I once worked for a company that was purchased by a Swedish company. We saw a lot of that in our “introduction to your new (and BETTER!) owners.” The company failed anyway.
So Sweden was just the last EU country dropped from Germany’s travel ban amidst plummeting new case numbers there.
Plummeting is pushing it a bit. They had 125 new cases today, which is a higher rate than the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands…
OK, it is about a quarter of the US’s rate. But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves.
Plummet is a relative term but regardless it dropped below Germany’s benchmark number of <50 new cases/100 000
I came across this (IMHO) pretty balanced interview with Sweden’s Dr. Anders Tegnell. I included my notes on the 30m interview below. These are Dr. Tegnell’s thoughts. Don’t shoot the messenger!
Sweden is likely further along the disease timeline than other countries.
The demographics of Sweden make Britain, the Netherlands, or Belgium more appropriate peer comparables instead of Norway and Finland.
There are large variations in how countries report COVID deaths. Sweden is very liberal in counting “COVID-related” as a COVID death.
Relatively large number of cases but extremely low hospitalizations/deaths explained by currently very low numbers of infections in the older population, with most new cases in younger generations. Hospitalization and death is very rare in younger people.
Sweden has learned how to better protect the vulnerable and keep disease out of long term care facilities.
This coronavirus likely can’t be eradicated and is something we will have to live with. Despite having vaccines for the flu and other respiratory viruses, we’re not close to eradicating them.
Suppression of the disease enough in order to protect the healthcare system is the goal, not eradication of the virus.
When considering more draconian measures it needs to be considered if the policies will produce a more negative overall public health outcome vs. the disease itself.
Absent an unusually powerful vaccine, it is unlikely Iceland/New Zealand will be able to maintain their status given the global nature of the economy.
Hospitals/ICUs are much more knowledgeable on how to treat the disease, which will have a larger effect on the number of deaths compared to looking only at raw number of cases.
Estimates overall IFR will be between 0.1% and 0.5%.
The number of infections is much higher than the official count.
Has not seen a confirmed case of a person being infected with two unique bouts of the disease.
Immunity to the disease is difficult to track due to heterogeneous spread. Some populations show 1% antibody presence, some show 20%.
Estimates that future resurgences will be easier to limit in Sweden due to wider immunity at this point.
The coming fall will be informative on the effectiveness of various countries’ policies.
Evidence base for the use of masks in broad society is very weak.
Social distancing is a much better way of controlling the spread of disease than masks.
He’s concerned a false sense of security from masks will lead to riskier social behavior.
If evidence changes concerning mask usage, they will adjust policy.
The time to judge the effectiveness of different policies is next summer when data is clearer.
When it comes to deaths, is Sweden getting out of the woods, you think?
On Worldometers, Sweden is still 7th highest in overall Deaths per Million with 564 [USA currently 11th with 459]. Its case and death curves are dropping a lot so hopefully that number is stabilising.
If Tegnell suggests they are the appropriate comparators then:
Belgium - 874 [2nd overall]
UK - 676 deaths/million [3rd ]
Netherlands - 359 [13th]
However, that stress on demographics implies there is something innate in the these populations that makes them more likely to reach higher death tolls. Given there are a great diversity of countries who have managed to keep their death toll at less than 100, 10 or even 1 death per million, you have to say that having the right plan and behaviour within the population has a far higher effect on overall mortality than anything inherent in the Swedish population.
I think you have to regard Tegnell’s defence in that regard as fatuous self-serving bollocks.
[and, for completeness - Norway - 47, Finland - 59 deaths per million]
I believe he specifically mentioned refugee populations, for what that’s worth.
That page has selected answers and quotes. I can’t watch the video now but describe it as:
Fair enough, if migrant and refugee populations are likely to be impacted above the levels of the locally-born. It could also be that being in poverty or marginalised, which is a correlate for foreign birth in many places, might also drive higher infection rates.
Wikipedia even has a page on the proportion of the population who are foreign-born. Its a bit of a blunt instrument, as it would count migrants, refugees, temporary workers, students etc, but as a starter:
Sweden - 20%
Norway - 16.1%
UK - 14.1%
Netherlands - 13.4%
So, plausible, but other countries above 20% with far more modest death rates include Australia [30%] and Canada [21.3%].
The discussion about urban density and wide open spaces has been had. Sweden is not that different to those other places for that to be a big contributor to the difference.
Appears to be looking good at the moment. Though, as Dr. Tegnell suggested, it’s likely too early to judge the true effectiveness of government policies.
At around 550 per million of population, it sits just under the UK and Italy but far above neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Dr Tegnell offers a collection of reasons: with its larger migrant populations and dense urban areas, Sweden is actually more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than it is to other Scandinavian countries
As a Brit that has lived in Sweden for twenty years and is now also a Swede … that is comically inaccurate. One wonders if he has ever been to the UK.
I’m not sure having lived in the country makes you an expert on population density or immigrant population other than the neighborhood you live/work in but ok.
Well, today Sweden gets a point…
Sweden’s Actual COVID-19 Results Compared to What Modelers Predicted in April
“Our model predicts that, using median infection-fatality-rate estimates, at least 96,000 deaths would occur by 1 July without mitigation,”… mitigation meaning lockdown.
…snip…
Total COVID-19 deaths in Sweden stand at 5,700, nearly 90,000 less than modelers predicted. Hospitals were never overrun. Daily deaths in Sweden have slowed to a crawl.
…what kind of nonsense is this?
Mitigation means mitigation.
Lockdown means lockdown.
They did mitigate. They did socially distance, they did plenty of things to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. They didn’t lock down hard, which is why the rate of deaths is higher than many of its neighbours. But it is incorrect to conflate mitigation with lockdown.
Still, the model was way, way off. The 96k figure was assuming they stayed on the course they did.
“This individual-based modelling project predicts that with the current mitigation approach
approximately 96,000 deaths (95% CI 52,000 to 183,000) can be expected before 1 July, 2020”
The article I linked to and much of the discussion here is around lockdown or not - so that is what is being drawn-out. Lockdown is a kind of mitigation.
While Sweden certainly has fared much worse than it’s neighbors in the deaths/1M column, the U.S. is not too far behind them at this point on that metric. The difference seems to be their economy has not cratered like ours, and we may end-up in the same deaths/1M ballpark anyway.
It specifically says
Sweden did have mitigation (voluntary distancing, no groups over 50, etc).
The author is being a bit disingenuous by using the most extreme example of predicted deaths. He’s a right-wing author with bylines from The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, and the Epoch Times.
Not that it isn’t promising that Sweden’s deaths are less than they could have been. Evidently they self-isolate and pride themselves on logic and intelligence better than the US does.
There’s a pdf link to the study, in the abstract it says:
and
[QUOTE]Findings: Our model for Sweden shows that, under conservative epidemiological parameter estimates, the current Swedish public-health strategy will result in a peak intensive-care load in May that exceeds pre-pandemic capacity by over 40-fold, with a median mortality of 96,000
(95% CI 52,000 to 183,000). The most stringent public-health measures examined are predicted to reduce mortality by approximately three-fold.[/quote]
Not disingenuous. The model is estimating 30k dead with the most stringent, 96k with the Swedish strategy.
Yes, because I haven’t traveled around at all. Two decades in each country counts for nothing.
Is Tegnell an expert in the population density or immigrant population of the UK? Why do you take his experience at face value but not mine?