10 ms·

Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Sweden had a light response to the pandemic, and it quickly found itself with a major outbreak, and a

Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Sweden had a light response to the pandemic, and it quickly found itself with a major outbreak, and a high rate of deaths. Yet without implementing any major controls, with significantly less social distancing among the population, without significant mask usage, the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. It's almost impossible to make these comparisons in real-time, without the benefit of hindsight. We won't know if this approach made sense until after the pandemic is over. But it's certainly an interesting data point. One thing that is clear is that it's far too complex to look at a couple metrics, compare them against wildly different populations, and form a conclusion. Sweden had a higher unemployment rate than many of its peers before the pandemic. Exports are a staggering 47% of GDP in Sweden. Sweden made the same mistake as many other countries, putting COVID-positive patients in nursing homes. But the longer the pandemic remains under control in Sweden, with comparatively little social distancing and mask usage, the more interesting it becomes, particularly as countries which implemented strong lockdowns see renewed outbreaks.

addicted 6y ago
The uncertainty was all the more reason to be more aggressive! We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. And the death rate is down because we understand the virus better and so are able to take actions that do not involve locking down to control it. And also it wasn’t a massive emergency at this time with massive shortages of PPE etc.
- jlmorton 6y ago
  I agree with you, I supported the lockdowns in the United States, and I think, for instance, the SF Bay Area did a good job. But it's still an interesting data point.
- btilly 6y ago
  We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. If you think that was luck, then you didn't understand the difference between CFR and IFR. The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is the fraction of reported cases that result in death. This is easier to measure. And if you're sick enough to become a reported case, it is the best back of the envelope estimate of how likely you are to die. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is the fraction of infected people that will die. For estimating how many will wind up dead if you hit herd immunity, that is the relevant figure. It is also harder to produce. Early on we were seeing CFRs in the 5-10% range. That is the figure that you remember But the first estimates of the IFR was an analysis of the Diamond Princess. It estimated an IFR of around 0.5%. In late March, Fauci reported that it was about 1%. Both estimates had significant error bars. The figures that Neil Ferguson used in his model was in the same range. All of this happened while we saw CFRs in the 5-10% range. And therefore there should have been no surprise from the beginning that the CDC estimate of the IFR for the Spring would come out where it did, 0.65%.
  - makomk 6y ago
    Part of the problem is that early on the US media actively misinformed people about this crucial point for partisan reasons, describing the naive CFR as the real WTO-confirmed fatality rate and lower figures as Trumpian lies created to downplay the severity of the disease.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > And therefore there should have been no surprise from the beginning that the CDC estimate of the IFR for the Spring would come out where it did, 0.65%. Where are you seeing the CDC say that please?
    - scottlocklin 6y ago
      It's actually considerably lower. 0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Well, yes, people wake up eventually, when their friends are dying. That said, new cases per capita in Sweden are still an order of magnitude higher than in Finland and Norway. Denmark caught up last month, but that may be because they are so much more urbanized there. See graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=NOR~DNK~SWE~FIN&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=total_deaths&pickerSort=desc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
- tomp 6y ago
  > new cases per capita Why is this a relevant metric at all?? UK (where I am) has more confirmed cases than in March, yet comparatively negligible death rate. So the raw new cases metric is obviously completely useless and uninformative, there's clearly something else going on (better management of disease, more medical resources, less extremely vulnerable people, more testing, ...)
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    Why is this a relevant metric at all? We don't know enough about long-term problems affecting those who caught it, although one glance at Boris Johnson should get anyone worried. Convalescence is protracted, and there are reports of lung damage and cardiomyopathies in a good number of recovered patients. We don't know yet for certain about neurological problems, but there are indications that covid might cause demyelinating disease, and until that's settled I'm not going to find out.
    - UncleOxidant 6y ago
      > one glance at Boris Johnson should get anyone worried. He always looked disheveled. Has it gotten worse? Agreed on he longterm effects, I don't think we know all of the longterm impacts yet and as such I'd prefer to avoid it until a safe vaccine is available.
api 6y ago
A car hitting a wall will come to a full stop eventually without applying the brake. Not a great metric.
- UrsaMedius 6y ago
  Considering that cases seem to be increasing again, there is obviously not herd immunity and thus that's not what happened.
  - orangecat 6y ago
    Cases are increasing everywhere due to increased testing. Increases in hospitalizations and deaths are much lower or nonexistent, even after taking into account the expected delay between infection and hospitalization.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      We would expect hospitalisation duration of stay and severity, and therefore instantaneous numbers hospitalised, to improve anyway, because the medicine has improved a lot since earlier in the year. And that chance to significantly improve the medicine was helped, hopefully, by the "flatten the curve" policies intended to delay the spread of the disease regardless of whether the number of people getting it would end up the same. So you can't directly compare both waves. A lot of things have changed between them.
      - smaryjerry 6y ago
        This is substantially wrong. Medicine has not improved at all over the time period. There are still no accepted treatments for the virus. They stand by the same treatments they have always used for treating the sick For a non-curable virus, fluids and steroids.
munificent 6y ago
> Yet without implementing any major controls, with significantly less social distancing among the population, without significant mask usage, the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. Are you saying that social distancing wasn't mandated by the government or that people didn't choose to do it all? Because there is an obvious potential explanation that once people started dying, Swedes chose to social distance on their own without being told to do so.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  People aren’t wearing masks in Sweden, though.
- wk_end 6y ago
  That's a potential explanation, but is it based on anything? Per the IMHE's COVID page [1], mobility has been depressed, around -30%-35% at peak, and that does line up with the peak of deaths, so there's some merit to your argument there. What doesn't really line up is that mobility quickly rose again, up to around -25% and then -15% from base line, without a corresponding increase in cases, deaths, or hospitalizations. It dipped again, and then went back up, and is now hovering closer to -10%. There's also been virtually no mask usage throughout the entire pandemic. Compare this to the US [2], which fell to -50% at peak, and has never risen above -20% this entire time. [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden [2] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >What doesn't really line up is that mobility quickly rose again, up to around -25% and then -15% from base line, without a corresponding increase in cases, deaths, or hospitalizations. It dipped again, and then went back up, and is now hovering closer to -10%. If I go to that mobility stat and plug in a bunch of other countries they almost all look the same and Sweden is no outlier. That is also true for the lack of increasing deaths which is nowhere to be seen compared to the first wave. So either everyone is doing what Sweden does or Sweden is doing what everyone else does, depending on your perspective I suppose.
ghaff 6y ago
People in general are looking at outcomes in countries and states (selectively) and interpreting them through lenses that correspond to their policy preferences and their feelings about the governments in general. The Atlantic [1] has an interesting article on the role of super-spreaders. It possibly suggests a particular contact tracing approach but it also suggests that, especially early on, there was probably a great deal of randomness in how events unfolded in a particular place. I can't speak to the medicine but it has certainly seemed as if a lot of outcomes have been pretty random. (With some exceptions like nursing home deaths that were just bad policies.) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  And people also tend to only look at policies that were implemented due to COVID and leave any pre-existing policy differences out of the picture. In Sweden it's likely much easier to stay home when you show symptoms without risking your livelyhood than it is in the US. Things like that might make a difference when looking at other measures that were out weren't taken
  - ghaff 6y ago
    The idea that places where generous sick time and healthcare policies cover more of the population might have better COVID outcomes is not an unreasonable hypothesis--and there are at least anecdotal examples of urban immigrant/poor communities in some places, including both Sweden and the US, being especially hard hit. But you'd need to study how much correlation on this dimension there is in general worldwide to conclude it's a major factor.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      Very much agreed. My point wasn't that this definitely matters or doesn't matter, but that there is more going on on countries than just the policies specificly put in place for COVID. It's easy to fall into the trap of only looking at which country took what steps.
boxed 6y ago
Swede here. > Yet without implementing any major controls, Weasel word "major". Everyone who can work from home has done so since April. I'm basically isolated at home all day. The difference is that it's voluntary because the government thinks we are adults. Turns out we are! > with significantly less social distancing among the population, Than what? And citation needed. I have cut down my physical interactions by crazy amounts and this is extremely common. > without significant mask usage, This is true. > the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. The most vulnerable have died already if that's what you mean. Now there IS a good argument for Swedens approach being good for Sweden and that is that we have had lower than average total mortality a while now. Meaning probably that the deaths we saw were dominated by people who had their lives cut short by 6 months or less. "X dead" is an obvious crap number if you think about it for 1 second. The actual interesting number is how many years have the disease cut from people's lives. Seems like not a lot actually. We took a huge gamble on this entire thing though.
- krona 6y ago
  > it's voluntary because the government thinks we are adults. Or, a country of lonely conformists. Over half of households in Sweden (52 % of all households) were one person households in 2017, the highest in the EU by a considerable margin (Eurostat data.) Also, Swedes have extreme levels of social conformity, more comparable to Japan than even its Scandinavian neighbours. Not a good environment for a virus.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    Indeed, if you want to spread the virus to your neighbor here you'd have to catch them not avoiding you first.
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  It's easy to forget that Sweden also has a much stronger social system than the US. I vaguely recall reading that Sweden also expanded some compensation for people who stay home because they show want symptoms at all. Can you elaborate on that?
null_object 6y ago
Cases are doubling each week in Stockholm right now. This article seems to have jumped on the bandwagon too late: the slow up-tick of cases was due more to people staying longer at their summer cottages, than anything special about Sweden’s strategy.
newacct583 6y ago
> But the longer the pandemic remains under control in Sweden, with comparatively little social distancing and mask usage, the more interesting it becomes And if Sweden has another outbreak? You'll revisit those arguments? Really it seems like everything you're saying is predicated on the idea that Sweden hast his "beaten" in a way that just doesn't seem rational. What's the argument that they won't see a phase 2 just like everyone else has, or will? (Obviously someone is going to chime in with "herd immunity", but that's simply wrong: other nations and regions with similar initial outbreak sizes saw second outbreaks.)
- beagle3 6y ago
  But none of those 2nd wave places took Sweden’s relaxed policy, which is likely to promote herd immunity (likely the only one to not fight it)
  - newacct583 6y ago
    There's no science showing a higher antibody prevalence in Sweden than other places like NYC that had large outbreaks. You need to cite something if you want to claim that.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      There is no science showing antibody prevalence is required for herd immunity either; you need to cite something ..... (but you might want to look at: [0]). Everywhere except Sweden implemented legally mandated strategies -- often with police and military enforcement - that were designed to limit virus spread, including places that had just-as-bad-or-worse death outcomes such as NYC, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and France. Really, almost nothing can be said for certain, and it's definitely possible for Sweden to experience a second wave soon, but it won't if this virus' dynamics is similar to other viruses - which, by all studies, it very much is. [0] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/28/herd-immunity-without-antibodies/ https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/28/herd-immunity-with...
      - 6y ago
matwood 6y ago
> Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Maybe not mandatory, but Sweden had/has voluntary controls in place. People there seem to actually listen to their government and try to do the right thing. The US could be in a similar situation, but we all know how that has gone. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coronavirus-strategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coro... While it is sometimes implied that Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, it did. It was just largely voluntary, with only a few legal measures such as a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people. “Voluntary restrictions work as well as legal ones,” says the architect of Sweden’s strategy, chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. This appears to be true, in Sweden at least. The measures did work nearly as well in getting people to change their behaviour. Adam Sheridan at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, for instance, has used data from a bank to compare spending patterns up to April in Sweden and Denmark. Denmark introduced a compulsory lockdown on 11 March, one of the first in Europe.
bsder 6y ago
> Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Perhaps, but Finland and Norway only took about 50 days to reach steady state on deaths per capita while it took about 120 days for Sweden. The current data suggests that Sweden did not do better than Finland or Norway unless one of those two countries has a sudden spike that Sweden does not have. Anybody crowing "Sweden did better" needs to present some evidence that Finland and Norway are going to get some spike in the future that Sweden will not--and currently Finland and Norway have about 150 days (and increasing) of evidence to the contrary.

addicted 6y ago

The uncertainty was all the more reason to be more aggressive! We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. And the death rate is down because we understand the virus better and so are able to take actions that do not involve locking down to control it. And also it wasn’t a massive emergency at this time with massive shortages of PPE etc.

jlmorton 6y ago
I agree with you, I supported the lockdowns in the United States, and I think, for instance, the SF Bay Area did a good job. But it's still an interesting data point.
btilly 6y ago
We are freaking lucky that COVID’s death rate is by the lower end of all the estimates. If the actual rate was closer to what Italy was seeing, or even a smaller fraction of thst, Sweden would have had far more dead. If you think that was luck, then you didn't understand the difference between CFR and IFR. The Case Fatality Rate (CFR) is the fraction of reported cases that result in death. This is easier to measure. And if you're sick enough to become a reported case, it is the best back of the envelope estimate of how likely you are to die. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) is the fraction of infected people that will die. For estimating how many will wind up dead if you hit herd immunity, that is the relevant figure. It is also harder to produce. Early on we were seeing CFRs in the 5-10% range. That is the figure that you remember But the first estimates of the IFR was an analysis of the Diamond Princess. It estimated an IFR of around 0.5%. In late March, Fauci reported that it was about 1%. Both estimates had significant error bars. The figures that Neil Ferguson used in his model was in the same range. All of this happened while we saw CFRs in the 5-10% range. And therefore there should have been no surprise from the beginning that the CDC estimate of the IFR for the Spring would come out where it did, 0.65%.
- makomk 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that early on the US media actively misinformed people about this crucial point for partisan reasons, describing the naive CFR as the real WTO-confirmed fatality rate and lower figures as Trumpian lies created to downplay the severity of the disease.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > And therefore there should have been no surprise from the beginning that the CDC estimate of the IFR for the Spring would come out where it did, 0.65%. Where are you seeing the CDC say that please?
  - scottlocklin 6y ago
    It's actually considerably lower. 0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

HarryHirsch 6y ago

Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Well, yes, people wake up eventually, when their friends are dying. That said, new cases per capita in Sweden are still an order of magnitude higher than in Finland and Norway. Denmark caught up last month, but that may be because they are so much more urbanized there. See graphs: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=NOR~DNK~SWE~FIN&region=World&casesMetric=true&interval=smoothed&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=total_deaths&pickerSort=desc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

tomp 6y ago
> new cases per capita Why is this a relevant metric at all?? UK (where I am) has more confirmed cases than in March, yet comparatively negligible death rate. So the raw new cases metric is obviously completely useless and uninformative, there's clearly something else going on (better management of disease, more medical resources, less extremely vulnerable people, more testing, ...)
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  Why is this a relevant metric at all? We don't know enough about long-term problems affecting those who caught it, although one glance at Boris Johnson should get anyone worried. Convalescence is protracted, and there are reports of lung damage and cardiomyopathies in a good number of recovered patients. We don't know yet for certain about neurological problems, but there are indications that covid might cause demyelinating disease, and until that's settled I'm not going to find out.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    > one glance at Boris Johnson should get anyone worried. He always looked disheveled. Has it gotten worse? Agreed on he longterm effects, I don't think we know all of the longterm impacts yet and as such I'd prefer to avoid it until a safe vaccine is available.

api 6y ago

A car hitting a wall will come to a full stop eventually without applying the brake. Not a great metric.

UrsaMedius 6y ago
Considering that cases seem to be increasing again, there is obviously not herd immunity and thus that's not what happened.
- orangecat 6y ago
  Cases are increasing everywhere due to increased testing. Increases in hospitalizations and deaths are much lower or nonexistent, even after taking into account the expected delay between infection and hospitalization.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    We would expect hospitalisation duration of stay and severity, and therefore instantaneous numbers hospitalised, to improve anyway, because the medicine has improved a lot since earlier in the year. And that chance to significantly improve the medicine was helped, hopefully, by the "flatten the curve" policies intended to delay the spread of the disease regardless of whether the number of people getting it would end up the same. So you can't directly compare both waves. A lot of things have changed between them.
    - smaryjerry 6y ago
      This is substantially wrong. Medicine has not improved at all over the time period. There are still no accepted treatments for the virus. They stand by the same treatments they have always used for treating the sick For a non-curable virus, fluids and steroids.

munificent 6y ago

> Yet without implementing any major controls, with significantly less social distancing among the population, without significant mask usage, the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. Are you saying that social distancing wasn't mandated by the government or that people didn't choose to do it all? Because there is an obvious potential explanation that once people started dying, Swedes chose to social distance on their own without being told to do so.

jtbayly 6y ago
People aren’t wearing masks in Sweden, though.
wk_end 6y ago
That's a potential explanation, but is it based on anything? Per the IMHE's COVID page [1], mobility has been depressed, around -30%-35% at peak, and that does line up with the peak of deaths, so there's some merit to your argument there. What doesn't really line up is that mobility quickly rose again, up to around -25% and then -15% from base line, without a corresponding increase in cases, deaths, or hospitalizations. It dipped again, and then went back up, and is now hovering closer to -10%. There's also been virtually no mask usage throughout the entire pandemic. Compare this to the US [2], which fell to -50% at peak, and has never risen above -20% this entire time. [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden [2] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >What doesn't really line up is that mobility quickly rose again, up to around -25% and then -15% from base line, without a corresponding increase in cases, deaths, or hospitalizations. It dipped again, and then went back up, and is now hovering closer to -10%. If I go to that mobility stat and plug in a bunch of other countries they almost all look the same and Sweden is no outlier. That is also true for the lack of increasing deaths which is nowhere to be seen compared to the first wave. So either everyone is doing what Sweden does or Sweden is doing what everyone else does, depending on your perspective I suppose.

ghaff 6y ago

People in general are looking at outcomes in countries and states (selectively) and interpreting them through lenses that correspond to their policy preferences and their feelings about the governments in general. The Atlantic [1] has an interesting article on the role of super-spreaders. It possibly suggests a particular contact tracing approach but it also suggests that, especially early on, there was probably a great deal of randomness in how events unfolded in a particular place. I can't speak to the medicine but it has certainly seemed as if a lot of outcomes have been pretty random. (With some exceptions like nursing home deaths that were just bad policies.) [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overloo...

ajmurmann 6y ago
And people also tend to only look at policies that were implemented due to COVID and leave any pre-existing policy differences out of the picture. In Sweden it's likely much easier to stay home when you show symptoms without risking your livelyhood than it is in the US. Things like that might make a difference when looking at other measures that were out weren't taken
- ghaff 6y ago
  The idea that places where generous sick time and healthcare policies cover more of the population might have better COVID outcomes is not an unreasonable hypothesis--and there are at least anecdotal examples of urban immigrant/poor communities in some places, including both Sweden and the US, being especially hard hit. But you'd need to study how much correlation on this dimension there is in general worldwide to conclude it's a major factor.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    Very much agreed. My point wasn't that this definitely matters or doesn't matter, but that there is more going on on countries than just the policies specificly put in place for COVID. It's easy to fall into the trap of only looking at which country took what steps.

boxed 6y ago

Swede here. > Yet without implementing any major controls, Weasel word "major". Everyone who can work from home has done so since April. I'm basically isolated at home all day. The difference is that it's voluntary because the government thinks we are adults. Turns out we are! > with significantly less social distancing among the population, Than what? And citation needed. I have cut down my physical interactions by crazy amounts and this is extremely common. > without significant mask usage, This is true. > the outbreak seems to have slowed substantially. The most vulnerable have died already if that's what you mean. Now there IS a good argument for Swedens approach being good for Sweden and that is that we have had lower than average total mortality a while now. Meaning probably that the deaths we saw were dominated by people who had their lives cut short by 6 months or less. "X dead" is an obvious crap number if you think about it for 1 second. The actual interesting number is how many years have the disease cut from people's lives. Seems like not a lot actually. We took a huge gamble on this entire thing though.

krona 6y ago
> it's voluntary because the government thinks we are adults. Or, a country of lonely conformists. Over half of households in Sweden (52 % of all households) were one person households in 2017, the highest in the EU by a considerable margin (Eurostat data.) Also, Swedes have extreme levels of social conformity, more comparable to Japan than even its Scandinavian neighbours. Not a good environment for a virus.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Indeed, if you want to spread the virus to your neighbor here you'd have to catch them not avoiding you first.
ajmurmann 6y ago
It's easy to forget that Sweden also has a much stronger social system than the US. I vaguely recall reading that Sweden also expanded some compensation for people who stay home because they show want symptoms at all. Can you elaborate on that?

null_object 6y ago

Cases are doubling each week in Stockholm right now. This article seems to have jumped on the bandwagon too late: the slow up-tick of cases was due more to people staying longer at their summer cottages, than anything special about Sweden’s strategy.

newacct583 6y ago

> But the longer the pandemic remains under control in Sweden, with comparatively little social distancing and mask usage, the more interesting it becomes And if Sweden has another outbreak? You'll revisit those arguments? Really it seems like everything you're saying is predicated on the idea that Sweden hast his "beaten" in a way that just doesn't seem rational. What's the argument that they won't see a phase 2 just like everyone else has, or will? (Obviously someone is going to chime in with "herd immunity", but that's simply wrong: other nations and regions with similar initial outbreak sizes saw second outbreaks.)

beagle3 6y ago
But none of those 2nd wave places took Sweden’s relaxed policy, which is likely to promote herd immunity (likely the only one to not fight it)
- newacct583 6y ago
  There's no science showing a higher antibody prevalence in Sweden than other places like NYC that had large outbreaks. You need to cite something if you want to claim that.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    There is no science showing antibody prevalence is required for herd immunity either; you need to cite something ..... (but you might want to look at: [0]). Everywhere except Sweden implemented legally mandated strategies -- often with police and military enforcement - that were designed to limit virus spread, including places that had just-as-bad-or-worse death outcomes such as NYC, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and France. Really, almost nothing can be said for certain, and it's definitely possible for Sweden to experience a second wave soon, but it won't if this virus' dynamics is similar to other viruses - which, by all studies, it very much is. [0] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/28/herd-immunity-without-antibodies/ https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/09/28/herd-immunity-with...
    - 6y ago

matwood 6y ago

> Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Maybe not mandatory, but Sweden had/has voluntary controls in place. People there seem to actually listen to their government and try to do the right thing. The US could be in a similar situation, but we all know how that has gone. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coronavirus-strategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coro... While it is sometimes implied that Sweden didn’t have a lockdown, it did. It was just largely voluntary, with only a few legal measures such as a ban on gatherings of more than 50 people. “Voluntary restrictions work as well as legal ones,” says the architect of Sweden’s strategy, chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. This appears to be true, in Sweden at least. The measures did work nearly as well in getting people to change their behaviour. Adam Sheridan at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, for instance, has used data from a bank to compare spending patterns up to April in Sweden and Denmark. Denmark introduced a compulsory lockdown on 11 March, one of the first in Europe.

bsder 6y ago

> Because the outbreak slowed without any strong controls. Perhaps, but Finland and Norway only took about 50 days to reach steady state on deaths per capita while it took about 120 days for Sweden. The current data suggests that Sweden did not do better than Finland or Norway unless one of those two countries has a sudden spike that Sweden does not have. Anybody crowing "Sweden did better" needs to present some evidence that Finland and Norway are going to get some spike in the future that Sweden will not--and currently Finland and Norway have about 150 days (and increasing) of evidence to the contrary.