Japan fits. Some cities are more restricted, but even here personal freedom remains. The emphasis is for people to choose to do the right thing.

Various European countries. Sweden comes to mind.

Sweden has more deaths per capita from coronavirus than the US, has an exponentially increasing death rate (i.e. they haven't turned the corner yet), and a very high case fatality rate of 9.4% indicating that they're severely under-testing. This is not what a successful disease prevention strategy looks like.

Sweden's deaths per capita is neck and neck with the United States and following approximately the same trajectory with no lockdown. It's neither appreciably better nor appreciably worse.

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

The US, like the UK, did a terrible job early on when containment was most critical. Several states are in lockdown now but arguably, the reason for our awful current new cases/death rate is due to the resistance to taking action in February when it first hit. There are also many places in the US that are not in lockdown. From another comment: “Approximately 44 of 50 states have lower per capita death rates than Sweden.“ The US cannot be compared directly to Sweden because it doesn’t have a single policy like Sweden. It’s also worth noting that Sweden has taken some lockdown measures ie your comment about “no lockdown” isn’t accurate. Finally, it’s early days and time will tell. The UK changed their policy because there is no credible evidence that herd immunity is effective. I believe Sweden will as well once the disease spirals out of control. And hopefully less people will die as a result. Unfortunately, there will also be the insufferable few that claim we could have survived without being cautious because you can’t prove that those measures were responsible for saving lives. Don’t be that person.

> the reason for our awful current new cases/death rate is due to the resistance to taking action in February when it first hit.

The reason is actually NYC, specifically Cuomo and DiBlasio passing the buck back and forth and doing nothing. If you remove just NYC, the rest of the country is for the most part doing a lot better than Europe.

It's even worse than that, de Blasio was basically in denial and wasn't doing anything, even through mid-March when cases were exponentially skyrocketing here. It took all the heads of his public health department threatening to resign for him to actually start doing things, and the idiot even went to his gym on the last day that gyms were even open.

Both he and Cuomo took way too late to act, and now we're all suffering for it. Cuomo has since at least gotten better, but de Blasio has been terrible throughout.

Sweden has by far the highest number of cases/deaths with respect to neighboring countries. Finland has 1/10th of the number of deaths per capita [0]. They are also faring much worse than Denmark and Norway (in terms of both cases and deaths) where much stricter measures are enforced.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/04/14/sweden-22...

Why limited to neighboring countries though?

The fact is Sweden has no full quarantine and they have less infection rates and less fatalities per capita than many countries with full quarantine.

It's clear that full quarantine may not be effective.

Full quarantine is effective, almost tautologically so. If the virus is still increasing exponentially then whatever quarantine measures you do have in place simply aren't full enough yet. At the extreme end of a full quarantine, imagine everyone is prohibited from leaving their homes for any reason, and once a week someone in a fully sealed bunny suit comes by to drop off food for the week. That's a pretty darn full quarantine, and you better believe it'd be effective.

Fortunately, we don't need to go to such extreme measures to get the replication rate below 1, but my point is, that extreme measures absolutely do work. The virus isn't magic; it needs to spread through relatively close personal contact. If you eliminate personal contact and sharing of spaces entirely, it cannot spread at all.

Sure it's effective.

But is it more effective than simple washing hands and social distancing?

I think Sweden is proving that it's not.

Additionally short of what you're proposing...full total lockdown...the virus isn't going anywhere...it will be in society when we emerge from quarantine immunologically naeive ready for another wave of Corona.

You have to compare states with comparable population density, cultural norms and roughly comparable initial cases. Climate plays a huge role in how much people engage in potential infection prone activities. E.g. like being outside in parks, beaches.

Uk is on full quarantine. There are no cultural norms because there's no culture there at the moment.

It should have less than Sweden if quarantine is effective.

The question is: how many infections happened before the quarantine was established? In UK the quarantine was started way to late. That the UK has in common with Italy, Spain and France. But in all these countries, a massive infection rate has been drastically reduced by the quarantine.

In Sweden, there seem to have been only very few initial cases and the virus seems to be slow to spread there - it probably helps that Sweden is over 80% larger than the UK and has only 1/6 of the population. Also, at this time of the year it is much colder than the UK, less reason to be outside in big groups.

If you check the infection graphs, in the UK the quarantine finally seems to have an impact on the infection numbers, which stopped growing a while ago. Sweden still seems to have growing infection numbers.

It's still SPREADING at a more rapid rate in U.K. than Sweden on full quarantine.