Because he’s head of a national level public health department, he probably has more information. He’s been involved in other national vaccination efforts. He may be full of crap but he probably has got access to more info than you do traveling around observing. I mean, seriously, dude.
Seriously, as an example. Sweden has eight cities of over 100,000 people.
The UK has eighty four.
The entirety of the Swedish population can fit into five of them.
It isn’t even close.
Additionally, if you want to concentrate on population density in urban areas.
The UK has thirty five urban areas with a population density of over 4000 people/square km.
Sweden has one. A tiny area just outside Stockholm of 7,475 people.
Well, I think he was saying Sweden was closer to the UK than to Finland in density. That’s still dubious and as someone mentioned just above, population density was heavily discussed earlier in this thread.
Yep, Tegnell is trying to CYA with that claim. Stockholm county, the most densely populated in Sweden (almost 3 times more dense than the second densest) has lower density than the entire countries of Belgium and England (it’s slightly more dense than the UK has a whole).
Overall, Sweden has 1/11th of the density of the UK, and 1/15 of the density of Belgium.
Tegnell has a novel way of talking up his and Sweden’s ‘success’
Here he claims the likely outlook for Sweden is a further 3000 deaths with a possible upper limit of around 5800.I guess if it is anything less than that it might be seen as a success but what a way to spin a story
Let’s just note that and do a back of the envelope calculation - what in fact he is saying is the ‘successful’ policy will result in is a death rate of between 900 per million through to 1160 per million.
…and this is despite the neighbouring nations having death rates of between 20% to less than 10% and yet he states “It really is yet another sign that the Swedish strategy is working,”
To put this in perspective, he is trying to spin a story that if it were to be replicated in the US would be something around 400 thousand deaths - and if this does prove to be the case I somehow doubt that Americans would feel all that lucky - this is what he is trying to call a success whilst his neighbour nations are looking at figures based on his own judgment of between 220 to perhaps 110 deaths.
Still trying to hang on to failed success story - personally I would have sacked him a long time ago and brought in a more realistic epidemiologist.
Who are the creators of this model and what are their credentials? Who was using this model to enact policy? Were there any news articles highlighting this model at the time of publication? This SDMB thread is over 500 posts; where there any mentions of the model in this thread?
Or, as I suspect, did someone just peruse hundreds of models on preprint publication servers and pick an extreme outlier that no one else has ever seen in order to get a big gotcha? Notice how the article says “inspired by the Imperial College of London study” in order to trick readers into thinking it’s a legitimate model associated with a prestigious group.
Here we go.
The forecasters are saying that Sweden’s hit to the economy will not be as bad as some other European countries.
Virus Hit to Sweden’s Economy Seen Among Least Bad in Europe
Still may not be much better than Norway and Denmark that didn’t have such a high death toll.
Ever since Sweden’s Prime Minister order an investigation into the country’s handing of the coronavirus response, things have changed in Sweden. More articles are about social distancing than about the do-nothing approach.
In this article, the author talks about how Sweden isn’t exceptional anymore, both in its response to the coronavirus and the results coming from that. Tegnell says the declining death rate is from herd immunity. Other doctors say that it’s likely from the summer holiday that Sweden takes every year that keeps people more isolated.
Sweden’s pandemic no longer stands out
The country has tougher restrictions in place than in France or Austria and new infections have plunged
When the pandemic hit, Sweden shut down high schools and colleges. Now that school is starting again, Sweden is facing the same issues on opening schools, exacerbated by a public transport issue.
The high school that equips with masks and visors
So in a word, the death drops are because they changed their policy?
My relative is a Covid denialist and yesterday he looked up Sweden Covid deaths and was gloating about how they were zero, zero. And I was confused because, hey, hadn’t Sweden been a hot mess? But if the death rates are going down because they’re taking the disease more seriously, then that kinda undermines his argument.
The death rates are approaching zero all over Europe, not just in Sweden.
I read an observation recently that Sweden’s numbers aren’t much different than Quebec’s, in many respects. I found that intriguing.
They didn’t change their policies; other countries changed theirs. For the others it was called opening up; for Sweden it was staying the course.
Being low right now is not so much for them to crow about. It is after having paid a price. Once again whether or not that price saves them paying much more over winter and beyond, is to be determined.
Sweden has had more deaths than all of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland combined. That’s from here:
Early indications are that their economy took the same hit due to the virus as Norway, so all they got from their do-nothing approach was extra deaths.
Sweden population: about 10 million
Norway: about 5.5 million
Finland: about 5.5 million
Denmark: almost 6 million
Iceland population: less than 0.5 million
(Personal note: I had no idea that all of those countries were so sparsely populated. Sweden is smaller than the NY metro area and Iceland is tiny!)
The results of Sweden’s policies probably provide ammunition to both critics and proponents alike. The initial data clearly showed that Sweden’s policies, compared to its European neighbors, resulted in more death. However, it’s possible that Sweden’s population and institutions may have figured out ways to adapt and mitigate the spread on their own. Additionally, like other countries, they apparently learned how to treat the worst cases and control the death rate.
In terms of economics, which was their justification for not shutting down in the first place, it seems that their economy was impacted by the outbreak, even though they chose not to shut down.
I’m confused. The article quoted above says Sweden did in fact fare better so far economically than Europe in general. Surely no one claimed that Sweden would be totally unaffected by the pandemic? 
If you mean my statement, I was comparing them directly to Norway, which is closer to them economically, culturally, and size-wise than, say, Spain, France, Italy, etc. Italy had a complete shut down and many deaths. Ditto Spain.
I haven’t seen final numbers, but early indications suggest that Sweden and Norway fared similarly economically.
I meant asahi’s statement that “their economy was impacted by the outbreak”. That’s rather meaninglessly obvious unless he meant something about relative impact.
Your article doesn’t seem to name Norway. Where did you see they had a similar economic fallout?
I’m still trying to track that down. I saw the graph of Sweden and Norway’s second quarter performance on Twitter somewhere, but I can’t find it on the web yet.
ETA: Aha! Here it is:
It doesn’t have Norway yet, but there are estimates that suggest it did better than Sweden. Denmark and Iceland did better, too.
Huh, the interesting part is that Finland did so much better than all the other Nordics as far as a hit to the economy goes.