I don’t believe it is higher, I think it is lower. When you talk about death rate are you talking per capita or what percentage of those who contracted the virus die. If they have higher deaths per million coming in that just means the virus is circulating faster. Before this is over we could be looking at 2,000 deaths per million. New York is the only place currently approaching that.
Hmmm. Checks current numbers …
Nope, UK 1 week running average death rate currently running higher. But more relevant U.K peaked at over 17 deaths per days as their running average and Sweden peaked at 10.5.
Checks again. Nope. That same rolling average for death rate has been dropping now 7 days in a row.
Checks again. Deaths (and presumptively true infection rates) had been higher in London and New York so duh yeah antibody levels would be expected to be higher there. That said not apples to apples sorts of studies in methods. You also I hope realize that antibody tests do not measure how many have been infected as of this day, but how many had been infected as of about two weeks before the samples were taken. In Sweden the samples had been taken week 18, which was end of April, about 5 weeks ago, reflecting the number infected there as of about 7 weeks ago in mid-April. Hmmm, nearly three times as many “confirmed cases” since then and twice as many deaths. Maybe the number that are on the other side of infection has increased since then? Ya think?
BTW no one actually knows what will be required for herd immunity and the number will be different for different places. Nor is herd immunity some sort of magical threshold number before which there is no impact of having more who are presumptively at least less susceptible.
Again, not promoting the Swedish approach, no idea who will end up less or more severely impacted by next Spring, but let’s use real numbers and make some effort to understand what they do and do not mean, 'kay?
DSeid, did you actually bother to read the article and look at the charts?
Because you’re flat wrong.
I just checked Wordometer.
Sweden:
7 day moving average for June 6 is 38. Population is 10.095 million. Death rate is 3.76/m.
UK:
7 day moving average for June 6 is 235. Population is 67.862 million. Death rate is 3.46/m.
And for the rest… what’s the name again of the logical fallacy where you reply to a different argument than the one being made?
Thanks for admitting that your previous argument was wrong. 
91-divoc was my source. 4.5/m UK to 4/m Sweden.
Not sure how showing the seven day drop is not responding to a claim of no drop in sight. Must be me.
Nor how explaining that the numbers quoted for how many have had infections as defined by antibody positivity do not reflect what is in Sweden but what was nearly two months ago is off.
Yes read the article. Unimpressed by it is all.
Look I get it. Some are very invested in Sweden being a disaster and will look at numbers with that preordained conclusion in mind. I remain sure that so far they are not a complete disaster nor a complete success. They have clearly done some things wrong to my estimation. But the test of their main premise vs Denmark’s will be over next winter and into spring and possibly beyond. Those who already “know” and “knew” that Sweden was going to a horrible disaster, a cautionary tale of what not to do, don’t need to wait to see what happens. You’ve had your conclusion and discussion written months ago and don’t need to wait for all of the results.
I’m not as sure about what is to be is all. I have my suspicions but I have little confidence about them. Still personally I’d rather be living in Sweden in November than in Denmark if I had to choose.
It seems to me that you are doing exactly what you are accusing others of doing - you’re invested in Sweden not being wrong, and you’re not prepared to change your views as the evidence changes.
Even Anders Tegnell is now admitting that it would have been better to have taken a different approach.
Annika Linde, Tegnell’s predecessor as Sweden’s state epidemiologist also says it was a mistake.
Sweden ‘wrong’ not to shut down, says former state epidemiologist
The data from IHME also shows that Sweden currently has the highest death rate in the world.
IHME:
They show projections from their models, as well as current data.
NB: They are showing deaths the day they occurred, rather than the day they were reported.
Go to their page for Sweden, scroll down to daily deaths.
The trend tab shows that deaths are not leveling off, and the Compare tab shows that death rate is the highest in the world.
Honestly I think it is cute that you now see Tegnell as having some sort of expert opinion worth quoting.
Me? I see any experts who express any prediction with high confidence as not really being so expert. That goes across the board. I was not impressed with his absolute confidence in the first place and don’t place him as the judge now either. I thought what he had them do was a risky and deserved criticism from the start.
In terms of what it seems to you like - you are simply wrong. I am 100% convinced that Sweden’s execution of a key element of their plan was done very wrong. To me it is surprising that having done that element, elder care, so horribly, they still managed to not turn into a complete disaster right off.
I have no evidence yet to evaluate that about what the net numbers will be by next Spring.
Overall failure would have been overwhelming their healthcare systems.
Success OTOH would be their avoiding being overwhelmed throughout the entire course and having a net of morbidity and mortality better than peer nations on when evaluated after next Spring and beyond.
Despite major mistakes in failing to well protect their nursing home populations they have (amazingly) not yet completely failed and they have not yet succeeded. That was the case when you were already declaring them failure on 4/3 and is still the case.
My big worry remains a fall/winter surge synchronized with influenza demands on healthcare systems. I won’t judge any approach a success or a failure, right or wrong, until we are past that risk period.
Um… I mentioned that Tegnell is now admitting that he made mistakes. That’s completely different from regarding him as an expert worth quoting.
That tells me all I need to know about the standard and integrity of your arguments.
The fact that you are so desperate to write the eulogy for Sweden tells me what I need to know. As I said earlier to someone thinking I was “holding on”, all the expert opinion said this is a marathon and that we will almost assuredly encounter a second wave of disease. Now, the lefties are super intent on wrapping up the story on Sweden 4 months in.
To date, Sweden obviously has nothing to brag about. But the rush to judgment people have decided to forget that this isn’t over. The Swedish strategy was explicitly a long term strategy. The upcoming flu season and Spring will be about where we can make more final judgments. Or do you agree with Trump that this disease will soon vanish of its own accord?
You know that ‘eulogy’ means specifically a speech of praise, right? :rolleyes:
I have to say it’s entertaining to watch right-wingers rushing to defend a leftie liberal socialist country like Sweden, that they’ve been denouncing for decades. 
However, this not about politics, or believing whatever it suits us to believe. This is about science.
Yes, it’s still early days, but the general consensus of expert scientific opinion so far is that Sweden has made a mistake.
Sweden being that guys who figured out in 5 second it is good idea to just run over embers or (lava river) to solve the problem. We will heal our feet whilst other will be slowly cooked, is their thinking.
Not convinced.
Well, as I said, they’re strategy was rather explicitly intended to be more than a four month one. There are already reasons for regret, yes. But I still think the ending hasn’t been written yet.
The question about Sweden is arguable in more than one part. Probably three.
One. Knowing what they did at the start, was the decision to run with the policy and strategy they did a good one?
Two. Is is working now?
Three, will it turn out to be reasonable in hindsight when everything has settled down?
IMHO, in question one the answer is no. They bucked the worldwide consensus on what the best practice was. I remember at the time observing that this was a “courageous” decision. This is courageous in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense of courageous. Going with the advice of one person, who basically ran his own simulation (or numerical predictions) in the face of clear knowledge of the difficulty in making predictions of any accuracy was a poor decision. It is taking a bet on the lives of thousands of citizens. It does not matter if the outcome has been exactly as planned. It was still based on an unreasonably poor set of assumptions. Statesmen need to mitigate risk, not plan on best outcomes. The assumptions driving policy are a mix of the characteristics of the virus, and their ability to execute policy successfully. Both turned out to be poorly judged.
Two. Mostly not, but nor has it been a total disaster. They could easily have matched the death rates of their immediate neighbours. But they are not the worst in the world either. Many expected them to look more like Brazil and Chile are heading to. Instead they are not really any worse than the UK. Which is hardly praise, but not a disaster. The UK has endured a very hard lockdown, brought upon themselves by acting too late. Criticisms of Sweden are more focussed not on the lockdown, but on the failure to implement any useful form of protection of the vulnerable. As has been discussed elsewhere, the manner in which they have managed aged care homes is complicated and includes some difficult ethical issues. But there is no doubt, they took their eyes off the ball, and deaths in care homes have been unreasonably high by any metric.
Three. We don’t know. What people forget is that Sweden did not institute a “do nothing approach” as the thread title suggests. They implemented an advisory approach. They made requests of the populace in a society where there is an entrenched culture of social responsibility and acceptance of government advice. Something that many countries lack. Especially the USA. So Sweden did have partial shutdown. Many people working from home, with an unusually high number of single person households. Bars and restaurants may have been open, but patronage is still well down. It isn’t a lot different to the partial restrictions we are following where I live right now. (Then again, we are very possibly actually virus free here.)
Reporting and testing in Sweden was very poor at the start. Sweden is currently reporting one new case for every 7.4 tested, which is a very poor number. Here in Oz it is one in every 218. A low number can reflect poor testing or high infections or a mix of both. Either way it isn’t good.
But we are hardly in a position to judge the outcome of any policy right now. Maybe those countries enjoying very low virus levels will descend into anarchy when the economic ramifications come home to roost. Maybe there will be a sudden breakthrough in treatment that reduces the death rate - still probably with many people sick, but not actually dying, and everyone opens up reasonably happy. We don’t know.
My guess is that Sweden will roughly track the UK, and suffer just less economic damage, but that damage reduction is more a matter of the nature of Sweden’s economy and government compared to the UK that the nature of their Covid-19 policy. They will take a significant economic hit due to their poor control of the epidemic. What the balance between that and the cost of a harsher lockdown is impossible to know at the moment.
Btw Green Wyvern, I am not remotely a right winger. Neither is DSeid afaik.
For me, this is going to be the enduring legacy of this thing. This blind worship of ‘science’, whatever that is supposed to mean at the time. If there’s one thing I think I could take to the bank about all this, it’s that any consensus of ‘expert scientific opinion’ you might think you have is probably something you should question and question hard. And if you don’t question but rather buy into it wholesale, then you ought not to let them off the hook when they change their minds.
But the hell of it all is that this isn’t really, or shouldn’t be, about ‘science’. This is about public policy, and the confusion between the two has caused us a whole lot of trouble, worldwide, that we did not deserve.
It is and it isn’t. And you are right, confusion brings a lot of trouble.
Public policy has to be informed by science, but it doesn’t get a free pass in its decisions just by being informed.
There is a problem when people don’t understand what science is and isn’t. Most of science is not like physics. Most of science wants to be like physics, and sometimes deludes itself that it is. But physics is just lucky. It is the bit about the universe that has tractable rules. If there is an asteroid on its way to hit the Earth, public policy can be informed with a few pretty solid facts. Probably the greatest single time pure science directed public policy was the development of the atomic bomb.
So politicians and those charged with directing public policy need to know what questions to ask of science. And those delivering the answers need to be honest enough to be clear about the range of error there is in those answers. Honest enough that there can be a sensible discussion. Egos need to be checked at the door. This is true for all participants.
What went wrong in Sweden is hard to totally fathom. Their chief epidemiologist had his own ideas, once that were at odds with his peers elsewhere. Which is fine. But that only gets us a small part of the way. Only taking his advice is another step. Especially when it clearly is at odds with others. But still not the whole problem. Then there was a disconnect in policy. A list of stupid mistakes made in public health implementation. Most of which seems to be a matter of no overarching direction and no responsibility being taken at the coal face for what was clearly a bad situation, and one that was clearly getting worse. Those are not matters of hard science. Sociology perhaps, but only as an observer. These matters firmly come under the responsibility of the elected government. It is eventually their job to direct public policy, and ensure its implementation. Buck stops here. Modern politics seems to have largely forgotten this. It takes a novel threat to shake things up. Whether they improve, well we can hope.
Mostly agree with your points except that the comparison to physics is less apt than it would be to climate science.
There is an actual consensus of the scientific community held with a great deal of confidence about climate change. Years of study and evidence have firmed up inputs.
Predictions regarding what are the potential results of different actions with this virus are not climate science. The critical bits of information to inform the models have not been there, aren’t there yet. And sometimes, IMHO shamefully, scientists presented their models choosing assumptions based on scant evidence or even none, in order to create model results that would support what they felt were the best public policy decisions. Despite media reporting that sometimes suggests otherwise, there is no broad confident consensus within the scientific community about what will happen if x or y.
There is no solid science yet done that fully informs what the costs (in ives and quality of live across the globe or within a single country) would be as the result of various different actions. I haven’t even seen any solid attempts by those who have the best toolboxes.
There are instead nonscientific beliefs that are being held sometimes misrepresented as “what the science says” by those who have no clue what science is actually about. Assumptions held as if they are fact instead of with appropriate doubts.
My personal opinion was that in the face of the level of doubt Sweden’s approach was too risky. That said if they had not done so poorly in implementing one key aspect of their plan, the protecting their nursing home populations and elderly in general, they’d be being judged now an overwhelming success, instead of just not having been a complete failure so far.
I do think the way in which the name of science has been abused during this time period will undermine the public’s confidence in areas in which there is actual broad scientific consensus and confidence, like climate science.