
Sweden, Which Never Had Lockdown, Covid Cases Plummet as Rest of Europe Suffers - mrfusion
https://www.newsweek.com/sweden-which-never-had-lockdown-sees-covid-19-cases-plummet-rest-europe-suffers-spike-1521626
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notacoward
AFAICT, Sweden's figures have only dropped so much because they had been so
high before, and remain higher than its neighbors.

[http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-
visualization/?chart=countri...](http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-
visualization/?chart=countries-
normalized&highlight=Sweden&show=25&y=both&scale=linear&data=cases-
daily-7&data-
source=jhu&xaxis=right&extra=Denmark%2CFinland%2CNorway#countries-normalized)

That makes the headline _very_ misleading, much like cheering about a
company's stock rebounding while ignoring the precipitous fall that had
preceded it (sometimes called a "dead cat bounce").

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joe_the_user
As I understand it, Sweden did have a response to Covid that involved a
massive increase in working at home and with those who felt vulnerable
engaging in social distancing. So the cases tended to involve nursing homes
and essential workers.

So it seems like they've found up with "herd immunity" _relative to_ the
defensive measures that were taken. Which is to say they don't have
unconditional herd immunity. If they get Covid slowly down to a very rare rate
(and Covid is decline there quite slowly[1]) and normal activity returns, one
or another "super-spread events" could reignite the epidemic in a similar
fashion to other places where it's been eliminated currently though with the
relative immunity perhaps slowing it a little.

[1] [https://cv19info.live/sweden/](https://cv19info.live/sweden/) Look at new
cases in log scale. Sweden's cases have declined but extremely slooooowly. 23
deaths a couple of days ago where the high was 172. That a low rate of decline
which indicates Covid will be there quite a while.

------
uberman
While the infection rate in Sweden is thankfully dramatically reduced, it
should also be noted that Sweden has reported more infections than:

Denmark, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland

COMBINED.

Additionally, we generally are seeing reduced cases in cooler climates at the
moment and increases in warmer climates. The reverse of which was true in the
late winter and spring.

My personal theory is that air conditioning in the heat and heating in the
cold with the increased likelihood that clusters of people are inside enjoying
these amenities leads to more cases. My prediction is that the warmer places
with high case loads will taper off in the fall and rising case loads will
return to the colder regions.

~~~
tommybu
Do infections really matter though? Shouldn’t we focus on total deaths per
country? I think we are trying to minimize deaths, not infections.

~~~
joe_the_user
Aside from Deaths, Covid can cause permanent organ damage.

People have talked about the uncertainty involved in this virus as reason to
not shutdown economies. But this kind of argument misses the danger involved
in exposing many people to a fairly intense disease where it's not just the
death rate that will harm the people and indirectly harm society.

Headline: "Three-quarters of adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after
recovery". See: [https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/07/27/Three-quarters-
of...](https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/07/27/Three-quarters-of-adults-
with-COVID-19-have-heart-damage-after-recovery/5451595856303/?ur3=1)

~~~
lbeltrame
> Aside from Deaths, Covid can cause permanent organ damage.

So can other diseases we live with, we're just not that exposed to them
through the press. Certain diseases can cause heart failure; bacterial
pneumonia, even if treated, can have effects that last for months if not a
year or more; some viral infections can cause all sorts of bad side effects,
including cytokine storms.

This including the recent interview with someone who had a lot of their
fingers amputated due to cardiovascular complications from infections: this
also happens to quite a few who have type 2 diabetes (due to neuropathy).

A _lot_ of treatable diseases can have long lasting, sometimes even crippling
effects in life. Many people just don't know because it's not told around.

This virus is no different from them.

~~~
jddj
Right.

This one, though, seems to be much more adept at spreading through communities
than your run-of-the-mill bacterial pneumonia or type two diabetes.

That must factor into your equivalence test, no?

~~~
lbeltrame
Yes, but the easiness it spreads does not equate to the same frequency of
long-lasting damage.

In fact, given so many cases are missed (bloodstream antibody tests don't
catch those with T-cell responses, and mucosal antibodies aren't detected by
those tests, either) I would not be surprised if those with complications are
a minority (of extreme clinical importance, mind you) of the total cases.

My point is not much as to downplay the seriousness of these side effects, but
rather that we have become more aware of them due to "information overload",
because many other diseases can have these complications. IOW, this is not a
magic disease (sometimes the press almost paints SARS-CoV-2 as something out
of this world...).

~~~
joe_the_user
Hopefully those with complications will turn out to be a minority but we are
talking a disease whose parameters haven't been fully discovered.

The "magic" of COVID is that combines the seriousness of many serious
diseases, like more conventional viral pneumonia, that do long lasting damage
with an infectiousness greater than the flu - so even minority with organ
damage can be many, many people. It's not the worst disease in the world but
the point one should be concerned with the number of cases rather than just
fatalities.

------
jgwil2
Of course it's easy to show declines when you had much higher numbers to start
with. The implication here that lockdowns were a mistake is totally specious.

~~~
wk_end
Not just (relative) declines but an absolute decline: they're down to a small
handful of cases; COVID-19 is basically gone from Sweden. Moreover, if the
cause of that is widespread immunity, it means they don't need to concern
themselves with second waves or additional lockdowns as other European nations
do right now.

It doesn't _prove_ that lockdowns were a mistake, but it means we should start
considering that possibility. Sweden's still doing comparably or better than
other nations that locked down heavily (e.g. the UK); even if you take the
position that there's absolutely no doing cost/benefit when it comes to
potential deaths (which is a radical position for seemingly everything besides
COVID, but no matter), if at the end of the day the number of
infections/deaths per capita turns out to be roughly the same anyway, the
lockdowns were an enormous waste.

My personal favourite insight from all this, though: if you'd applied the
Imperial College model (~500,000 dead in the UK without lockdowns, 2.2 million
in the US) that initially inspired the lockdowns to Sweden, you would've
gotten ~100,000 dead [1]. Instead we're left with ~5000. The virus turned out
to be 20x less deadly than we thought. Maybe that calls for a change in
tactics?

[1]
[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1.full.pdf)

~~~
thrill
There's a lot of variables in play. It may be 20x less deadly in a specific
scenario, but change that scenario slightly and some other variable may
explode in influence.

------
oxymoron
This article contains a number of factual error and a general lack of insight
in the situation.

First off, it attaches a special significance to the end of June as a turning
point, but Sweden was late in deploying widespread testing of the general
population, so that’s mostly due to the expanded testing around that time. In
Stockholm it is well established that the peak was mid April. Other parts of
Sweden have a different story, with some regions tracking Stockholm in the
progression, while some are still quite early in the curve. For instance, the
southern region of Scania seems to track closer to Denmarks pattern even
though transits were largely shut down in March.

Another error is the claim that the strategy was to achieve herd immunity. The
line has always been that the actions taken should be sustainable in the long
term. As a resident of Stockholm, I can tell you that life here changed
massively in March, and it’s far from a normal summer with all concerts being
cancelled, amusement parks being shut, parades and festivals being cancelled
etc. That said, I’ve seen few people argue that the measures are too draconian
and should be dropped. (There was a major debate about the recommendations
around domestic travel during the summer, which eventually resulted in the
authorities saying that they no longer discouraged it. They released a rather
interesting paper where they modelled the consequences of internal travel.)

In general, I think it’s too early to draw conclusions from comparisons
between countries. The end result will depend on things like the impact of
seasonal forcing on the contagiom, the availability of vaccines, the
willingness of the population in other countries to accept renewed lockdowns,
the feasibility of contact tracing schemes etc. I do however think it’s fair
to say that Sweden failed mainly in protective measures around elderly care,
and that the actions taken made sense in the particularly Swedish case.

------
wyxuan
Title should be: Covid cases decrease in Lockdown-Free Sweden as cases rise in
Europe

Current title doesn't clearly indicate that Sweden has plummeting covid cases

------
cblconfederate
Swedes, who are by default social distancing anyway, should not have seen a
lot of infections in the first place. The abrupt drop in cases id probably due
to schools closing.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Sweden's Health Agency Says Open Schools Did Not Spur Pandemic Spread Among
Children [1]

1\.
[https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/sweden...](https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-07-15/swedens-
health-agency-says-open-schools-did-not-spur-pandemic-spread-among-children)

