions seem similar in many places. > Also, what will count is not the first few months but the entire lifetime of this pandemic. Considering only the improvements in treatments made between March and now, it seems fairly evident that a strategy of front-loading deaths was ill-considered. Even if all countries eventually end up with the same percentage of the population infected (which is far from certain), it's likely that those with a late wave will have considerably fewer deaths.
- sjg007 6y ago
  There’s been no real progress in clinical treatment since March.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    There have been numerous improvements, summarized here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-lessons-factbox-idUSKBN23Z04K https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-lesson... * Some medication which appears to be effective, i.e. dexamethasone and remdesivir * Proning * An increased focus on avoiding blood clots, e.g. by using blood thinners.
  - mhandley 6y ago
    Dexamethasone decreases deaths of ventilated cases by a third: https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery_dexamethasone_statement_160620_v2final.pdf https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery_dexamethasone_s...
    - sjg007 6y ago
      Prevents 1 death in 8 of ventilated cases and 1 in 25 on oxygen.
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    No longer putting everyone with a <95% blood oxygen level on ventilator. It's heartbreaking to read this article from three months ago (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-overused-for-covid-19/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...) and realize that everything those warning against overuse of ventilators turned out to be correct.
claudeganon 6y ago
Taiwan. 7 people have died. No major economic impact. Now exporting masks to other countries. No brushing aside deaths of the elderly and disabled as if those people’s lives were nothing. Their’s was demonstrably the best strategy and everyone else is just making excuses.
- simonh 6y ago
  Taiwan and Germany have the advantage that they have strong domestic medical testing industries. This allowed Germany to do 5x to 10x as many tests as France, Italy and Spain. In turn this enabled them to accurately map the spread of the disease and use targeted tactical lockdowns to eliminate outbreaks at the local level. Korea did the same. Without the same testing capacity, this strategy simply wasn’t available in most other countries. However now that testing capacity has ramped up, we should be able to employ more efficient lockdowns from now on. It’s still not a magic wand though, Germany’s economy has still suffered significantly even with a relatively efficient lockdown.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Ok, now do Vietnam. Also, the choice to offshore medical supply infrastructure was a deliberate one by many wealthy countries. That this was foolish and short-sighted is not any more of an excuse than anything else with their poor responses.
    - hjnilsson 6y ago
      Vietnam has a population 10 years younger than Taiwan / Sweden / Germany. This is a very significant factor when we are talking about Covid, and explains the very low mortality rate in Vietnam. But yes: Vietnam still did great, most likely thanks to very early intervention (as early as January).
      - claudeganon 6y ago
        Vietnam has low mortality because they stopped the spread of the disease early on. If they had allowed it to sweep over the country, like Sweden, this population age difference might have been a factor. Thankfully, it never came to that.
wrsh07 6y ago
You know, it feels like bullshit to give this counterfactual. One of the reasons other countries locked down like they did was to give themselves time to figure out what actually needed to be done to save lives. Saying "well if they had done this other thing fewer people would've died" means they made the wrong decision. Full stop.
- addicted 6y ago
  Yeah. Every country had vast majority of deaths in care homes. In fact, this is a complete repudiation of the Swedish experiment because the one thing they did say they would do was protect the vulnerable. It was the only goal they had. And they failed miserably.
vkou 6y ago
The entire purpose of the Sweedish strategy was to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. And it failed. You can't go back, and re-write history, now, and blame the elderly care homes for the failure of the strategy. They weren't the ones setting policy.

systemvoltage 6y ago

A very large percentage of US deaths are also from the same type of residents - care homes, elderly communities and such. I read that it was as much as 40%. I need to find source.

ziga 6y ago
43% according to NYT (includes residents and workers): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nurs... 55k+ deaths, 296k+ cases, staggering numbers. Out of a 1.3M nursing home population (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/nursing-home-care.htm), which makes you wonder if the recent decrease in deaths is driven by the fact that the majority of the susceptible nursing home population has already been affected.

bhupy 6y ago

> I do think that that the worst strategy is to have no strategy, seemingly like the USA The USA does not have "no strategy", it just depends from State to State[1]. Every state has had some form of lockdown and school closure. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...

triceratops 6y ago
That is the same as "no strategy". Without coordination of the lockdowns, travel monitoring, national testing and contact tracing, you're just going to have shifting hotspots of infection. This also leaves behind an embittered population whose lockdown sacrifices were for nothing.
- bhupy 6y ago
  That's not the same as "no strategy", because this level of decentralization is how nation-states work today. It's also, incidentally, how the EU works. There are open borders between member states — and while some member states "closed" their borders, this has been largely unenforceable in land crossings because there are no border patrol agents between every single land crossing between EU member states. Border enforcements have only been enforced at airports. In the US, nationwide air travel came to a near complete stand-still during the outset of the pandemic, so inter-state travel was already at the same levels you had in the EU. The US's strategy has been the same as the EU's, and it has been to let the member States define the strategy. As of right now, 36 out of 50 US states have a lower per capita death rate[1] than France, Sweden, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland[2]. 15 States have a lower per capita death rate than Germany and Denmark, who have seen the best COVID outcomes in the EU. The US, to date, has administered more tests per capita than Belgium, Australia, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway, and Sweden (to name a handful). This is not because the US has a nationwide testing regime, rather it's because testing systems have been administered at the State level, with varying strategies (some focusing on nursing homes, some focusing on drive-thru testing etc). [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ [2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
  - aazaa 6y ago
    > That's not the same as "no strategy", because this level of decentralization is how nation-states work today. It's one thing to leave pandemic response to member countries like the EU does. Each country knows it's responsible for its own response. Money is budgeted and spent specifically for this purpose. That's not the system in the US - or hasn't been. The Federal government maintains what, until recently, was the world's premier infectious disease-fighting organization - the CDC. The implication was that pandemic response occurs through this organization. In the past, this is exactly what happened. You may recall the one state (Washington) earlier this year whose brave scientists decided to test for COVID on their own. They were told in no uncertain terms from the feds to stand down or else. So the idea that this pandemic response is up to the states doesn't hold water. Had the states known that they'd be left twisting in the wind, they could have taken steps beforehand. That's one likely outcome of this event (assuming it has a clean endpoint): states realizing they really are on their own - and acting like it.

celticninja 6y ago

I'm not sure that the UK has had no strategy, it's just that the strategy they chose may possibly be worse than no strategy at all.

frereubu 6y ago
As someone more erudite than me put it, the UK has "government by press release". They may have tactics, but no strategy.

heavyavocado 6y ago

Swede here. The leadership in Sweden has consistently tried to find different ways of justifying the strategy. Blaming the results on failing elderly care has been one such tactic. When you compare the raw numbers the proportion of elderly care deaths is actually in line with (or even less than) neighboring countries.

addicted 6y ago
I feel like Tegnell’s original mistake was his disbelief that asymptomatic spreaders existed. His entire strategy was based on this and worse, he loudly and publicly criticized other countries that chose to lockdown because unlike him they were fully convinced about the existence of asymptomatic spreaders. Once his strategy to protect the vulnerable failed dramatically due to asymptomatic carriers (and the fact that people make bad decisions), it was too late for him to back down and it’s been Iraq war all over again. One day he is criticizing other countries saying that what they are doing is not sustainable and then in the next breath complaining that his strategy has been misrepresented and what he is doing isn’t different from what the rest of the world is doing. It’s been unfortunate to watch his inability to admit his initial mistake lead to so much unnecessary suffering and pain.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  He's made a long string of bad judgement calls and spurious statements. However, I'm more appalled by the government's complete mismanagement. They have completely pushed responsibility onto this single man, who cannot be held accountable in public elections. His job is to be a key advisor. The politicians are the policymakers and the only enforceable decisions they've made is pretty much to prohibit gatherings of more than 50 people and close down high schools.
  - tjomk 6y ago
    To a degree, they did a sane thing: listened to the advice of an expert. Now if you look at the other side of the ocean where the orange man didn't listen to the advice of an expert, look what happened. I don't know how these things work in government, but relying on the opinion of just a single expert might not be the best strategy to win here. It's unlikely though that policy makers will come out in the worse shape here than they were before because even though they might have failed (a big if in the long run), they've relied on the advice of the experts rather than their beliefs.

makomk 6y ago

This. It's pretty obvious at this point that a general lockdown is worthless as a replacement for locking down care homes specifically - Spain had one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe but massively screwed up their handling of their care homes, and ended up with an even worse per-capital death toll than Sweden. Unfortunately, mainstream media publications have been spinning this instead as evidence that herd immunity wouldn't work by taking the incredibly high infection fatality rate from Spain, scaling it up, and claiming this is the best measure of how many people would die to achieve herd immunity.

mirimir 6y ago
Right. From what I've read, it seems like the most effective strategy would be locking down elder care homes tightly. And also tightly locking down staff at elder care homes. Because once one resident gets infected, there's no way to prevent other residents, and staff who care for them, from getting infected. At least, short of staff wearing ebola level protection, and changing between residents. Which would be impossibly expensive and time consuming. Others in the general population who are at serious risk of complications, such as elderly and those with preexisting conditions, should also isolate themselves. As I gotta say, I have done. But I suspect that it will turn out that general lockdown is neither good enough, nor worth the long term economic consequences. Except of course that those long term consequences will arguably mitigate global climate change.
- simonh 6y ago
  > But I suspect that it will turn out that general lockdown is neither good enough, nor worth the long term economic consequences. Hang on, this is an article showing that a looser lockdown still ends up with your economy hammered anyway. This should not be surprising, analysts if the Spanish Flu pandemic showed that cities that locked down later and lighter actually suffered more economically. This is because the higher infection and death rate, and larger number of people caring for sick relatives. People ended up Locking themselves down anyway out of fear, and the epidemic dragged on for longer. Now we know this wasn’t due to special conditions back then, it’s true now too. There simply isn’t an option to ‘choose the economy’.

usrusr 6y ago

How do you completely lock down a care home? It's a labor-intensive industry and you can't just put care on hold for a few weeks like you could with an assembly line. The only way to keep a virus like this away from care homes is to keep it away from friends and families of caretakers and from their friends and families. You can't focus prevention when you are dealing with presymptomatic spread.

frereubu 6y ago
Ban visits, quarantine any goods coming into the building for three days, strict hygiene requirements for staff entering and existing the building. It would be really difficult, but when the other alternative is letting a highly contagious virus spread rapidly through a susceptible population I'd say that's worth it. As others have pointed out in this thread, strict lockdowns haven't prevented a horrifying number of deaths in care homes.
- atourgates 6y ago
  I don't think it was really possible in the early stages of the pandemic, and might not be possible now. Care workers have to go in and out of elderly care facilities. We still don't have much data on how good COVID-19 testing at tracking pre-symptomatic cases, but the data points at "certainly not 100% accurate". Even if you tested _every_ care worker before they entered the building, you'd likely miss some asymptomatic cases who could go on to transmit to the elderly. Nevermind the fact that earlier in the pandemic, the kinds of near-instant tests we have now (allbet with unimpressive reliability) weren't available.
  - frereubu 6y ago
    Sure, it's not going to be perfect. But at the other end of the scale in the UK, for example, they were discharging people they knew to be infected into care homes. If you tested everyone you would miss some, but you'd catch some. You'd provide proper PPE to everyone (that is, if you hadn't cancelled pandemic preparedness measures as in the US and UK) and so on. The risk wouldn't be eliminated, but you could at least reduce it with some relatively simple measures.

microtherion 6y ago

> a large proportion of the deaths were in care homes … which is no different from other countries. I seem to recall articles comparing the numbers, and the proportions seem similar in many places. > Also, what will count is not the first few months but the entire lifetime of this pandemic. Considering only the improvements in treatments made between March and now, it seems fairly evident that a strategy of front-loading deaths was ill-considered. Even if all countries eventually end up with the same percentage of the population infected (which is far from certain), it's likely that those with a late wave will have considerably fewer deaths.

sjg007 6y ago
There’s been no real progress in clinical treatment since March.
- microtherion 6y ago
  There have been numerous improvements, summarized here: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-lessons-factbox-idUSKBN23Z04K https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-lesson... * Some medication which appears to be effective, i.e. dexamethasone and remdesivir * Proning * An increased focus on avoiding blood clots, e.g. by using blood thinners.
- mhandley 6y ago
  Dexamethasone decreases deaths of ventilated cases by a third: https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery_dexamethasone_statement_160620_v2final.pdf https://www.recoverytrial.net/files/recovery_dexamethasone_s...
  - sjg007 6y ago
    Prevents 1 death in 8 of ventilated cases and 1 in 25 on oxygen.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  No longer putting everyone with a <95% blood oxygen level on ventilator. It's heartbreaking to read this article from three months ago (https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-overused-for-covid-19/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/08/doctors-say-ventilators-...) and realize that everything those warning against overuse of ventilators turned out to be correct.

claudeganon 6y ago

Taiwan. 7 people have died. No major economic impact. Now exporting masks to other countries. No brushing aside deaths of the elderly and disabled as if those people’s lives were nothing. Their’s was demonstrably the best strategy and everyone else is just making excuses.

simonh 6y ago
Taiwan and Germany have the advantage that they have strong domestic medical testing industries. This allowed Germany to do 5x to 10x as many tests as France, Italy and Spain. In turn this enabled them to accurately map the spread of the disease and use targeted tactical lockdowns to eliminate outbreaks at the local level. Korea did the same. Without the same testing capacity, this strategy simply wasn’t available in most other countries. However now that testing capacity has ramped up, we should be able to employ more efficient lockdowns from now on. It’s still not a magic wand though, Germany’s economy has still suffered significantly even with a relatively efficient lockdown.
- claudeganon 6y ago
  Ok, now do Vietnam. Also, the choice to offshore medical supply infrastructure was a deliberate one by many wealthy countries. That this was foolish and short-sighted is not any more of an excuse than anything else with their poor responses.
  - hjnilsson 6y ago
    Vietnam has a population 10 years younger than Taiwan / Sweden / Germany. This is a very significant factor when we are talking about Covid, and explains the very low mortality rate in Vietnam. But yes: Vietnam still did great, most likely thanks to very early intervention (as early as January).
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Vietnam has low mortality because they stopped the spread of the disease early on. If they had allowed it to sweep over the country, like Sweden, this population age difference might have been a factor. Thankfully, it never came to that.

wrsh07 6y ago

You know, it feels like bullshit to give this counterfactual. One of the reasons other countries locked down like they did was to give themselves time to figure out what actually needed to be done to save lives. Saying "well if they had done this other thing fewer people would've died" means they made the wrong decision. Full stop.

addicted 6y ago
Yeah. Every country had vast majority of deaths in care homes. In fact, this is a complete repudiation of the Swedish experiment because the one thing they did say they would do was protect the vulnerable. It was the only goal they had. And they failed miserably.

vkou 6y ago

The entire purpose of the Sweedish strategy was to protect the elderly and the vulnerable. And it failed. You can't go back, and re-write history, now, and blame the elderly care homes for the failure of the strategy. They weren't the ones setting policy.