Sweden's deaths per capita attributed to COVID-19 is currently the 8th highest in the world (exempting a few tiny city states). That's about 20% more deaths per capita than in the US.
It also has one of the lowest testing rates in the Western world at 0.7%, compared to around 2% in Spain, Italy and Germany.
Yes but we cannot function as a society like this, indefinitely on lockdown. The proposals to test, track, and isolate sound good but are preposterous in terms of logistics - funding, manufacturing, personnel, accountability. It will optimistically be 12-18 months till we “have a vaccine” - but I suspect it will be 4-5 years more realistically till we have applied it planet-wide sufficiently to eradicate the disease. So, I don’t think Sweden is totally crazy, we have to find some way to live with the disease, and that still means a lot of people are going to die.
1. "The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%"
2. "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"
The first one is trivially wrong. In NYC more than 0.1% of the _population_ (not the infected) has died already.
The second is less trivially wrong, but there's a lot of evidence against it: tests from Wuhan[0], Denmark[1], the Netherlands[2] all show very low infection rates, around 3-4%.
I agree. I have several objections to this line of thought. Of course Sweden might want to risk its entire population on made up data but I don't think that's a prudent approach.
1. When we put in these lockdown measures, we basically had very little science behind the disease. Not locking down and hoping things generalize from very small sample sized studies coming out of Italy (which did enter lockdown at that point) is not prudent policy.
2. The only clean room evidence we have even now is the US Naval carrier that was exposed to COVID. It turned out that amongst those infected, 30% of the sailors were just asymptomatic. Previous modeling assumptions that US policy is driven off of were using 15-20% are asymptomatic. Okay, fine our initial assumptions were off a little, but not orders of magnitude off.
3. The other problem with the Swedish approach is that you can't simply isolate old people in isolation from younger people - healthcare workers, nursing home workers etc. are all fairly young and can be asymptomatic COVID carriers.
4. Even if the mortality for younger folks is ~0.1% the toll that COVID is taking on the lungs of even recovered patients is pretty brutal (anecdotal evidence, needs more study). Especially, if you're an athlete or want 100% lung capacity for the rest of your life, it's a bit iffy at this point if you'll actually get it. It also looks like it's hitting multiple organs and not just lungs, again we don't have much science here at this point.
5. I was hoping we could do antibody testing as a way to judge who can safely go out, but I was watching a Bill Gates interview yesterday and it looks like the testing is not good enough yet to make that call - it still has too high a false positive rate, people with antibodies still can get reinfected if their viral load the first time was enough to only trigger a mild infection.
Is 0.1 when the ventilators/hospital treatments are used? If the spike happens and people that needs it but don’t have it, how would deaths look like?not sure if he took that into account with the 0.1, otherwise he is not much of an epidemiologist
I can't believe we're still having this debate in April when it should have been settled in Feb. After Wuhan got hit, a bunch of countries repatriated their citizens and tested every single person.
From Reddit:
South Korea: 802 imported cases, 17 from China, 389 from Europe, 306 from Americas.
Taiwan: evacuated 975 from Wuhan so far, only 1 tested positive. 728 evacuated from Wuhan since March 10th, 0 positives.
Singapore: ~80% of 800 cases imported, 24 from China.
Ontario (Province of Canada): 968 imported cases, US 318, UK 101, Mexico 49, Spain 46, Germany 34... China 5. HK 1 - HK has 200x less population than China.
It was clear Wuhan was hit by something incredibly deadly that had only barely started inching its way through the population.
South Korea is one of the most comprehensively tested nations on the planet and their death rate right now is 2%.
People are still desperately clinging onto a narrative that this thing is way less deadly than it appears and twisting and distorting all sorts of stats to get them there but it just plain is vanishingly unlikely to be true.
This virus started with Westerners assuming that they were somehow exceptionally different from Asians and did not need to learn from their experience and it will end with Westerners assuming that they are exceptionally different from Asians and do not need to learn from their experiences.
1. It's about as made up as the WHO's 3.4% figure.
2. Most thinkers I know and follow widely believe this to be the case as well, it also passes the common sense test.
(OK, 3.4% of reported cases, my point is they have thrown out death rates as well, all of them can be considered fantasy because we have zero clue what the denominator is)
True, but it's probably not so important. After all, it's just more human centered talk. It might be useful now for everyone to take a step back, consider we share this planet with other living things, and maybe someone is brave enough to look at things from a perspective of non-human being. Who's the pandemic now? ;)
It the product of evolution. As a species we have to make decisions on imperfect and limited information all the time. If we were programmed to wait to figure everything out we would have died off ages ago.
indeed. here and elsewhere in the blagosphere people have taken this opportunity to opine at length on everything from epidemiology to virology to welfare economics. it's been the case for a long time that people online have had very little sense of humility about their opinions but somehow experiencing a pandemic has given them even less pause to consider what they're ignorant of.
I live in Spain. It's about one month and 7 days of lockdown and the official data isn't realistic. Although we are having lower numbers, it will take many months of lockdown to stop having deaths. I don't think this strategy of full lockdown will help, to be honest, we should lockdown risk factor people.
we will really only know when looking at yearly stats or even bigger stats, it's possible it may slightly increase yearly death toll but nothing close to those crazy numbers reported now when just cause of death shift towards virus from other causes
if your system is not overloaded or kills almost only the people who would die anyway soon
I feel pity for Spain, their economy was F up prior this virus, can't imagine what it's gonna be after virus
Thank goodness at least someone with credentials is saying what is obvious. The lockdown approach is not sustainable for much longer out of basic economic concerns and the virus will absoluteley start spreading again when the masses break and go back to work. Protecting the most vulnerable while the rest of the society works to support them is the only sensible approach and should have been the plan all along. I'm personally very sad that so many will sustain great economic damage on top of this reality, but this is what happens when people run scared. I just hope this reality is recognized and accepted before even more damage is done.
> start spreading again when the masses break and go back to work
I don't see why this must be true. R before the lockdown in northern CA and WA (heavy voluntary measures but people "working") was ~1.45. [source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v...]. SoCal was higher at R=2.1, possibly due to less voluntary restrictions.
Add on a functional testing and contact tracing (built up during the lockdown) and you should be at r < 1.
You’re ignoring the possibility that the lockdown bought us time to prepare a more effective strategy we can implement as we open society again.
Also, there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus.
* It has been reported to cause long term organ damage. How common is that? How severe is it?
* It has killed lots of people who are not frail.
* We don’t have a good idea of how widespread it is, so we don’t know what the true death rate is. The Santa Clara serological study suggested that 48k residents have been infected. Santa Clara currently only has 73 deaths, which gives a death rate of .15%. We only had access to this serological data yesterday, so how would we have made decisions using it last month? And even if the death rate is low, that’s the death rate with a health care system that’s not at capacity thanks to social distancing and lockdown measures.
* We don’t know how effective a policy of “protect the old and frail” would be because it’s never been tried.
* etc etc
All of these unknowns together should give you pause. It’s tiring to hear people confidently promoting their unfounded opinions on the virus grounded in nothing more than a know-it-all attitude and a generous helping of Dunning-Kruger.
(The week 15 report predicted 5k excess deaths for week ending apr3, more concrete figures had it at 6k. Week 16 predicts about 12k excess deaths for w/e april 10.
60% extra deaths isn't "slightly above background level"
If covid is burning itself out then that's great, we'd be looking at a total 100k excess deaths, or 20% above background level for the year.
However there is no evidence that we're anywhere near 20% of the country having had it, let alone 70%.
Those dying in week ending april 10th will likely have contracted covid before lockdown
So we're likely looking at 30k excess deaths in the last month, or about 80%, but that's because we locked down in mid-end march and the number of deaths 3 weeks later hasn't increased at the non-lockdown rate we'd expect.
Tobacco kills an average 2k per week in the UK, covid is killing 5 times as many, and that's with all the controls.
This is a stunning difference. In the US we had no excess mortality in March, in fact total deaths from all causes were down year over year.
Cases didn’t peak in NY until April so we may see some increase after this month.
I realize the U.K. locked down later than many countries, but there must be other factors driving mortality as there are other countries that did not lock down and aren’t being ravaged quite the same.
What is it? Level of care in the NHS? Higher prevalence of secondary conditions like diabetes? Hygiene? Crowding?
It's unknown how long symptoms typically last. I am pushing 4+ weeks with mild symptoms I have never experienced with the flu. My doctor indicates 4+ weeks until ~mostly recovered based on her patients. How does this deplete nutrients necessary for continued immune function relative to the flu? We need more data and that Swede doesn't have it.
Why is this flagged? The interview is intellectually interesting. Prof. Johan Giesecke literally wrote the book on infectious disease epidemiology, and works as a senior advisor to the WHO and Swedish government.
"The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%"
Fatality rate is meaningless. Even if you don't die, you can't work when you're sick for 2 to 5 weeks. Sickness duration is relevant.
Hospital bed occupancy rate and impact on hospital treating other pathologies and injuries is relevant.
> "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"
It's just pure speculation at the moment. You don't take life or death decision based on such optimistic speculation. This is just irresponsible.
Mild disease that caused of rationing of care in multiple countries. Filled up all the hospitals and stopped elective surgeries through out the world. Killed more people in the US in 1 month that the flu kills in a year even with the largest states going into full lock down to prevent spreading. What disease besides Spanish flu has caused this must disruption to our medical infrastructure?
> "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"
They're already doing antibody testing in other countries and the numbers are much lower than 50%.
In Santa Clara county, California, the estimate is only 2.49% to 4.16%
Sweden already has 1 death per 10,000 population (0.01% per capita, not per case) and rate is increasing. Spain is 1 per 2,500 (0.04%). NY state is 1 per 1,200, soon to be 1 per 1,000 (0.1% per capita). This is with lockdown [0]
I agree with most of the things besides 50% of infected population, in Czech 250+ branches (that's at least 5000 people) of Lidl they had only 4 confirmed infected until now, in Globus supermarket chain out of 5000 workers only 2. yes, Czechia is enforcing mandatory masks (although like 90% of population wear only cloth masks due to lack of access to medical masks and respirators) but still you would expect, if it would be that contagious through surfaces and other ways as some scare, there would be much more infected in these busiest businesses right now
“The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only.”
How is it working out with that. Last I heard old people in Sweden don’t go to the ICU but is left to die and they have a large spread in care homes for elderly. And as if their economy is in a vacuum they think they won’t be struggling with the same recession as the rest of us
The old and frail will die eventually. It’s reasonable to discuss how much we’re willing to sacrifice for the additional time afforded them in aggregate.
This is not to sound cold or callus. I’ll be old one day (but am also not going to expect extraordinary resources to live a few extra months). These are necessary discussions in a finite world.
Sweden is the only country that has a scientist in charge of covid response? All other countries have politicians in charge? I'm not sure that they're definitely wrong?
[+] [-] standardUser|6 years ago|reply
It also has one of the lowest testing rates in the Western world at 0.7%, compared to around 2% in Spain, Italy and Germany.
[+] [-] nabla9|6 years ago|reply
Year from now we will see the total number of deaths from different strategies and the thing is settled by then.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
It's not uninteresting who's in the lead now. But it's the goal line standings that matter.
[+] [-] flatline|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoster|6 years ago|reply
1. "The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%"
2. "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"
[+] [-] bobcostas55|6 years ago|reply
The second is less trivially wrong, but there's a lot of evidence against it: tests from Wuhan[0], Denmark[1], the Netherlands[2] all show very low infection rates, around 3-4%.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determi...
[1]: https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2020-04-17-stor-screening-vis...
[2]: https://nltimes.nl/2020/04/16/3-dutch-blood-donors-covid-19-...
[+] [-] safog|6 years ago|reply
1. When we put in these lockdown measures, we basically had very little science behind the disease. Not locking down and hoping things generalize from very small sample sized studies coming out of Italy (which did enter lockdown at that point) is not prudent policy.
2. The only clean room evidence we have even now is the US Naval carrier that was exposed to COVID. It turned out that amongst those infected, 30% of the sailors were just asymptomatic. Previous modeling assumptions that US policy is driven off of were using 15-20% are asymptomatic. Okay, fine our initial assumptions were off a little, but not orders of magnitude off.
3. The other problem with the Swedish approach is that you can't simply isolate old people in isolation from younger people - healthcare workers, nursing home workers etc. are all fairly young and can be asymptomatic COVID carriers.
4. Even if the mortality for younger folks is ~0.1% the toll that COVID is taking on the lungs of even recovered patients is pretty brutal (anecdotal evidence, needs more study). Especially, if you're an athlete or want 100% lung capacity for the rest of your life, it's a bit iffy at this point if you'll actually get it. It also looks like it's hitting multiple organs and not just lungs, again we don't have much science here at this point.
5. I was hoping we could do antibody testing as a way to judge who can safely go out, but I was watching a Bill Gates interview yesterday and it looks like the testing is not good enough yet to make that call - it still has too high a false positive rate, people with antibodies still can get reinfected if their viral load the first time was enough to only trigger a mild infection.
[+] [-] fiter|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shalmanese|6 years ago|reply
From Reddit:
South Korea: 802 imported cases, 17 from China, 389 from Europe, 306 from Americas. Taiwan: evacuated 975 from Wuhan so far, only 1 tested positive. 728 evacuated from Wuhan since March 10th, 0 positives. Singapore: ~80% of 800 cases imported, 24 from China. Ontario (Province of Canada): 968 imported cases, US 318, UK 101, Mexico 49, Spain 46, Germany 34... China 5. HK 1 - HK has 200x less population than China.
It was clear Wuhan was hit by something incredibly deadly that had only barely started inching its way through the population.
South Korea is one of the most comprehensively tested nations on the planet and their death rate right now is 2%.
People are still desperately clinging onto a narrative that this thing is way less deadly than it appears and twisting and distorting all sorts of stats to get them there but it just plain is vanishingly unlikely to be true.
This virus started with Westerners assuming that they were somehow exceptionally different from Asians and did not need to learn from their experience and it will end with Westerners assuming that they are exceptionally different from Asians and do not need to learn from their experiences.
[+] [-] alharith|6 years ago|reply
2. Most thinkers I know and follow widely believe this to be the case as well, it also passes the common sense test.
(OK, 3.4% of reported cases, my point is they have thrown out death rates as well, all of them can be considered fantasy because we have zero clue what the denominator is)
[+] [-] AzzieElbab|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbr2000|6 years ago|reply
Besides, the planet doesn't care about our little problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHgJKrmbYfg
[+] [-] rpiguy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwlaplace|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meerita|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheChaplain|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Markoff|6 years ago|reply
if your system is not overloaded or kills almost only the people who would die anyway soon
I feel pity for Spain, their economy was F up prior this virus, can't imagine what it's gonna be after virus
[+] [-] erdos4d|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaar333|6 years ago|reply
I don't see why this must be true. R before the lockdown in northern CA and WA (heavy voluntary measures but people "working") was ~1.45. [source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.12.20062943v...]. SoCal was higher at R=2.1, possibly due to less voluntary restrictions.
Add on a functional testing and contact tracing (built up during the lockdown) and you should be at r < 1.
[+] [-] DennisP|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _vertigo|6 years ago|reply
Also, there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus.
* It has been reported to cause long term organ damage. How common is that? How severe is it?
* It has killed lots of people who are not frail.
* We don’t have a good idea of how widespread it is, so we don’t know what the true death rate is. The Santa Clara serological study suggested that 48k residents have been infected. Santa Clara currently only has 73 deaths, which gives a death rate of .15%. We only had access to this serological data yesterday, so how would we have made decisions using it last month? And even if the death rate is low, that’s the death rate with a health care system that’s not at capacity thanks to social distancing and lockdown measures.
* We don’t know how effective a policy of “protect the old and frail” would be because it’s never been tried.
* etc etc
All of these unknowns together should give you pause. It’s tiring to hear people confidently promoting their unfounded opinions on the virus grounded in nothing more than a know-it-all attitude and a generous helping of Dunning-Kruger.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iso1631|6 years ago|reply
Stats for week ending April 10th aren't out yet, however they are alluded to in https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... at being over 20k deaths, twice the number.
(The week 15 report predicted 5k excess deaths for week ending apr3, more concrete figures had it at 6k. Week 16 predicts about 12k excess deaths for w/e april 10.
60% extra deaths isn't "slightly above background level"
If covid is burning itself out then that's great, we'd be looking at a total 100k excess deaths, or 20% above background level for the year.
However there is no evidence that we're anywhere near 20% of the country having had it, let alone 70%.
Those dying in week ending april 10th will likely have contracted covid before lockdown
So we're likely looking at 30k excess deaths in the last month, or about 80%, but that's because we locked down in mid-end march and the number of deaths 3 weeks later hasn't increased at the non-lockdown rate we'd expect.Tobacco kills an average 2k per week in the UK, covid is killing 5 times as many, and that's with all the controls.
Cars kill an average 30 per week
[+] [-] rpiguy|6 years ago|reply
Cases didn’t peak in NY until April so we may see some increase after this month.
I realize the U.K. locked down later than many countries, but there must be other factors driving mortality as there are other countries that did not lock down and aren’t being ravaged quite the same.
What is it? Level of care in the NHS? Higher prevalence of secondary conditions like diabetes? Hygiene? Crowding?
[+] [-] lymeeducator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nradov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] specialbat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesblonde|6 years ago|reply
"At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"
"The results will eventually be similar for all countries"
"Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people."
[+] [-] ldng|6 years ago|reply
> "At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available"
It's just pure speculation at the moment. You don't take life or death decision based on such optimistic speculation. This is just irresponsible.
[+] [-] adrr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klipt|6 years ago|reply
They're already doing antibody testing in other countries and the numbers are much lower than 50%.
In Santa Clara county, California, the estimate is only 2.49% to 4.16%
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/04/17/heal...
[+] [-] mgsouth|6 years ago|reply
[0] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/
[+] [-] gberger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SlowRobotAhead|6 years ago|reply
Are those the things you agree with most or are those things you disagree with?
[+] [-] Markoff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonsaidit|6 years ago|reply
How is it working out with that. Last I heard old people in Sweden don’t go to the ICU but is left to die and they have a large spread in care homes for elderly. And as if their economy is in a vacuum they think they won’t be struggling with the same recession as the rest of us
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|6 years ago|reply
This is not to sound cold or callus. I’ll be old one day (but am also not going to expect extraordinary resources to live a few extra months). These are necessary discussions in a finite world.
[+] [-] m3kw9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazylizard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azranoman|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elesbao|6 years ago|reply