In Stockholm about 20% of the population now have antibodies, despite a lot social distancing. We have plenty of hospital beds ready in the event the number of people with respiratory problems would rise. No one is using face masks and the official consensus is that it doesn't provide enough contamination protection to be currently worthwhile. We keep our gatherings small and avoid crowds or close interactions where possible. Our authorities in control of elderly homes really did screw up in the early parts of the outbreak though, and a lot of elderly people lost their lives because of that. But overall things are moving toward a more normal society each day. I'm far removed from the belief that we need a rushed vaccine to cope with this pandemic. I can't speak for other countries and their strategies though but this is a local correspondence from the ground sort of speak.
You forgot to say that you have basically the same deaths/M as Italy, and these increased drastically in the last part of the outbreak, not in the early part.
The difference is that Italy was completely unprepared while you had all the information needed to mitigate the impact, as your Nordic neighbours did very well.
I did adress it though, but I formatted the post poorly since it was very late. I did acknowledge that in the beginning the authority in charge of elderly homes messed up, badly. But it's unfortunate that this fuck up drags the whole strategy into the ground. I'm very confident that had we simply enforced stricter care in the elderly homes that huge chunk of people would've not died in the beginning and fractions would speak a whole nother story. The strategy is working, unfortunately the media doesn't want it to work. As the other guy said in this thread add up the estimate for T-cell immunity and we're likely approaching 50% immunity.
But sure, all those people in elderly homes got the short end of the stick in the beginning. But please be level headed and don't judge the whole strategy on that.
No, it’s not true that the early part of the pandemic caused the majority of the deaths. All the deaths after the peak are more than all the deaths before the peak, so you can’t say that the huge amount of deaths have been caused early on by the authority in charge of the elderly homes.
There's a huge delay, someone doesn't contract corona and just die. Especially not in a country with good medical care. It's hard to say for sure, if you compare 2019 there were 10.000 elderly who died in elderly homes. This year it was 11.000. I'm not sure how the data was prior to that, but regardless a couple of thousand cases is a lot when the total is 5800.
Deaths percentage in Finland and Norway for the elderly homes was higher than in Sweden as far as I remember. But they have an abysmal number of deaths/M compared to Sweden. So the elderly homes deaths can’t be an important contributing factor in the Swedish total deaths number.
I chuckle a bit when I read "country X was one of the few that dealt with Covid the right way". To me, it's funny to call out the winner when when the "race" has just started.
Come back in 2 years and we'll see which country had the right approach. It wouldn't surprise me it's Sweden.
> Come back in 2 years and we'll see which country had the right approach. It wouldn't surprise me it's Sweden.
This would be very difficult. There are two elements you'd need to be right.
On the one hand the pandemic has to turn out to be unstoppable. No vaccine, no amount of test & trace, it just spreads forever and so Sweden is "lucky" to have already had the worst of it as every country undergoes wave after wave. But all signs so far are quite the contrary.
On the other hand, no improvements to gold standard treatment, even though we've already seen some small improvements those somehow are reversed.
Without that second one, Sweden has excess deaths because it used less-than-great treatments due to inexperience, while other countries get to learn from history when, (in that two extra years) lots of their people supposedly get the virus and need treating.
Sweden's gamble made very little sense when it was made. I will say one thing for Anders, his position is that if you make this gamble, you must stick with it. There is no point taking such a gamble and then chickening out after a week or two as some countries did. That makes sense, but it was a bad gamble.
> Sweden's gamble made very little sense when it was made. I will say one thing for Anders, his position is that if you make this gamble, you must stick with it. There is no point taking such a gamble and then chickening out after a week or two as some countries did. That makes sense, but it was a bad gamble.
There was a huge part of our deaths that were caused by lack of protection and procedures in the elderly homes at the start of the outbreak. This isolated event skews the numbers very much. Looking at the whole picture where we're approaching something around 50% immunity (T-cell plus antibodies). Compare this to nations around us experiencing second and third waves and not getting close to our immunity numbers. But sure, you can look at the numbers as they are, I wouldn't judge you, it's too bad that such an outlier event has such power on the numbers though.
One also have to account for T-cell immunity which is double that of normal anti body immunity. 14.5 percent of Sweden capital Stockholm population had antibodies according to COVID-19 test lab Werlabs. If you take 14.5 + 2x14.5 you get 43.5 percent that have immune system protection from COVID-19 in Stockholm. 43.5 percent is close to when we get herd immunity. In smaller cities in Sweden there is not the same population immunity so it may still spread there up to the herd immunity point. People still can get infected by a spreader if about 43.5 percent have immune system response.
> In Stockholm about 20% of the population now have antibodies, despite a lot social distancing.
Maybe ... it's because of this:
> No one is using face masks and the official consensus is that it doesn't provide enough contamination protection to be currently worthwhile.
All the evidence I've seen is quite clear; masks are effective.
And let's consider that the U.S., seen by many to be the worst handler of this pandemic thus far, is currently only ~8% of the way done. Yet Stockholm has already _blown_ through 33%.
Sweden, on the whole, is at 9.4%; again surpassing the U.S. by a good chunk.
I feel like the point of your comment was to suggest that Stockholm is doing well. The data is clear that they are not. In fact, they are doing quite poorly. I would take a good hard look at anyone in your government not vehemently pushing for mask use.
> I'm far removed from the belief that we need a rushed vaccine to cope with this pandemic.
I cannot for the life of me fathom why the impending death of 60,000 fellow citizens, and 600,000 disabled with chronic illness wouldn't convince someone that a vaccine is needed ASAP.
> All the evidence I've seen is quite clear; masks are effective.
Isn't there a lot of nuance to that, in the sense that it depends on other factors? As far as I understand it, the advisory body in the Netherlands (which sounds like it's in a similar situation to Sweden) does consider masks to be effective, but marginally so, in the sense that compared to social distancing, they are far less effective in combating the spread. And since they can't tell for sure yet to what extent the wearing of masks affects people's adherence to social distancing, they are afraid that mandating masks might be counterproductive if it leads to less distancing.
> I cannot for the life of me fathom why the impending death of 60,000 fellow citizens, and 600,000 disabled with chronic illness wouldn't convince someone that a vaccine is needed ASAP.
I deliberately wrote that a _rushed_ vaccine is not needed. All the side effects need to be carefully considered. Even some vaccines that weren't necessarily rushed proved to have really horrible side effects when deployed to the population at scale.
I'm simply saying Stockholm is probably approaching 50% immunity soon (T-cell + antibody). If you isolate the outlier event that is the very poor treatment at the elderly homes at the start of the outbreak, causing a huge part of our deaths numbers, you get a completely different picture.
It’s not clear you get permanent COVID immunity, just like you don’t get lifelong flu immunity. The Swedish gamble may become a cycle of unneeded deaths.
And people gave you solid evidence that Sewdish numbers are not the result of early elderly outlier events. You should stop claiming that in so many posts when it seems untrue.
There are 7.8 billion people on Earth. A vaccine that saves a few million isn't worth making billions put their lives on hold plus all the collateral damage that causes.
Pandemics of this size in the past destroyed economies as people decided to hide, so you're going to get that damage no matter what. By getting it under control, the damage is minimized as many countries that followed best practices has shown.
Those countries that tried to do what you suggest are the ones with the longest economic downturns.
You should read about pandemics of the past.
And as very solid evidence from experts, the famous IGM economists poll of most of the world's top economists covered this exact question [1], which I'll repeat:
"Abandoning severe lockdowns at a time when the likelihood of a resurgence in infections remains high will lead to greater total economic damage than sustaining the lockdowns to eliminate the resurgence risk"
100% of them selected Strongly Agree (41%) or Agree (39%) or Uncertain (14%), not a single vote on any part of the Disagree spectrum, which is nearly unheard of for a question in economics, and these responses were also rated highly confident. Check other questions and polls to see how rare this strong of a response is.
Shortsighted action ignorant of the history of economics almost always makes things worse.
I'm not comparing anything, just reporting what I'm seeing. I will say I'm glad we have an authority basing their decisions on the well being of the people based on the science we have at hand rather than political clout though.
I'm not sure specifically what you're responding to, but as far as I'm aware Sweden is the only country in the world where there's a specialized authority dealing with this exact kind of situation - rather than letting politicians call the shots based on gut feelings or public opinions. This is the opposite of luck. This authority has the job of distilling scientific evidence into course of action for the greater good of the people - regardless of what the ruling party believes. Look at the second or third wave of outbreaks throughout europe due to politicians calling the shots rather than scientists. Calling this luck is such a foul move and so far removed from the truth that it's quite upsetting.
