
Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus strategy’ - mrfusion
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/swedens-low-positive-test-rate-vindicates-coronavirus-strategy-5nw0k2vd7
======
udev
"Up to now Sweden has recorded 5,838 coronavirus deaths, giving it the fifth-
highest per capita death rate in Europe, [...]"

Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding
microstates (Andorra, San Marino).

It is the 11th worst mortality in the world, again excluding the same two
microstates.

Not sure how one can "vindicate" a strategy that lead to that, unless you
imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to
second wave, and Sweden somehow ends up on the other side of the table, with
11th best in the world.

They tried, props for the courage, but they fucked up.

~~~
rossdavidh
Well, they are better off so far than France, Italy, the U.K., Spain, and
Belgium, which is most of western Europe. So in other words, as good or better
than most of western Europe.

Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the
world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.

~~~
cma
France has 5X the population density of Sweden though, so maybe France did
much better considering that. Sweden has lots of barren arctic area though so
it may not be a fair measure. You'd want to know how many people the average
person interacts with pre COVID or something.

~~~
SahAssar
One of the most populated reigons of sweden (skåne) has one of the lowest per
capita infection rate. Globally (on a country level) there does not seem to be
a strong correlation between density and infection. I think it will take years
to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't and why.

~~~
cma
I'm not sure what explains Skane being so low, but the highest per capita case
county was also the county with the first case. So random seed case event
timings seem to have been more important there: "On 31 January, the first
Swedish case was confirmed in a woman in Jönköping who had travelled to Sweden
from Wuhan, China, on 24 January directly from Wuhan. "

------
vannevar
Well, other than having ten times as many deaths as the other Nordic
countries: [https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-
covid-19-in...](https://www.statista.com/topics/6123/coronavirus-covid-19-in-
the-nordics/)

I feel like lives lost is perhaps the better metric of success.

~~~
controversy
No. Most of Sweden’s deaths were due to poor management at the beginning. They
shoved the elderly into old folks homes with Covid positive patients.

~~~
he0001
They didn’t. Although they didn’t protect the elderly in the beginning, which
is official.

------
Svip
Isn't it a bit early to say that? As I understand it, there is still so much
we don't understand about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19. I am not sure whether the
other strategies were better either, I think it would be a little premature to
vindicate any strategy.

I am merely speculating here, maybe due to the situation, Swedes had generally
been more careful than their neighbours (i.e. Denmark, Norway and Finland),
because their situation remained worse and worsened for longer, and they might
be seeing a downturn in cases a few months later than neighbouring countries.
Again, just speculating, but I also feel vindicating their strategy at this
stage is doing exactly the same.

~~~
nytesky
I think THIS may be the true secret to Swedish strategy, much like NYC -- it
got so bad it really changed the conversation and people are still shell
shocked and caution remains high to maintain social distancing, defer
gathering in groups etc.

If they aren't really getting together much indoors, masks won't be necessary
for now (may need to be outside once winter comes and UV drops precipitously).

------
owenversteeg
Basically, the article is saying that they've achieved herd immunity. Is that
correct? As soon as a month ago I believe the consensus was that they were far
away from it, with the total percentage that have antibodies somewhere around
15%.

They also have significantly more deaths per capita than all but 3 EU
countries (Italy, Spain and Belgium.) That said, I definitely don't think a
country's deaths per capita necessarily indicate doing something totally
wrong. Belgium, for example, has the 2nd worst number of deaths per capita -
literally ten times more than many other EU countries - but they weren't
materially different than their neighbors in their strategy, and indeed seemed
to lock down harder...

~~~
Svip
Belgium is also reporting any potential death linked to COVID-19 as that.
Effectively, almost all excess death in Belgium is reported as COVID-19,
leading to a far higher death per capita reporting from Belgium. Other
countries usually require a proof that it was COVID-19 before reporting it as
such.

~~~
owenversteeg
Right, but there's other evidence that even with that, their situation was
particularly bad. If you go by the excess-death numbers, Belgium is still the
2nd worst in the world. Why them, and not their neighbors?

~~~
raphaelj
Bad luck.

A small country or state has an higher chance of being an outlier. 11M people
live in Belgium, and a lot of +/\- 10M inhabitant regions in larger countries
have an higher death rate (Paris, NYC, Lombardy, Madrid ...).

If you live in a large country, some highly impacted regions will be offset by
less affected regions.

------
JohnTHaller
This is The Times in the UK reporting here, wholly owned by News Corp (aka Fox
News' parent). They're trying to paint the failures of Sweden (5th highest
per-capita death rate in Europe) as a success the same way they do in the US.

------
pedrocr
3x more people died than in places that did the consensus strategy. And they
haven't stopped having more cases either. 4000 more people died than in the
other strategy. It will take a long time before that difference disappears, if
it ever does, and it's not like those extra years of life are something you
can ignore. What exactly has been vindicated?

~~~
orangecat
_it 's not like those extra years of life are something you can ignore_

Quarantining entire populations also has costs you can't ignore.

 _What exactly has been vindicated?_

If the doomsayers were right, Sweden's lack of restrictions should have
produced by far the highest death rates in Europe and probably the world.
Instead they did better than many countries on all possible metrics: deaths,
economic impact, and behavior restrictions.

 _4000 more people died than in the other strategy._

Even if true, that doesn't make it obviously the wrong call. On average,
people who die from COVID would otherwise have lived around 12 years longer,
so that's 48,000 life-years lost. On the other hand, putting 10 million people
under lockdown for three months is 2.5 million life-years. If a lockdown
decreases the average quality of life by even 2%, then that's a higher cost.

~~~
pedrocr
The idea that Sweden had no lockdown measures at all and other places had
draconian lockdowns where the whole population was closed down for three
months is a strawman. They are also near the bottom on all those indicators
you mentioned. Doing better than the US or Brasil is a very low bar for this.
And what we're discussing here isn't that their strategy is "obviously wrong"
it's that it's very definitely not "vindicated".

~~~
elcritch
The vindication - to my mind - is that if broad government enforced lockdowns
were truly effective then Sweden should be an extreme outlier for their
general region, which is Western Europe. They're not. They’re about middle of
the pack there, and as others point out there’s chance involved to a large
degree. Belgium introduced lockdowns but is much worse off than their
bordering neighbors and Western Europe. Sweden has a large immigrant
population which for various reasons have resulted in a lot of worse outbreaks
like say Nothern Italy which had lots of immigrants from China and Wuhan. So
essentially lockdowns don’t seem much more effective than chance in many
measurements.

~~~
pedrocr
Sweden is not middle of the pack. They are in line with the worst death rates
in Europe when their comparable neighbors have the best rates. And they
achieved that while still doing quite a few lockdown measures, just less.

In numbers of cases we've already gone from high to low and back to high again
in direct correlation to the lockdown measures that were taken. We've done
that in multiple places and at different times. I don't see any way to argue
that lockdowns are not more effective than chance. Not even Sweden argues
that, they just think they can manage the extra cases and achieve herd
immunity soon.

~~~
elcritch
According to this Statista data, they’re roughly in the middle for Western
Europe, not precisely but they certainly aren’t ahead of the pack:
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-
deat...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-death-rate-
europe-by-country/)

Just because your bordering countries do better, is a possible indicator there
methods worked better but there’s a lot more confounding variables that would
need to be isolated, as I mention in another comment. For example perhaps the
Nordic countries have similar age distributions (or not). They do have what
seems to about 1/3 more immigrants than the other nordics per capita
([https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-
publikasjoner/_...](https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-
publikasjoner/_attachment/204333?_ts=1497ab86428)). Immigrants aren’t bad,
just this particular virus hits elderly people more severely so having more
elderly living in stratified homes means more elderly exposed.

Certainly stricter and government enforced lockdowns slow down progression
rate of the disease for a while, but other factors also appear to have a
larger cumulative effect. Timing, population composition, age distribution.
It’s more akin to anti-depressants, as in clinical studies of many potential
anti-depressants show they have similar rates of effect as placebos. The
degree of the covid deaths per capita has as much to do with societal,
geographical, and even luck in many countries.

I grant that well executed lockdowns have better success, especially in as in
New Zealand, but they’re more of an anomaly I’d say. Now presuming, France,
Belgium, Spain, Italy weren’t completely incompetent in their governmental
lockdowns then other factors appear to be as big a factor as those policies.
France from the Statista data only has a per capita mortality rate that 25%
larger, which isn’t a large effect given the uncertainty of the data, and
especially for epidemics which generally follow exponential curves (e.g. a
tiny initial difference in starting conditions can lead to large differences
very quickly). Take this (older graph) and it’d difficult to statistically say
which countries have lockdowns or not. Again just including nearest neighbors
isn’t sufficient since other neighboring countries like Germany, Belgium, and
Netherlands have pretty big variations between them as large as Sweden to
Norway. So do say the US and Canada.

I don’t believe the absolute number of COVID-19 cases matters as much given a
virus where 5-80% of cases are mild or asymptotic
([https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-
are-a...](https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-what-proportion-are-
asymptomatic/)). Many serological studies point to 10x the number of cases,
which if so, all the cases numbers are off by an order of magnitude
([https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-
sug...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/antibody-surveys-suggesting-
vast-undercount-coronavirus-infections-may-be-unreliable)). A bit callous
perhaps, but the more cases of sars-cov-2 overall with the same number of
fatalities means the less deadly it is overall. Also, the countries that
had/have stricter lockdowns will likely continue having larger waves of deaths
until their overall numbers look more like Sweden (your point of achieving
herd immunity sooner).

~~~
pedrocr
> According to this Statista data, they’re roughly in the middle for Western
> Europe

I stopped right here. You linked data that shows them 5th of a list of 31
countries, with values that are 5x larger than 2/3 of the list. You linked
that to argue they are "roughly in the middle". At that point facts don't
matter and there's no point in having a discussion.

~~~
elcritch
> I stopped right here. You linked data that shows them 5th of a list of 31
> countries, with values that are 5x larger than 2/3 of the list. You linked
> that to argue they are "roughly in the middle". At that point facts don't
> matter and there's no point in having a discussion.

The facts do matter, though your comment doesn't give my point fair
consideration that I'd expect of a genuine discussion. I provided a link to
raw data for all of Europe which requires a bit of interpretation since
Statista doesn't have a convenient link for Western European. Croatia is not
part of Western Europe by most metrics, so saying they're 5x smaller isn't a
valid criticism.

For sake of completeness, I took data from the first Statista link and a
common list of Western European countries: Luxembourg, Norway, Finland,
Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Ireland, Netherlands, France, Sweden,
Italy, UK, Spain, Belgium. These lists vary of course, and if you were
critiquing my argument that would be the best point, and I would concede that.
For those countries I took the Statista at the time of this post (plus extra
data for Swizterland of 23.57). Using the Excel quartile on these countries
the quartiles are: 1st: 4.95-14.51, 2nd: 14.51-36.03, 3rd: 36.03-57.85, 4th:
57.85-86.4. Sweden at 56.89 falls into the 3rd quartile, though just barely.
When speaking, I consider 2nd and 3rd quartiles to be "middle of the pack" as
a general statement (rather than the median or average). As in if one were
talking of say, student grades, or variations in parts productions I'd give
them a "B" and say they're middle of the pack. Almost in the "A" group, but
not quite. You could say it's close enough that it doesn't matter, but by the
numbers and using quartiles the math would put it there. Personally I'm happy
my eye ball estimation as it'd getting very close to where I'd say Sweden is
in the top of the pack. A valid criticism would be that Belgium appears to be
an outlier and likely counts their numbers differently (w/o Belgium Sweden is
pushed into the bottom of the 4th quartile)), but I have not method to control
for that nor the time to do so unfortunately.

To my overall point, despite being downvoted, I still consider Sweden's policy
not a resulting in complete outlier to be a "win". It's close, but yes, that's
my conclusion. If a vaccine had similar ratios of effectives vs no vaccine
it'd likely not be considered an effective vaccine or deterrent. Unfortunately
I've yet to see good thorough counter-arguments in this or in scientific
arguments. Also, other arguments often don't consider what how policies in
health care are or aren't generally considered effective.

------
vikramkr
Compared to their peers in northern Europe that fared far better, the data
does not suggest vindication. They have 5x the number of cases per capita
compared to countries with similar social/economic/geographic conditions.

~~~
tpmx
Yeah. Norway/Denmark/Finland all did better than us. :(

This is all on the current swedish social democratic government.

------
tpmx
Yeah, the current positive test rate is relatively low because much we already
had 6k deaths (approximately 5x the death rate of our neighbours Norway,
Denmark and Finland per capita, iirc) and loads of infected people at risk for
chronical diseases. So yes - there is some level of herd immunity already
(although mostly in Stockholm/Uppsala/Linköping/Göteborg).

We also do a lot less less tests than our neighbouring countries. Denmark in
particular is really good at getting testing done, which is also a reason why
they are seeing a spike in their results the past few weeks.

------
IdontRememberIt
When crushing the numbers and speaking with relatives in Sweden and
Switzerland, it is striking to see that most of the dead counts are in house
structures for elderly.

When going deeper, there are 2 parameters that seem to correlate with the dead
rates:

1) Sweden is lacking medical employees, therefore the medical education of the
staff in these structures is very low. Also the geographical death
distribution in the country is a big debate because some reasons could be "hot
potato" topic

2) "replacebility" of the elderly: in luxury private structures, the death
rate is very low because they protect the one paying the bill (so all the
procedures are very strict). In public structures, the gov is paying the bill,
and as soon as someone dies, it frees a bed for the next "customer".

My father in law was in a public structure in Sweden and died this year. For
several years we saw horrible things: medical staff/procedures does not care
about deadly "common" viruses.

------
bjornedstrom
Can you people please stop with this unhealthy attention.

You need to understand that Swedish culture is really unhealthy right now and
I ask all of you - I plead to you - as a Swede, to please stop giving Swedish
policy attention so we can, on our own, solve our problems and get back to
some kind of normalcy and humbleness.

What has happened the past 30+ years and has become really problematic the
past 10 years is that Sweden has this extremely unhealthy culture of believing
in Swedish exceptionalism while at the same time craving attention from other
nations, and promoting this belief socially. While the Swedish Corona strategy
is not explicitly designed to be contrarian at the world stage (and therefor
get a lot of attention), the way Swedish mono-culture works is that the people
who implement policy (as well as many citizens) chauvinistically and
subconsciously believe that Sweden is somehow superior to other nations and at
the same time believe that Sweden (as an exceptional country) has something to
teach inferior countries (i.e all other countries).

So where we are right now is that we have this unhealthy feedback loop where
Sweden initially did it's own thing, and as it turned out to be different that
has been a signal to policy makers that Sweden is right. Because Sweden is
exceptional, so if the policy is different from inferior countries (i.e all
other countries), it must be right.

I wish, probably more than anything else, that other countries would just stop
giving Swedish policy makers this attention because then maybe, hopefully, our
politicians can start to do what's right for our citizens instead of what gets
attention and talking points at the world stage.

This is far broader than Corona: Sweden gets way too much attention overall,
because Swedish politicians and government communication employees have nailed
"marketing" more than anything else. They crave this attention and they
manufacture policy to get attention, at the expense of the people who live in
the country. Often under the guise of marketing Sweden as a "moral super
power", superior to other nations.

So please, if you are for example a left leaning American, please don't use
Sweden as a political piece. Don't give our politicians this attention. There
are many other countries that deserve attention but they deserve attention
because they do The Right Thing. Like Denmark. Not like Sweden that fucks
things up but enjoy the attention it gets when doing so, citizens be damned.

------
Yoofie
I found this [1] twitter thread interesting regarding herd immunity.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024](https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1295152579941249024)

------
opwieurposiu
I am happy this worked out for them. Sweden is a great country, I wish them
well.

------
smartbit
[https://archive.is/axCvG](https://archive.is/axCvG) for those who can’t read
the whole article

------
he0001
There is an important point to make here. Sweden doesn’t have any laws where
the government can order a shutdown. So even if they wanted to do a lockdown
they couldn’t. Doctors can order individuals to be quarantined but not the
country as a whole.

~~~
gowld
Are the laws actually clear in many countries? Or is this a matter of the
political culture?

In the US, at least, the government's behavior has only a loose asociation
with "the law"

~~~
he0001
I can’t speak for all countries, but in this situation the Swedish government
have purposely few laws where they can act, in general, against groups of
citizens. Which is a problem with gang related crimes etc. In the case of a
pandemic, the profession that handles it are doctors and their government
body. But they only have the power for individuals and areas. Though even then
the base idea of an individual right is heavier than the right to contain
people. As such example, if an individual escapes from prison, the individual
is not committing any crime. This is based on the idea of individuals freedom
which is the base for all Swedish law.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Sweden left its old and vulnerable people unprotected and thousands of them
died. Now the virus is less deadly because there are fewer people left who are
vulnerable to it.

At the start of the pandemic Anders Tegnel, the architect of Sweden's response
to the virus, did not believe that asymptomatic carriers existed [1], so
Sweden's Public Health Agency instructed health workers in care homes to only
stay at home if they had symptoms and to not wear any PPE at work [2]. So they
carried the virus into the care homes and a hecatomb of old people ensued.

Obviously, now that the most vulnerable are gone, the virus kills many fewer
patients. Swedes don't even need to have immunity to the virus, as such. They
just need to be young and healthy enough to survive it if they get it. Not so
much heard immunity, as herd culling.

For comparison, let's take Greece, where I'm from and which is a country with
a similar population to that of Sweden (about 10 million each). Greece imposed
a draconian lockdown in early March, as soon as the severity of the pandemic
became obvious (we are right next to Italy, after all). The result was about
~2500 infections and ~140 dead by 1st July when the lockdown was lifted [3].
Remember, that's in a country with a similar population as Sweden (but with a
much more touchy-feely, huggy-kissy, family-dinner Mediterrannean culture than
Sweden). Now we've opened our borders and we're doing business (= tourism) as
usual. Infections have also risen, but deaths are still very low, in the
single or low double digits daily, so that about 300 people have died _since
the start of the pandemic_. It's all pretty manageable and our health system
is not overwhelmed.

We had a total lockdown, lost very few people, but we're back in action and
deaths are low despite rising infections. And without letting our old and
vulnerable die in their thousands. We lost 300, Sweden lost 6,000. If Sweden's
approach was vindicated- Greece's approach was vindicated tenfold.

____________

[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x)

 _There is a possibility that asymptomatics might be contagious, and some
recent studies indicate that. But the amount of spread is probably fairly
small compared to people who show symptoms._

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-
swede...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/19/anger-in-sweden-as-
elderly-pay-price-for-coronavirus-strategy)

 _The agency’s advice to those managing and working at nursing homes, like its
policy towards coronavirus in general, has been based on its judgment that the
“spread from those without symptoms is responsible for a very limited share”
of those who get infected._

 _Its advice to the care workers and nurses looking after older people such as
Bondesson’s 69-year-old mother is that they should not wear protective masks
or use other protective equipment unless they are dealing with a resident in
the home they have reason to suspect is infected._

 _Otherwise the central protective measure in place is that staff should stay
home if they detect any symptoms in themselves._

[3] [https://epidemic-stats.com/coronavirus/greece](https://epidemic-
stats.com/coronavirus/greece)

