5 ms·

Sweden, Which Never Had Lockdown, Covid Cases Plummet as Rest of Europe Suffers

26 points by mrfusion 6y ago

wyxuan 6y ago
Title should be: Covid cases decrease in Lockdown-Free Sweden as cases rise in Europe Current title doesn't clearly indicate that Sweden has plummeting covid cases
jgwil2 6y ago
Of course it's easy to show declines when you had much higher numbers to start with. The implication here that lockdowns were a mistake is totally specious.
- wk_end 6y ago
  Not just (relative) declines but an absolute decline: they're down to a small handful of cases; COVID-19 is basically gone from Sweden. Moreover, if the cause of that is widespread immunity, it means they don't need to concern themselves with second waves or additional lockdowns as other European nations do right now. It doesn't prove that lockdowns were a mistake, but it means we should start considering that possibility. Sweden's still doing comparably or better than other nations that locked down heavily (e.g. the UK); even if you take the position that there's absolutely no doing cost/benefit when it comes to potential deaths (which is a radical position for seemingly everything besides COVID, but no matter), if at the end of the day the number of infections/deaths per capita turns out to be roughly the same anyway, the lockdowns were an enormous waste. My personal favourite insight from all this, though: if you'd applied the Imperial College model (~500,000 dead in the UK without lockdowns, 2.2 million in the US) that initially inspired the lockdowns to Sweden, you would've gotten ~100,000 dead [1]. Instead we're left with ~5000. The virus turned out to be 20x less deadly than we thought. Maybe that calls for a change in tactics? [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v...
  - thrill 6y ago
    There's a lot of variables in play. It may be 20x less deadly in a specific scenario, but change that scenario slightly and some other variable may explode in influence.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  You have to look at the entirety of the response over time, which we can’t judge until this is over. If everyone ends up about the same as Sweden, then lockdowns were a mistake.
uberman 6y ago
While the infection rate in Sweden is thankfully dramatically reduced, it should also be noted that Sweden has reported more infections than: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland COMBINED. Additionally, we generally are seeing reduced cases in cooler climates at the moment and increases in warmer climates. The reverse of which was true in the late winter and spring. My personal theory is that air conditioning in the heat and heating in the cold with the increased likelihood that clusters of people are inside enjoying these amenities leads to more cases. My prediction is that the warmer places with high case loads will taper off in the fall and rising case loads will return to the colder regions.
- tigershark 6y ago
  And don’t forget that it’s just behind Italy for the deaths/M figure and probably will overtake it in the next couple of weeks.
- tommybu 6y ago
  Do infections really matter though? Shouldn’t we focus on total deaths per country? I think we are trying to minimize deaths, not infections.
  - jetpackjoe 6y ago
    Deaths, but also hospitalizations.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    the Scandinavian nation ranks eighth among countries with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people
  - rbecker 6y ago
    Not necessarily. If you're trying to decide which quarantine measures to take, and you look at only deaths, then your findings will be skewed by how good the medical system in the countries you examined is. Or in other words, jumping from the balcony is a bad idea, even if the doctor can patch you up afterwards.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Swedes, who are by default social distancing anyway, should not have seen a lot of infections in the first place. The abrupt drop in cases id probably due to schools closing.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  Sweden's Health Agency Says Open Schools Did Not Spur Pandemic Spread Among Children [1] 1. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/swedens-health-agency-says-open-schools-did-not-spur-pandemic-spread-among-children https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/sweden...
oxymoron 6y ago
This article contains a number of factual error and a general lack of insight in the situation. First off, it attaches a special significance to the end of June as a turning point, but Sweden was late in deploying widespread testing of the general population, so that’s mostly due to the expanded testing around that time. In Stockholm it is well established that the peak was mid April. Other parts of Sweden have a different story, with some regions tracking Stockholm in the progression, while some are still quite early in the curve. For instance, the southern region of Scania seems to track closer to Denmarks pattern even though transits were largely shut down in March. Another error is the claim that the strategy was to achieve herd immunity. The line has always been that the actions taken should be sustainable in the long term. As a resident of Stockholm, I can tell you that life here changed massively in March, and it’s far from a normal summer with all concerts being cancelled, amusement parks being shut, parades and festivals being cancelled etc. That said, I’ve seen few people argue that the measures are too draconian and should be dropped. (There was a major debate about the recommendations around domestic travel during the summer, which eventually resulted in the authorities saying that they no longer discouraged it. They released a rather interesting paper where they modelled the consequences of internal travel.) In general, I think it’s too early to draw conclusions from comparisons between countries. The end result will depend on things like the impact of seasonal forcing on the contagiom, the availability of vaccines, the willingness of the population in other countries to accept renewed lockdowns, the feasibility of contact tracing schemes etc. I do however think it’s fair to say that Sweden failed mainly in protective measures around elderly care, and that the actions taken made sense in the particularly Swedish case.
joe_the_user 6y ago
As I understand it, Sweden did have a response to Covid that involved a massive increase in working at home and with those who felt vulnerable engaging in social distancing. So the cases tended to involve nursing homes and essential workers. So it seems like they've found up with "herd immunity" relative to the defensive measures that were taken. Which is to say they don't have unconditional herd immunity. If they get Covid slowly down to a very rare rate (and Covid is decline there quite slowly[1]) and normal activity returns, one or another "super-spread events" could reignite the epidemic in a similar fashion to other places where it's been eliminated currently though with the relative immunity perhaps slowing it a little. [1] https://cv19info.live/sweden/ https://cv19info.live/sweden/ Look at new cases in log scale. Sweden's cases have declined but extremely slooooowly. 23 deaths a couple of days ago where the high was 172. That a low rate of decline which indicates Covid will be there quite a while.
notacoward 6y ago
AFAICT, Sweden's figures have only dropped so much because they had been so high before, and remain higher than its neighbors. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=Denmark%2CFinland%2CNorway#countries-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri... That makes the headline very misleading, much like cheering about a company's stock rebounding while ignoring the precipitous fall that had preceded it (sometimes called a "dead cat bounce").

26 points by mrfusion 6y ago

Title should be: Covid cases decrease in Lockdown-Free Sweden as cases rise in Europe Current title doesn't clearly indicate that Sweden has plummeting covid cases

jgwil2 6y ago

Of course it's easy to show declines when you had much higher numbers to start with. The implication here that lockdowns were a mistake is totally specious.

wk_end 6y ago
Not just (relative) declines but an absolute decline: they're down to a small handful of cases; COVID-19 is basically gone from Sweden. Moreover, if the cause of that is widespread immunity, it means they don't need to concern themselves with second waves or additional lockdowns as other European nations do right now. It doesn't prove that lockdowns were a mistake, but it means we should start considering that possibility. Sweden's still doing comparably or better than other nations that locked down heavily (e.g. the UK); even if you take the position that there's absolutely no doing cost/benefit when it comes to potential deaths (which is a radical position for seemingly everything besides COVID, but no matter), if at the end of the day the number of infections/deaths per capita turns out to be roughly the same anyway, the lockdowns were an enormous waste. My personal favourite insight from all this, though: if you'd applied the Imperial College model (~500,000 dead in the UK without lockdowns, 2.2 million in the US) that initially inspired the lockdowns to Sweden, you would've gotten ~100,000 dead [1]. Instead we're left with ~5000. The virus turned out to be 20x less deadly than we thought. Maybe that calls for a change in tactics? [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v...
- thrill 6y ago
  There's a lot of variables in play. It may be 20x less deadly in a specific scenario, but change that scenario slightly and some other variable may explode in influence.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
You have to look at the entirety of the response over time, which we can’t judge until this is over. If everyone ends up about the same as Sweden, then lockdowns were a mistake.

uberman 6y ago

While the infection rate in Sweden is thankfully dramatically reduced, it should also be noted that Sweden has reported more infections than: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland COMBINED. Additionally, we generally are seeing reduced cases in cooler climates at the moment and increases in warmer climates. The reverse of which was true in the late winter and spring. My personal theory is that air conditioning in the heat and heating in the cold with the increased likelihood that clusters of people are inside enjoying these amenities leads to more cases. My prediction is that the warmer places with high case loads will taper off in the fall and rising case loads will return to the colder regions.

tigershark 6y ago
And don’t forget that it’s just behind Italy for the deaths/M figure and probably will overtake it in the next couple of weeks.
tommybu 6y ago
Do infections really matter though? Shouldn’t we focus on total deaths per country? I think we are trying to minimize deaths, not infections.
- jetpackjoe 6y ago
  Deaths, but also hospitalizations.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  the Scandinavian nation ranks eighth among countries with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 people
- rbecker 6y ago
  Not necessarily. If you're trying to decide which quarantine measures to take, and you look at only deaths, then your findings will be skewed by how good the medical system in the countries you examined is. Or in other words, jumping from the balcony is a bad idea, even if the doctor can patch you up afterwards.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Swedes, who are by default social distancing anyway, should not have seen a lot of infections in the first place. The abrupt drop in cases id probably due to schools closing.

Fjolsvith 6y ago
Sweden's Health Agency Says Open Schools Did Not Spur Pandemic Spread Among Children [1] 1. https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/swedens-health-agency-says-open-schools-did-not-spur-pandemic-spread-among-children https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/sweden...

oxymoron 6y ago

This article contains a number of factual error and a general lack of insight in the situation. First off, it attaches a special significance to the end of June as a turning point, but Sweden was late in deploying widespread testing of the general population, so that’s mostly due to the expanded testing around that time. In Stockholm it is well established that the peak was mid April. Other parts of Sweden have a different story, with some regions tracking Stockholm in the progression, while some are still quite early in the curve. For instance, the southern region of Scania seems to track closer to Denmarks pattern even though transits were largely shut down in March. Another error is the claim that the strategy was to achieve herd immunity. The line has always been that the actions taken should be sustainable in the long term. As a resident of Stockholm, I can tell you that life here changed massively in March, and it’s far from a normal summer with all concerts being cancelled, amusement parks being shut, parades and festivals being cancelled etc. That said, I’ve seen few people argue that the measures are too draconian and should be dropped. (There was a major debate about the recommendations around domestic travel during the summer, which eventually resulted in the authorities saying that they no longer discouraged it. They released a rather interesting paper where they modelled the consequences of internal travel.) In general, I think it’s too early to draw conclusions from comparisons between countries. The end result will depend on things like the impact of seasonal forcing on the contagiom, the availability of vaccines, the willingness of the population in other countries to accept renewed lockdowns, the feasibility of contact tracing schemes etc. I do however think it’s fair to say that Sweden failed mainly in protective measures around elderly care, and that the actions taken made sense in the particularly Swedish case.

joe_the_user 6y ago

As I understand it, Sweden did have a response to Covid that involved a massive increase in working at home and with those who felt vulnerable engaging in social distancing. So the cases tended to involve nursing homes and essential workers. So it seems like they've found up with "herd immunity" relative to the defensive measures that were taken. Which is to say they don't have unconditional herd immunity. If they get Covid slowly down to a very rare rate (and Covid is decline there quite slowly[1]) and normal activity returns, one or another "super-spread events" could reignite the epidemic in a similar fashion to other places where it's been eliminated currently though with the relative immunity perhaps slowing it a little. [1] https://cv19info.live/sweden/ https://cv19info.live/sweden/ Look at new cases in log scale. Sweden's cases have declined but extremely slooooowly. 23 deaths a couple of days ago where the high was 172. That a low rate of decline which indicates Covid will be there quite a while.

notacoward 6y ago

AFAICT, Sweden's figures have only dropped so much because they had been so high before, and remain higher than its neighbors. http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countries-normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-daily-7&data-source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=Denmark%2CFinland%2CNorway#countries-normalized http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri... That makes the headline very misleading, much like cheering about a company's stock rebounding while ignoring the precipitous fall that had preceded it (sometimes called a "dead cat bounce").