# Sweden do-nothing approach good, US/UK/other countries' early do-nothing approach bad. Why? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [April 3, 2020, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962 "2020-04-03T14:44:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 13
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/241 "2020-05-25T14:00:36Z")
> [@Aeschines](#): > > NZ has done a great job… for NZ. It is a small island nation with a small population. Do you think the same thing could have been implemented in, say, the US? > > Also, NZ’s current measures will only continue to work if it doesn’t let anyone new in (or takes an _extremely_ cautious approach to letting anyone in). Especially since no one there will have immunity, and it will be gasoline and a match all over again. That’s the hell of this thing. NZ’s policies and responses would have dramatically lowered the case load and number of fatalities had we adopted them here. Germany, South Korea, and Singapore all have also managed well, and while nobody’s mentioning it, there are actually a number of success stories (for now anyway) in Africa and SE Asia. Really, we should be absolutely embarrassed at how badly a supposedly first world nation has responded to this crisis, and again I’m not being strictly political - the issue is as much cultural as anything. ---
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/242 "2020-05-25T14:05:31Z")
In 2019, how many international flights a day landed in New Zealand? How many landed in the US? ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/243 "2020-05-25T14:06:26Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > I’m probably what might be called on the hawkish end of the cautious crowd. I am for targeted (but fairly quickly progressively wider) openings despite a lack of accurate testing, comprehensive contact tracing or a vaccine. > > I think you have to realize that a significant part of this economic damage would have happened with or without government fiats on closures. Fear and a tonne of people getting actually sick from the disease would have done that. Not necessarily. Businesses would have been tempted to remain open and to have their workforce come out until business got so bad that they had to close during slow periods. People still would have gone out ,virus be damned, out of sheer ignorance. Customer ignorance combined with the owners’ desire to keep businesses going would have exposed workers to unnecessary hazards. **Ordinary working class people should not be forced to pay for their government’s abysmal failures to do its basic functions.** I look at the stimulus program as a form of compensation for this failure. > [@CarnalK](#): > > The US just had about two average flu seasons in two months. Not sure what you mean here: there’s typically one flu season that lasts several months. Are you suggesting that corona was simply another flu season? ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/244 "2020-05-25T14:07:43Z")
> [@SayTwo](#): > > In 2019, how many international flights a day landed in New Zealand? How many landed in the US? A lot more in the US and the US has a lot more ports. That doesn’t change the fact that the US could have been far more aggressive than it was in dealing with this situation. Yes, NZ is smaller, is an island, has fewer international flights - so what? ---
**Author:** ![Grim\_Render](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@Grim\_Render](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grim_Render)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/245 "2020-05-25T14:19:07Z")
> [@Banquet\_Bear](#): > > The UK, America, Sweden, Brazil, there is no strategy. No plan. And these countries with no clear strategy and no plan basing policy on “bad science” are trying to “open up.” With the greatest of respects: I’d much rather be “here” right now than “there”, even if our airports remain closed for the immediate future. I don’t think it is fair to say that Sweden had “no plan”, “no strategy” or that they were basing it on bad science. They absolutely have a plan, and its quite a challenging one to keep up. They also have a strategy and its based in the best science provided by the governments epidemics man. Is it is a good strategy? That is a different issue. Personally I think it is at least reckless. Are they actually managing to carry out their strategy in practice? They have admitted that they failed in relation to the nursing home. So at best it is a partial success. But they did have a science-based plan and they have stuck to it through hell and high water. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/246 "2020-05-25T15:04:06Z")
> [@HoneyBadgerDC](#): > > Lives are not being saved only delayed. This is a super fatalistic and stupid belief. And unfortunately quite prevalent. Let’s be optimistic and assume that an effective treatment for this thing is right around the corner. If you take this drug as soon as you start showing symptoms, your chances of needing hospitalization decreases by 50%. For high-risk groups, the drug decreases the likelihood of going into the ICU by 50%. For the highest-risk groups, the likelihood of death decreases by 50%. Would you rather contract the virus after this treatment goes on the market? Or would you rather contract the virus right now? How do you think the 100,000 folks killed by this thing would have voted, if they had been given a chance? Another reason why this is dumb logic: Everything we do is about delaying death. We spend umpty-ump trillions of dollars on military spending to delay our collective deaths, presumably. Think about all the happy, healthy, well-educated lives we could create if we diverted half of that on social welfare spending and education. But we’ve decided that killing and scaring people all around the world for the purposes of delaying our deaths somehow makes more sense. If this makes sense to you, then it should make sense to you why people want to temporarily sacrifice a booming economy for the same reason. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/247 "2020-05-25T15:18:38Z")
You can flip that logic and decide we need to keep the lockdowns indefinitely until there is a total cure. How long can we base things on the possibility of a cure being around the corner? What will probably appen is that we’ll develop better protocols and better understanding of when/why this goes bad in some people. That will reduce mortality rates from this disease. But planning based around some miracle breakthrough isn’t smart. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 3:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/248 "2020-05-25T15:28:12Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > You can flip that logic and decide we need to keep the lockdowns indefinitely until there is a total cure. How long can we base things on the possibility of a cure being around the corner? > > What will probably appen is that we’ll develop better protocols and better understanding of when/why this goes bad in some people. That will reduce mortality rates from this disease. But planning based around some miracle breakthrough isn’t smart. Planning around some conditions on the ground is smart, though. The administration’s guidelines for reopening laid out some key conditions. It doesn’t seem like a lot of jurisdictions have been following those guidelines, which is sad, but who can blame them when the administration never took them seriously. I agree that an indefinite lockdown planned around “what ifs” can’t be justified. But lots of people don’t even want to have a gradual reopening. They just want the virus to wash over the land and let the chips (bodies) fall where they may, since in their mind doing anything short of a complete return to normalcy is “not saving lives, just delaying deaths.” The middle ground is rapidly disappearing in the discourse. ---
**Author:** ![Telperion](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telperion/32/509_2.png) [@Telperion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telperion)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/249 "2020-05-25T15:46:24Z")
> [@asahi](#): > > Yes, NZ is smaller, is an island, has fewer international flights - so what? It means you can’t make a good comparison when every single factor differs. Stockholm has three international airports and is the biggest city in northern Europe, with ten times the population density of Wellington. You’d expect Stockholm to be hit harder by the pandemic simply because that is the exact same pattern we have seen around the entire world. ---
**Author:** ![crowmanyclouds](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crowmanyclouds/32/19884_2.png) [@crowmanyclouds](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/crowmanyclouds)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/250 "2020-05-25T15:57:21Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > You can flip that logic and decide we need to keep the lockdowns indefinitely until there is a total cure. How long can we base things on the possibility of a cure being around the corner? > > What will probably appen is that we’ll develop better protocols and better understanding of when/why this goes bad in some people. That will reduce mortality rates from this disease. But planning based around some miracle breakthrough isn’t smart. Developing better protocols and better understandings of when/why this goes bad in some people is one of the ‘miracle breakthroughs’ we’re counting/working on. CMC fnord! ---
**Author:** ![SayTwo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@SayTwo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SayTwo)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/251 "2020-05-25T16:07:45Z")
> [@asahi](#): > > A lot more in the US and the US has a lot more ports. That doesn’t change the fact that the US could have been far more aggressive than it was in dealing with this situation. Yes, NZ is smaller, is an island, has fewer international flights - so what? Yes, but it also doesn’t change the fact that the US could have been as aggressive as it wanted and it still could never – never, ever, not under any circumstances that you could at all possibly ever imagine being realistic – have had the same outcome as New Zealand. Me, I suspect that the situation was never going to get bad in New Zealand _no matter what_ the government did. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/252 "2020-05-25T16:21:49Z")
New Zealand was smart and proactive, but they were also lucky and less vulnerable to a crazy outbreak. They shut down before community spread was happening. I don’t think that was really possible in the States, even early on. Meanwhile, everyone is eagerly waiting for Japan to be punished for not doing jack other than shutdown some big events. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/253 "2020-05-25T17:04:37Z")
Funny. Many here are quick to correctly criticize those in the states who are under the impression that somehow the storm has passed, the story is over, that where things are is where they will be. There are a lot of states that have done very little, often GOP dominated, that can point to the fact that they have had many fewer Covid related deaths than states, often Bluer ones, that have been more aggressive. Maybe they should claim their way is better because they’ve had fewer deaths to date? Who knows, little enough is really known that while they are very very very very likely very wrong, they _could_ never see bad numbers. I am very happy for New Zealand and hope that they can remain isolated from new infections let alone surges going forward, maybe they can, but anyone who is _sure_ that the story there is over and is declaring victory may being a bit naive. Maybe it will turn out that way but I fear they are likely wrong too. No one is yet on the other side of this. Not Tennessee, not North Dakota, not Florida, not Alaska, not West Virginia, not Germany, not Denmark, not Sweden, not New Zealand. May they all continue to have relatively few deaths from this. And may they all recognize there they still have long and possibly treacherous roads ahead. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/254 "2020-05-25T17:09:55Z")
One thing to keep in mind when comparing states is that diseases inherently spread more in urban areas than in rural. And there’s a strong correlation between rural-urban and red-blue. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [May 25, 2020, 6:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/255 "2020-05-25T18:01:04Z")
One can also, when comparing any country or region, keep in mind that every country and region has its own unique features that may contribute to how the disease spreads, from living conditions, to the way in which people communicate and interact, to density of living conditions, to degree of international travel and the number of “hits” they’ve taken with new cases before even knowing it had made landfall. As for the specific urban/rural issue … again I’d caution against premature conclusions. Maybe it is not true that it doesn’t spread as much in rural area, but that it spreads a bit slower there, until conditions favorable for its spread align and it takes off, spreading as much as it does in urban areas (like influenza does) but hitting a population with a greater fraction of high risk individuals and a more easily overwhelmed healthcare system? We don’t know. That is the pertinent point. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2020, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/256 "2020-05-26T00:39:33Z")
> [@SayTwo](#): > > Yes, but it also doesn’t change the fact that the US could have been as aggressive as it wanted and it still could never – never, ever, not under any circumstances that you could at all possibly ever imagine being realistic – have had the same outcome as New Zealand. > > Me, I suspect that the situation was never going to get bad in New Zealand _no matter what_ the government did. I’m not disagreeing with you re: USA vis-a-vis New Zealand. The point is, could the US have been much closer to New Zealand’s outcome on a per capita basis than it is now - and I think we know the answer. I don’t know why everyone outside of New Zealand seems to have a boner over New Zealand. My guess is that they’re secretly envious of NZ’s success and don’t want to admit it (my apologies to the mods if this is an over the top comment - trying to add levity here). ---
**Author:** ![Banquet\_Bear](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banquet_bear/32/373_2.png) [@Banquet\_Bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banquet_Bear)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2020, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/257 "2020-05-26T00:43:24Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > I am very happy for New Zealand and hope that they can remain isolated from new infections let alone surges going forward, maybe they can, but anyone who is _sure_ that the story there is over and is declaring victory may being a bit naive. …funny. The point of my post wasn’t to “declare victory”, and I’m not naive enough to think that our “story is over.” My post was in direct response to another poster who has consistently advocated on these boards for a position that, IMHO, would be disastrous one to take. It is entirely reasonable to use “current death rates” as a metric: especially as those death rates all began being recorded at about the same moment in time. The idea that we should “stop spending money on tracing” and instead “be spent protecting those at risk” is an absurd one, as you well know. Spending money on tracing \*\*is \*\*spending money protecting those at risk. The countries that didn’t lockdown properly, the countries that didn’t lockdown with a strategy in mind, those countries are going to struggle to reopen. People aren’t going to want to go out and spend. You are going to have a long tail of deaths, probably followed up with a second wave. We know this because this is exactly what we are seeing happen. Churches will open and then close again. Businesses will reopen and then close. Flattening the curve is one thing. Breaking the chain of transmission is the other. Most countries have managed to flatten the curve. But few have attempted to break the chain. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2020, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/258 "2020-05-26T01:03:10Z")
People keep talking about how NZ isn’t comparable to the US, and I’m inclined to agree. But what about South Korea? Doesn’t their performance relative to the US (in this snapshot in time, at least) point to major areas of failure on the latter’s part? We will never get better at this thing if we continue to default to “America is special!” ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2020, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/259 "2020-05-26T03:02:23Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > People keep talking about how NZ isn’t comparable to the US, and I’m inclined to agree. > > But what about South Korea? Doesn’t their performance relative to the US (in this snapshot in time, at least) point to major areas of failure on the latter’s part? > > We will never get better at this thing if we continue to default to “America is special!” Why are we talking about South Korea when every country in south Asia including India and Pakistan have similar number of 5 deaths per million or below? ---
**Author:** ![Francis\_Vaughan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/francis_vaughan/32/3093_2.png) [@Francis\_Vaughan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Francis_Vaughan)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2020, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962/260 "2020-05-26T03:38:57Z")
Every country is special. (Some more special than others 🙂 ) Here in Australia we are, as I have said before, hoping to mirror the NZ experience. We are not far off it. Oz is a very urbanised country. The majority of people live in a few big cities. Sydney and Melbourne are larger than most US cities. In fact all our major cities are larger than almost all US cities. Where I live, which is considered a minor state, our capital is 1.3 million. Sydney is bigger than Los Angeles. Sweden is smaller on all scales than Australia. Smaller population, smaller cities. Tourist numbers are similar. But Australia gets tourists from around the planet, many from China, other parts of Asia. We are not just a convenient quick trip for Germans to hop over the sea. We get plane loads of tourists who have travelled half a day or more in a confined space together. This isn’t a good look if you want to avoid dispersing hundreds of virus laden folk across the landscape. Compared to the US of course our tourism numbers are much lower than the headline US cities. But there is more to the US than NYC, Orlando and LA. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962.md?page=12) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/sweden-do-nothing-approach-good-us-uk-other-countries-early-do-nothing-approach-bad-why/850962.md?page=14)