Scientists (which Tegnell is, effectively) are not meant to be politicians, and them getting into political matters is an excellent way to corrupt science. Although Sweden is not a place where one would look to think of corruption, there are still serious ethical issues with this. This is also a form of experimentation in COVID-19 that is among the riskiest and most dangerous in the world.

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the significant differences in death rates in developed countries for COVID-19 were attributed mostly to whether COVID-19 severely penetrated care homes, mostly designed for the elderly. We know that Sweden did not have proper PPE protection in these care homes to protect their most vulnerable, and it still does not. Sure, the death rates worldwide have been going down, at least in developed countries, because, perhaps we have become smarter at treating it, despite having no effective treatment for it.

Still, it is not prudent to expose people needlessly to a virus that we know is deadly--and we know little about. A lot of these deaths could have been prevented, with relatively little pain, although it takes a lot of sacrifice.

One of the countries I am sovereign to, Croatia, (the other being the USA) has not had any COVID-19 cases for 3 days in a row [1]. You know, a former war-torn Yugoslav country that is up and rising and just became part of the EU in 2013. This kind of stuff is not rocket science. Even war-torn, economically suffering countries can be successful at these sorts of endeavors. It just requires brave political leaders (along with a strong emphasis on public health--which a lot of ex-Yugoslav countries actually have) who can deal with crises (which Croatia has legitimately dealt with before).

[1] https://koronavirus.hr/en

People are quick to forget that the Swedish strategy was everyone's strategy in February. It was (most) other countries that changed strategy from "we must prevent healthcare from being overwhelmed" into "we must eradicate the outbreak at all cost".

It was different to stay on the first strategy, but just because other countries changed doesn't make the first strategy any more an "experiment".

Add to this an existing culture of using face masks and gloves in public (i.e. supplies of those things were already in place), and you've got a very different scenario compared to most of Europe for example.

Hard to make the argument that testing is of primary importance considering Japan did almost none and still didn't see a significant outbreak.

This is a big one. Around these parts wearing a mask means people assume you're sick or immunocompromised.

Obviously Sweden couldn’t scale to the same testing as e.g South Korea, but few countries could. Perhaps one lesson would be that if you can’t scale testing then locking down until you can would be good?

Japan did 90%+ mask coverage.

I was surprised to learn that the aggressive approach has become more the rule than the exception. This is great for the world but sad for my country.

Here in the US we are still taking the weaker “we must prevent healthcare from being overwhelmed” strategy. Having (mostly) succeeded at that (so far) we’re already looking to ease the lockdowns.

I tabbed through the statistics [1] and confirmed that much of the world is indeed on the path of “we must eradicate the outbreak at all cost”. Whereas in America the total cases are still climbing linearly (new cases roughly constant) in many other countries the total cases have decelerated (new cases decreasing or even approaching zero).

[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/26/covid-19-tracker/

Hospitalizations and deaths are much better metrics.

Sweden probably finds about the same or more infected people every day now, than at their peak of deaths/hospitalizations (which lags the peak of infections!) in the last week of April, for example.

Simply not true. Taiwan (with a population 2.5 times that of Sweden) adopted a strict containment and suppression policy as soon as they detected the epidemic risk, which was at the end of December 2019. And of course China had moved to containment and suppression by then too.

have you been paying attention to what's going on? I would not describe it as "relatively little pain"...

Staying at home for a couple of weeks is easy least in comparison. All it takes is a dash of political leadership.

So yeah, op is right on the money.

https://www.wbal.com/article/449453/124/state-opens-temporar...

It's far better to store piles of dead bodies on ice than leaving them piling up on morgues or crematoriums, as it was shown in Brazil or Mexico.

The only thing that ice rink morgues represent is the extent of the death wave, and how a nation has to cope with the sudden increase in mortality.

I'd call 3 weeks "only a couple of weeks".

Here in Norway we haven't had one, if by that you mean being forbidden to leave our houses except for essential purposes.

We have been free to travel, to meet people, to go to bars, restaurants, cafés. My grown children have not had a single day off work.

The only people forbidden from leaving home are those who have tested positive for COVID-19.

Of course a lot of shops, bars, cafés, etc. have closed but that was for a combination of lack of customers and a desire to protect their staff together with, in some case,an inability or unwillingness to comply with distancing rules.

Schools were closed but that was a bit of an overreaction on the part of the government and against the advice of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, https://www.fhi.no/en/ and they have been open again now for several weeks.

Here a page in English summarizing the rules: https://www.fhi.no/en/op/novel-coronavirus-facts-advice/fact...

Effective leadership early on is effective.

Under the theory that NZ citizens can’t go anywhere else, supposedly if all the people who would have gone overseas instead travel internally then it should recover up to 60%. If Australia can get thier shit together then it’s apparently 95%.

I guess it’s just a question of priorities. Most of the NZ population is feeling pretty good about life being normal and are willing to pitch the tourism sector into the fire to that end.

But hopefully we have bought time to make measured decisions, and now we do have options, including skulking away until there's a vaccine available.

Im fascinated to see how it plays out myself.

The plan for the next couple of months at least seems to be to require a 2-3 week quarantine for people coming into the country, which is definitely going to cause continued harm to the tourism sector.

I think the hope from the govt right now is that a vaccine becomes an option sooner rather than later...there is no guarantee of that even being possible of course, but its looking more hopeful as the data comes in.

OTOH within the country itself, as of right now, we are one of the least-shutdown economies in the world and have lost only 21 people to covid, which is a pretty solid place to be.

The longer we can keep covid out, the better the virus is understood and the more effective the treatments that are available, even without a vaccine.

It seems likely to be true that eventually we will need to shrug and let the virus have its way with our people, with or without a vaccine, but everyone with vulnerable dependents is grateful to have had more time with them, and already the treatment outcomes for covid have improved from 6 weeks ago.

Lives sacrificed by opening up too soon (or never closing) would be lost forever, while the economy is driven by people, and people are endlessly resilient, so the economy will recover.

Was it worth it for the lives saved? Clearly opinions are going to vary, but Im comfortable with the choices our govt has made so far.

We are already admitting film crews for certain TV and film productions, with a 14-day quarantine.

If we can sustain being COVID-free, that makes NZ pretty attractive for those activities.

I don't think we'll be admitting tourists unconditionally until we have vaccinated most of our population. But our tourism sector will probably limp along OK with outbound tourism switching to domestic. Also we will hopefully be opening a "travel bubble" with other countries that have beaten COVID19, probably Australia first.

Political leadership matters.

We had 1.5 months of partly lockdown. We were blocked from leaving our cities of residence except for work for two weekends. We closed pretty much everything until a few weeks ago.

And with all that, we had almost 1/2 the deaths of Sweden. Not 5% or 10%, but close to half (3800 vs 1450).

And we 'reopened' the country and right now have more cases per day (yesterday 350) as at the beginning when gov. decided to shut down everything. (State of emergency was declared on 18 of March where our cases were around 200 per day)

No, we did not.

Portugal's state of emergency consisted of imposing the duty of home confinement only to risk cohorts, comprised of sick and actively monitored patients. Everyone else was only subjected to "social duty to home confinement" and was obligated to wear protective masks on public transportation, customer service, and services open to the public.

> We closed pretty much everything until a few weeks ago.

That assertion is somewhere between disingenuous and confused. There was a healthy general attitude towards the civic duty of home confinement, but it was primary self-imposed restrictions. The Portuguese government ceased to impose general confinement restrictions after they revised the first declaration of state of emergency, which were downgraded to mandatory facemasks in public transportation and public services.

The state of Emergency (we had 3) lasted 6 weeks and during this time, bars, restaurants, car stands and a bunch of other stores were closed. They closed lojas do cidadao (?still many aren't open) and essential services were by appointment only.

Not by the owners but by the government: https://www.jornaldenegocios.pt/economia/coronavirus/detalhe...

'Que estabelecimentos encerram obrigatoriamente? Todos os estabelecimentos que não prestem serviços essenciais ou forneçam bens de primeira necessidade são obrigados a fechar portas. O diploma do Governo é exaustivo na lista que inclui: todos os locais de atividades de lazer e diversão, como bares, discotecas, zoos ou parques de diversões; locais de atividades culturais, como auditórios, cinemas, teatros, bibliotecas, galerias ou praças de touros; locais de atividades desportivas, como campos de futebol, courts de ténis, ringues de patinagem ou ginásios e academias; termas, casinos, salões de jogos, bares, esplanadas e restauração em geral.'

Layoff (furlough for other countries) was used to around one million people. 10% of the population and about 25% of the active population, and you are telling me that people just decided to stay at home and gov didn't ordered anything?

Basically, if it didn't sell food or medicine, chances it was closed, and not by choice. There were 117 people arrested and 311 stores/businesses where police/asa forcibly closed them: https://www.cmjornal.pt/portugal/detalhe/estado-de-emergenci...

Please, I don't know where the fuck you lived during the State of Emergency, but saying it was just 'social duty to home confinement' is a joke to what really happened here. The economic and social damage done was huge.

That's probably the bigger problem for your country than the absolute number of deaths: the "reopening" happened too early compared to some countries of equivalent size where the cases per day became lower before the "reopening."

Even after the "reopening" the war is not won.

Also, looking at the graphs of daily cases and comparing it with some other European countries, the measures were obviously less effective than in these other countries. Given that 10 million of people are involved, it's much more nuanced than "we had X for Y days."

Edit: To answer: "I don't know how we got the good press": deaths per million: Portugal: 142, Switzerland: 222, Sweden: 450, Spain: 580. It's easy to see that's how Portugal looks obviously better, statically. What I point to with "probably the bigger problem" (that it's not over) is that e.g. new daily cases in Switzerland are now 19, v.s. Portugal's 350.

I'll also edit ;):

Austria(75.73), Slovenia(52.72) Estonia(52.24) Lithuania(25.4) Croatia(25.19)

So it doesn't seem so good, but for some reason, we are called a miracle: https://bylinetimes.com/2020/04/27/the-coronavirus-crisis-th...

(first result in google, there are more)

Seems either people had very low expectations of Portugal, or are just using the Portugal is almost the same as Spain idea and expected the same results (even though we were affected later, if we were first, we would probably see something similar)

But I do think it is dangerous to try to play the two roles at the same time. Science demands an honesty that few politicians can afford, which the current discussion about Anders Tegnell so well demonstrates.

This varies across cultures though. Scandinavian countries have a bit of a different approach to many thing, the most recent example I stumbled across was Danish zoos honestly and explicitly saying that they can't keep all the animals, that they will kill some, and that they will feed them to e.g. the lions. They even make it a public thing where somebody will chop up the animal and explain stuff.

Those things generate outcries - in other countries. We're very used to hide "how the meat is made" from the general population, but that's not necessarily the same in all countries. I find it very refreshing for politicians to not have "a public and a private opinion", and I wish it was more common.

Sweden has a long and revolting involvement of medical experimentation and eugenics on its own citizens, such as unconsented sterilisations, or feeding mental health patients diets designed to induce tooth decay so they could study the teeth rotting in the victims (I will not describe those so afflicted as patients).

In this context, the decision of a prominent Swedish scientist to "go it alone" and experiment on the population who have entrusted themselves to his care is unsurprising as well as tragic.

(And an actual brilliant scientist learns from their results and modifies their hypothesis. He seems to have done very little of either.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipeholm_experiments

In case you haven't noticed, billions still get cavities.

As a Swede I‘m appalled at their handling of the matter, particularly when it comes to protecting the elderly. (Which is to say they didn’t.)

Saying that Tegnell "goes at it alone" is completely misinformed and comparing the situation to eugenics research is just going to show everyone how little you know about this situation. Stop wasting everyones time...

For example the argument that the high death in Sweden would not have been any different had we shut down completely because most deaths happened at old age care where the same people travel around the whole city thanks to state trying to cut down on costs. Tegnell did say that they expected the old age care to take steps to limit this travel when they set up the guidelines but this never happened in Stockholm apparently. I know that in my home-town they compartmentalized the care a lot after the outbreak, every person only sees the same two to three faces and the personell groups don't meet any more. And the death rate is no different to last years average in our state.

We do not experiment on people without asking for permission in Sweden. We do expect people to treat us with some respect.

Eugenics went on for considerably longer. Eg. compulsory sterilization, sterilization without consent, persisted well until 1970s.

It was similar with lobotomy (carried out until mid- or late 1960s, I think).

See https://www.umu.se/en/news/swedish-big-brother-behind-loboto... for an interesting take on the Swedish case:

> Sweden was more accepting than the US in its attitude toward lobotomy in the 1940s and 1950s. A possible explanation for this may be the strength of paternalism in Sweden, that is, a greater tendency to make decisions on behalf of the patient in Swedish medical culture than in its American counterpart. This is according to Kenneth Ögren from Umeå University in Sweden.

Whether a legitimate parallel can be drawn with their approach regarding the pandemics, is another matter I'm not really commenting on here.

This may not be the best comparison to make if you want to argue that everything is fine now.

Those over retirement age by definition can choose where to go during the day.

Quite a lot of this argument boils down to political philosophy: Personal Choice vs Nanny Knows Best.

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-mortality-over-time-o...

You somehow left out the fact that people can't see where the virus is or who carries it. Thus if you are, say, in a retirement home operated and visited freely by those you claim that have nothing to worry about then what chance do they have to avoid being exposed to the virus?

And all it takes is one exposure to get the virus to spread like wildfire within the retirement home. That's been observed in Italy and Spain.

The problem is even more serious if elderly live with family.

Additionally, you also left out the fact that your reference shows signifixant excess deaths in the cohort 46-64yo representing an increase of about 18% wrt the baseline.

Similarly the denominator game won't save you because I can do maths. Do the numbers again with the population total in that age range.

Then compare that to the chance of dying on the operating table if you opt to have surgery.

Then remember I'm in that age range and have assessed the risk.

Now tell me again why you think you have the right to tell me what I can and can't do?

I'd love to hear some of them.

> Now tell me again why you think you have the right to tell me what I can and can't do?

Same reason it's Ok to tell you can't drive drunk.

Care to tell us about these easy solutions?

Framing the argument in this way is the source of the problem every time this comes up.

Solutions don't adhere to philosophies. Some situations call us to work together, and sometimes the best way to work together is for everybody to cede a little control and defer to somebody doing the coordination.

That's all there is too it. We should agree to let everyone live their lives without unnecessary limits, but we should also agree that when collective action is needed, we are also prepared to accept that and to make it work.

Unless they are not able to. Or require basic resources. Or require medical attention they can't get at home. Or...

It's not a great generalisation.

Have you asked them whether they want to spend the few years and months they have left caged? If you did you may be surprised by the answer.

This virus doesn't just kill or leave people unscathed, it also leaves people with long term damage or knocks them out for a couple of weeks. Sitting in bed for weeks is not appealing at all to most people.

That is merely a possibility and if it's actually the case, it happens rarely.

> Sitting in bed for weeks is not appealing at all to most people.

It beats social distancing for months.

So far we've only seen individual reports about lung damage (including potentially life long) in e.g. divers (including for non-stationary disease courses!), reports about kidney damage, mid-term loss of smell, etc.

We're going to get a clear picture in years, so it's irresponsible to say it happens rarely.

The people for which social distancing is a major problem will also have a huge issue with becoming bedridden for weeks on end. Think single-income earners, single parents, etc. Even for a couple with kids this could be a nightmare with one partner taking care of the kids and their sick significant other. Remember that the sick person has to isolate too!

https://i.imgur.com/oiybcsx.png

Sweden will easily pass France in the next few days, yet new infections are now 500% greater than those of France.

Again, please keep in mind this is a per capita chart.

For this reason alone, we are unlikely to know the effectiveness of Sweden's herd immunity for months if not years.

We don't know. Covid19 leaves some people with long-term, perhaps permanent damage. You might lose working-age tax-paying people from workforce, having to pay them disability allowance, and this might offset part or all of your savings in pensions.

The epidemic is already over in Sweden:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#De...

(more up to date graph: https://lockdownsceptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG_...)

Yet a much lower level of infected population than conventionally understood has been reached. The models that assume the virus will continue to grow until 60%-70% have been infected are therefore wrong, reality itself is proving that.

There are now a whole lot of theories being explored as to why this is.

[edit: someone complained about the original graph link not matching worldometers. It's worldometers that's wrong so I replaced it with a Wikipedia link, which sources its data direct from Swedish health authorities. I left the lockdownsceptics link because it's a bit fresher]

Sweden (or any other country to be honest) is nowhere near herd immunity, which kicks in at 60% (though some studies seem to have pointed to a lower number around 45%/47% something like that, anyway), Stockholm I think is around 10%, maybe 15%

And even when you reach 60%, there's still an infection inertia

I think it's fine for Sweden to have tried their approach, at these times, there are no real right or wrong answers, and Sweden's population probably is a little more sensible than most other countries.

Other than geometric tidiness I see no point in your comment.

In fact, it ignores the denial of service impact that an epidemic has on a national health service, and plays down how it advocates for a population culling.

Perhaps it's time to relearn the basic principles and merits of "flattening the curve", not to mention the benefits of gaining some time until a vaccine is developed.

There are systematic statistics on overall excess deaths which will include people whose deaths are a short term response to lockdown, so we can pretty conclusively say that lockdowns reduced short term excess deaths. They don't account for future excess deaths due to situations like cancelled operations you mentioned or different responses to a second wave, but they don't account for future deaths of COVID survivors where cardiac and lung damage caused by the disease is a comorbidity either.

As a more straightforward example, it's simpler to compare countries with closed pandemics - say Iceland or New Zealand. Iceland has much higher deaths per capita, but they didn't lock down nearly as hard (groups limited to 10, schools open for kids below age 10, etc.). If you do the math, Iceland lost about 120 extra years of life, or something like ~3 hours per person. Is depriving everyone of additional liberties for a month worth increasing life expectancy by 3 hours?

The case for France vs. Sweden is a bit more complex, since Sweden, even though it isn't locked down, will be "unsafe" for large numbers of people longer. The raw math and projection models suggests Sweden will lose an extra 1-2 days of life per person, but more analysis is needed to really understand benefits and costs.

The problem with "extra years of life" metrics is that they artificially play down the death wave on older segments of the population, as if those dying from covid19 who happen to be older than 40yo should not matter to society.

The consequences of this nonsensical pick of statistics indicators is that a death wave of thousands of people per day that happens to hit harder on the > 40yo segment is watered down with "all this just to gain 3 hours of life" nonsense, as if all the coffins were only piling up because instead of being delivered on scheduled they needed to be delivered 3 hours earlier.

It does seem to me that a more just system would consider "time lost" as a metric since surely it can't be binary.

You're the one trying to quantify the value of life.

To me, my parents and grandparents are more important than your 1yo son/daughter, so YMMV.

Still, you're missing the whole point. The point is that it makes absolutely no sense to downplay an epidemic just because it hits hardest on those suffering from pre-existing medical conditions or being over 40. The coffins piling up on makeshift morgues make it quite obvious that the real effect of the death wave is not anticipating death by a couple of hours, and it matters nothing if those doing the dying are sick, old, or disabled.

You are bringing out facts such as "coffins are piling up" etc, this fact could be true if in one morgue in two places in the world there were coffins piling up. Maybe these morgues can only handle 5 deaths at once and now there's 5 more for each?

You need to quantify things to understand how bad they are. Otherwise these statements are meaningless.

You are essentially quantifying - any statement you do you is actually quantifying. For instance if you bring out the argument about coffins piling you seem to be considering potentially 10 deaths (which could cause coffins piling) to be the same as the whole world population dying.

I'm stating the exact opposite: that crudely abusing statistics to pretend that people over 40 don't count for nothing because they will die in a few years is abhorrent, and downplays the real impact of the whole covid death wave.

And otherwise, assume there is a fire and you are in the middle of a corridor. On one end there is your mother, on the other there is some 1 year old you don't know in any way. Which would you rush to save first? I know I would rush to save my mother before the 1 year old.

Wrong, the implications is that it makes absolutely no sense to state that society should just let old people die simply because you're so self-centered that you even fail to register the devastating effect of an epidemic just because you believe it doesn't affect you personally.

According to that logic you should have all 7+ billion people working that whole week to keep this person alive.

Would the man-hours spent saving that person have to be exactly the same as saving someone who has further life expectancy of 70 years?

> You're pretending that the economic dislocations are do to measures to combate the virus instead of the virus killing people. Countries that acted swiftly and forcefully are returning to normal right now. While countries that are handling the way you want are seeing no end to this. Meaning you are 180 degrees wrong, your way kills people from the virus. You way kills people via extended economic dislocation.

1. I haven't made a choice on what is the best option.

2. There's no "my way", all I'm saying that these aspects should be considered and math should be ran and it is possible that another option could be better, a combination of some options etc. And in order to determine what is the best way should be using calculations.

3. It should also be discussed how to do these calculations. Should we consider death as a binary or should we consider "time left", "quality time left". How do we calculate loss of life, time, resources that stems from people unable to be productive etc, because certainly there are consequences to that.

4. I'm trying to prove that this should not be binary and there should be a line drawn somewhere considering all the pros and cons from the both sides, assigning weights to those and trying to predict what is best option from that.

These discussions should still be held even if it's not about coronavirus, but other similar decisions as well.

So once again is that choice also appropriate if 7+ bln people have to spend 3 months working in order to save your dad? Obviously a lot of other people die because if they have to work 3 months saving your father it means the doctors are not saving other people, we won't have food etc.

I'm trying to show that there must be a line drawn somewhere and it can't be binary.

This analysis is flawed, because it compares the entire cost to only parts of the gain. Economic depression because no-one dares to go outside of fear for their lives, has for instance negative value too.

There's a lot of math and viewpoints that should be considered here. It does not seem to me that proponents of lockdowns are even doing any maths, it seems like they take it for guaranteed that lockdowns are the only choice.

We can’t know this number conclusively until a few years from now. The pandemic is still ongoing and does not have a flat distribution of impact over time.

So all this analysis is based on a false premise.

That "3 hours" mean that you're likely to loose one of the relatives or friends who are in high risk group. Suddenly a month of lockdown is worth to give your loved ones years or even decades.

Not arguing one way or the other, but I most certainly would not call it likely. Germany had more deaths than Iceland per capita and none of my relatives or friends are or know anyone even infected, let alone dead.

In Germany, you’d need to know about 440 people to even know someone who has been confirmed infected, in Iceland still around 200. To know someone who died, you’d need to know 9,661 in Germany and 36,363 in Iceland.

I have a feeling as things open up, more people are going to have my experience.

Edit:

> does it makes it a media hoax

Honestly, you completely lost me there. Did you read some other comment and attributed it to me?

edit2: FWIW, I wear a mask when going to the store despite it being only required inside, one of maybe 5% of people who do that. And that’s in a city of 200k with 0 known active cases.

Personally I'd rather not gamble wether I'd end up on tragedy or statistics side.

Not even close. For example, no one I know has been directly hurt by the coronavirus. And neither has anyone they know, including my friend from Wuhan.

(Why "directly"? I do know someone who had a mental breakdown related to isolation.)

I suspect you don't know the fate of everyone known by everyone you know.

Certain information is significantly more likely than average to be broadcast. Do I know what those people are doing? Do I have any idea who they are? No.

But I do know they haven't been hurt by the coronavirus.

Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually, it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl. Sure, you have to impose some restrictions in order not to overload hospitals and whatnot, but anything beyond that is just extending the suffering (both making living harder and ensuring it will go on for a longer duration), is it not?

I would also add that delaying the spread also contributes to making it progressively harder to get the disease to spread.

France has already lifted many of their lockdown restrictions.

> Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually,

That's a big assumption, and not necessarily correct.

First, we won't all get it - herd immunity means infection rates max out at something like 60% to 90% of the population. I understand this maximum is to some extent a function of how fast your infection rates rise due to a sort of momentum effect.

Second, we may be able to suppress maximum infections indefinitely (or until we get a vaccine or treatment) with tracing, local lockdowns and so on. It's not clear if this is an effective long-term strategy, and is disputed by some epidemiologists, but seems to be the leading preferred strategy by most experts.

> it makes little sense to adopt strong restrictive measures on personal liberty to slow the spread down to a crawl

The problem is that you can't really adopt half measures. That's linear thinking, and it's an exponential curve. You either keep the reproduction rate above 1 or below 1. Above 1 you get an accelerating increase and eventually overwhelmed hospitals. Below 1 your infection rates start halving.

Luckily, the measures required for keeping R<1 don't seem to be too intolerable. Spain, Italy, France etc. have managed to squash their epidemics and are getting close to having something like normal society back.

I don't believe Levitt's interpretation. I certainly hope it's true, but I don't think it is. He seems to believe containment measures have no effect, which is implausible to me.

He's just talking about the stats, without giving a biological hypothesis for why infections would top out - that seems to be coming in an upcoming video that hasn't been released yet.

I'm also a bit sceptical about his conclusions. The effects of containment measures aren't really visible in the curve, but e.g. Sweden has a much worse exponent - increasing the chance for more outbreaks will also change the parameters for Levitts curves. I think Germanys curve got very slightly worse recently (shops opening - masks didn't compensate). But I'm not sure if masks did anything at all - there is no clear trend-break in the growth-rate of Germany. Also masks may just keep a local population infectious for a longer time - increasing the risk for visitors.

One biological hypothesis is that covid-19 spreads in local clusters - and has a hard time to move to other places. (e.g. it might need 20 minutes of close-contact talking) The growth-rate is shrinking exponentially (something that Levitt noticed, and can be seen everywhere)- each outbreak locally is trapped and doomed to fizzle, because it is competing with itself - it's just not mobile enough to move to another location before it burns out to maintain a constant R=1.

"Assuming we'll all contract COVID-19 anyway, eventually" is not a reasonable assumption - it was the worst case scenario that the world has avoided and (as it seems) will continue to avoid. It's reasonable to expect that if we solve this issue through a vaccine in 2021, then by that time perhaps 10% of the world's population will have contracted COVID-19 and almost everyone else will not. And the expected difference between Sweden and France is going to be that by the time that we have a solution, one of them will have burned through more of their population for no good reason.

If you start with 10 cases and immediately take action like Taiwan, you have 7 dead. If you start with 10 cases and do nothing like Sweden, you have 4500 dead.

https://i.imgur.com/2iBcWi2.png

It couldnt feed its citizens without an economy.

Also note there's no exponential explosion in the rate of infection in Sweden or anywhere else that is opened its economy like the model for quarantine predicted to flatten the curve.

It's reached a steady-state in all of these places.

But, looking back on it, I'm pretty impressed with the results. Good foresight? Luck? Not really sure, but you can't really argue with results. As time goes on, you can see that it's a bit like surfing those huge 50 foot waves. If you can manage it, everything will be fine. If not, you are crushed. Fingers crossed.

The reality is that nobody really knows why, and there's a long list of potential confounded explanations (https://anond.hatelabo.jp/20200518004632 in Japanese).

It's really shocking to me to see to see that in 2020 humanity is so technically advanced (space probes at the edge of the solar system, chips at 7nm), yet so ignorant (how much do face masks, school closures, or climate differences affect the virus spread?)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-22/did-japan...

Shows how hard this is to actually find out. We have an enormous set of natural experiments and still each result is giving rise to more questions than answers. Are smokers better off? Does malaria drug X really help? How much do masks help? Do kids spread it a lot? Why are men more affected? We have no clue. We probably never will either, for many of the questions!

Changing course in the US is seen as weak and politicians hate to do it, even when it’s the right thing to do.

Also: US media is in a bad place. They have lost their sense of civic responsibility and are blatant fear mongers now. It’s lead to a lot of hysterics in the US.

Sure, it wasn't the apocalypse, and not one serious person claimed it to be. Everyone could see from the IFR that even with the highest estimates it wouldn't kill the human race or anything; but even with the lowest estimates, letting it run amok would kill millions of people.

Big restrictions severely harm the poorest people. Most people are poor. They also damage economy and civil rights. Governments spend like crazy to make up for the damage and few dubious interest groups benefit the most. And politicians enjoy their power trips and erode civil rights. That's a huge toll.

If cemeteries in your place can't keep up, maybe its exceptionally bad there, but this is not the general situation. Also, if somebody dies there, there is no societal need for his body to be put in those cemeteries.

Some relaxing of COVID-19 restrictions can make a lot of sense even if millions of people are going to die as a result. So far 4500 Swedes are dead due to COVID-19 [1]. In recent years, over 50 million people die each year [2]. I'd say the Swedish model is doing fine, except for the most vulnerable group of people - old or sick people. The state response should focus on how to help that group, not to shut down whole country.

Of course, the proper local action depends on the local situation, how bad the outbreak is there, cost/benefit analysis.

[1] https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/coronavirus/2020/06/04/swede...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths

And especially for poor people, being forced to work will mean a much higher chance of catching and spreading the disease, since poor people tend to work directly with other people, and companies rarely invest in protecting "interchangeable" workers.

I do agree that the proper measures may depend on the specifics of the situation. But I think that the spectrum in most of the world should have been between "close down schools and tourism" and "close down everything". "Recommend social distancing" or "hold massive rallies" are not good enough IF you care about human life.

And comparing the number of people who died in Sweden in 2 months to the number who die in the world every year is not very useful. More useful would be to see how many more people died in Sweden compared to normal - just from Covid19, they have ~2000 more deaths/month, compared to a baseline of ~7500 deaths/month in recent years. That is not an insignificant number however you think about it.

You're right for U.S, but not in Sweden or other social democracies where healthcare does not correlate with how much you have. Disease hurts the already sick and the elderly the most, but it does not care about your wallet.

> And especially for poor people, being forced to work will mean a much higher chance of catching and spreading the disease, since poor people tend to work directly with other people, and companies rarely invest in protecting "interchangeable" workers.

That's true, I do not advocate for forcing anybody to work.

> ...not good enough IF you care about human life.

I care, but with some reasonable proportionality. Saving everyone is not possible. Saving almost everyone by hard isolation rules is very expensive and unsustainable. Helping the vulnerable via smart specific restrictions is enough.

> And comparing the number of people who died in Sweden in 2 months to the number who die in the world every year is not very useful. More useful would be to see how many more people died in Sweden compared to normal - just from Covid19

You're right it wasn't a good comparison. I just meant "let's get some perspective".

> More useful would be to see how many more people died in Sweden compared to normal - just from Covid19, they have ~2000 more deaths/month, compared to a baseline of ~7500 deaths/month in recent years. That is not an insignificant number however you think about it.

We are not doing that comparison, because even with tighter restrictions deaths would be increased. We do not know how many people would have been saved if hard U.S. like restrictions were used. I think not many, because most of the deaths happenned in nursing homes where restrictions on public places would have not have much of an effect.

Another substantial fact is that Sweden has greater birth rate than death rate and was projected to increase its population in next years. Their COVID policy will be responsible for curbing that population growth, but no disaster is happenning.

This is my point. When the medical system wasn’t overwhelmed, the restrictions should have been eased, but weren’t in many places. The goal posts were moved dramatically.

The early estimates for the IFR from February turned ouf to be quite accurate.

That estimate has hardly changed.

CDC current estimate is around 0.2% and that's certainly still too high, for various reasons.

Many seroprevalence studies with prevalence >5% also show that the IFR is in the region of 1%.

"The CDC's New 'Best Estimate' Implies a COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rate Below 0.3%"

The only countries worse off than Sweden are significantly poorer - besides Belgium, which seems to be the only country counting correctly (e.g. untested excess deaths in Covid proximity are included).

The most similar countries to Sweden, regarding political structure and wealth, are Denmark and Norway, which have 20% and less than 10% of Swedens death rate, respectively. I'd say it's safe to assume that at least 80% of Swedish deaths could have been avoided with a conventional approach.

> I'd say it's safe to assume that at least 80% of Swedish deaths could have been avoided with a conventional approach.

What do you build that assumption on? Comparison to other countries, thinking "they have 1/4 the deaths and strategy X so if Sweden had strategy X they would have 1/4 the deaths"?

Half of the deaths were in elderly homes, and they could perhaps have been avoided with a different approach. That's the big failure. Old people who don't have care in their homes or live in elderly homes (e.g. retired healthy people) have been in full "lockdown" just like in most other countries.

The same is true for Norway, with Oslo leading the list and also having the most inhabitants. So there is no difference here between the countries.

Testing capacity of >1000 per week locally. No way it can sneak up on us without a large external influx.

Tourism is dead, music festivals are off and the oil industry is in a shambles, but otherwise things are close to normal.

Plenty of routines to limit contagion, lots of care and social distancing, but life goes on with no disease for now.

The most successful countries have already managed to reduce their infection rate to almost zero.

And we don't know exactly why Sweden are hit the way it is. The exact week (February 24th to Mars 1st) where the schools in Stockholm had a winter break was the worse possible time for getting the virus back from Italy and the Alps. E.g. Gothenburg which winter break was two weeks earlier wasn't nearly as badly hit. There are just too many variables to assign any clear causes and effects yet.

But they shut down immediately to stop further spread. In Norway, things were spurred on even faster because a royal testing screwup in one of the biggest hospitals sent 30 people in quarantine. I think that event spooked everyone to take it seriously right away, along with some video conferences with doctors in Lombardy.

Textbook case of reducing the exponent of an exponential function early for massive benefits, if you ask me. That’s a very simple explanation. I don’t think the truth is more fancy than that. Even a week or two is an eternity when the doubling time is 3 days, everyone being unprepared and all.

OTOH, Sweden has pretty similar politics and cultural values compared to Denmark and Norway, which means people would react similar to measures like lockdowns etc. Additionally, health care professionals have a similar social standing (as opposed to Spain, where healthcare workers are often poor, which significantly worsened Spains problems).

I fully agree that we cannot have a complete understanding of the situation until everything is over, BTW! But Norway and Sweden are similar enough that a factor 10 difference in outcome cannot be ignored.

The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already).

Some cities and countries had lots of travel in Week 9 (Week of feb 24) because of holidays. This is e.g. All of Belgium, and the Stockholm region in Sweden.

In Sweden its striking how much better regions that had the holiday just one week later fared (e.g. Sweden's second and third largest cities).

Obviously an initial/seed outbreak of 5000 infected people in a city, compared to an initial outbreak of 50 people will be very different.

It's like commentators on this particular subject assume this diseases was distributed evenly across all countries and the outcomes after that depends on the mitigations applied...

It's also peculiar how some routes didn't incur a lot of spread but others did. E.g. compare the travel from the Italian alps to Scandinavia - tons of people infected. But packed high speed trains between Lombardy and Rome left several times per day during the time when lots were infected but no lockdowns were in place, yet Rome managed with a lot less disease. No one can really explain that yet. Is it something about how the virus spreads that makes planes worse than trains? Is it something about the particular population in Rome having had a Coronavirus cold last season that Lombardy didn't? Who knows.

People coming from Italy (for instance) were not asked to quarantine or even informed that it might be a good idea to self quarantine for two weeks.

Nothing. This initial non-response might alone explain the Stockholm outbreak.

Edit:

someone could have greeted arriving travellers at the airport with a pamphlet. This would have made a huge difference without having to adjust actual policy. Etc, etc. There could have been so many things done which were not done.

But that was absolutely a part of government response. In Romania, isolation of travelers from Italy and China began on February 21st, before any confirmed cases. Travel and meeting restrictions started when we hit 10 total cases. The lockdown measures increased significantly when we hit 100 total cases. This was in the same time that France was holding general elections with a few thousand cases.

I think that was the case everywhere. What didn't work was that it wasn't just Italy (Wuhan was almost no travellers compared to Northern italy that had many thousands in that worst week alone).

Part of the problem was that a) While the travellers were told to isolate, especially if they had symptoms, you had Taxi drivers that took people from the airport who were already sick, caught the disease. It then exploded in the areas where taxi drivers live (where people live in very crowded apartments and often don't speak good swedish etc) and b) that it apparently came from many more places e.g. the US, Spain, France etc already at that time.

In hindsight, there should have been clear messaging that anyone returning from italy and several other locations should isolate, regardless of whether they had symptoms, and that they shouldn't take taxis or public transport when returning from the airport.

That's easier said than done though - if you do that you risk having thousands of sick people carrying skis, sitting at the airport not sure how to get home. That doesn't help either. So in hindsight, authorities should have arranged transports for these people too. But now as you can see it's becoming a pretty complex operation.

Maybe leaving schools, stores and restaurants open is not what's behind the high number of deaths in predominantly Stockholm, but something else, like how the elder care homes are managed. It doesn't seem fair to point to Sweden's high death numbers when Stockholm is a big outlier that skews the average. In most other parts of Sweden the people are doing fine, without lockdown.

That's not a correct way to count and is one of the reasons why comparing "COVID deaths" between countries is meaningless.

It's not valid because:

1. It assumes COVID is the default cause of death even though it's known to be a very mild disease for virtually everyone (0.2% IFR and estimates keep falling, not 100%).

2. It assumes lockdowns don't kill anyone, but that's known to not be true for all kinds of reasons.

The problem with this kind of reasoning is it looks motivated. It's what leads to fiascos like the New York Times publishing a list of 1000 COVID deaths and the 5th person on the list turned out to be a homicide victim. It's how you get reports of a 19 year old dying of COVID and then it turns out he had leukemia. It's how you end up with COVID death counts going down by large amounts in various parts of the world, as we're seeing now, because cases get re-evaluated and discovered to be incorrectly attributed.

And all that ignores the problem of severe co-morbidities in the elderly, who often are claimed to have died of COVID even when they had major pre-existing problems and were about to die anyway.

These things destroy public confidence in disease statistics. The message that COVID death counts don't mean anything hasn't really got out yet but in time it will.

And this nonsense of how Sweden will be better of in a second wave.. why? Because people are already dead?? They are not even done with the first wave, they are litterally #1 in deaths pr capita.

There have been a multitude of reports from other countries on how they fail to account for all deaths, let alone all deaths from the disease, for instance.

The death toll is severe though, no two ways about it, but therea are also a lot of factors to weigh in, such as:

- What could have been done instead? There are several countries with radically different measures that still face high numbers of reported deaths

- Would more severe restrictions have mitigated the most damaging vectors? A lot of the deaths come from elderly homes, for instance, and further lockdowns wouldn't naturally have prevented that (as much as, say, more personnel in elderly care)

- What will the secondary effects be? The effects of Covid-19 go beyond the deaths from the disease itself. How many will die from the economical impact of lesser, or more severe restrictions? For instance.

These are all difficult considerations and near-impossible to answer.

Look here[1] to see that Sweden is the only Nordic country with under-estimated deaths for this period.

Living in Sweden I must say I'm really tired of constantly hearing that other countries are just "cheating" by under-estimating their covid death-rates. The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition.

When the supposed herd-immunity rate was re-calculated by the Swedish-resident statistician Tom Britton to possibly be around 40%[2] the news was widely discussed as though Swedes had won some sort of 'race' - one of my colleagues actually punched the air and said "I knew we'd be first!" (the actual rate of antibodies is around 7-10% in the worst-affected Stockholm area)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

[2] https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/hoppfulla-teo...

Yes, it's somewhat ugly, but I feel that some confirmation bias is unavoidable. At this point, pretty much everybody has experienced substantial downsides of the epidemic (either restricted public life, or increased deaths around them), so it seems only natural to look for data implying that it was all worth it.

That doesn't make them poor at counting death, so long as those deaths do eventually get counted. Everyone knows there are lags in reporting and counting, and everyone should take those lags into account when using the data.

Compare that to Spain, which has recently changed their count method and ended up with a confusing and misleading set of data. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?...

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-u...

The assumption then is that the difference between 1% immunity, 10% immunity or 20% immunity is massive when it comes to how strict any tracing regime, temporary lockdowns and so on need to be during the next outbreak. If that's the case remains to be seen. But if it is, then that's the answer to the "why?".

There is no evidence that the quality of data from Sweden, should be better then anywhere else. Sweden actually has a testing problem, so by design, missdiagnosed could be higher in Sweden. There are very very vey few undocumented people in Scandinavia.

Looking at graphs of excess deaths compared to previous years the graph for Sweden is pretty much identical to most Europen mainlaind countries. It spikes at the same time, and it goes down at about the same rate at the same moment, which is when the governments of some countries went into lockdown, while Sweden just advised social distancing etc. But the effect was pretty much the same as e.g. here in the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Germany, France, Switzerland, etc.

I get this feeling some people really want to rake Sweden over the coals because their policy is supposedly 'killing more people', but the numbers only show this when you compare against direct neighbors, and not at all when you compare to EU mainland countries. Coincidentally, Sweden was one of the first countries that had its first confirmed cases, way before other countries, and way before everyone realised this was going to get bad. So it's very likely that the high number of early infections that went undetected lead to a later spike similar to countries in mainland EU, and, as a result of that, similar statistics in terms of excess deaths. Other nordic countries may have dodged the bullet simply by virtue of a having a little more time before the exponential increase in infections started to get out of hand.

Also (and this seems to be an unpopular opinion around here), maybe we should accept the fact that a certain number of deaths/capita will be inevitable, even for those countries like Norway/Denmark etc, at least in their more densely populated areas. Countries like Netherlands and Sweden had a big spike where many people died in a short time, the vast majority being old (80+ year old) people and people with one or more comorbidities. In the past three weeks, the excess deaths here have been negative compared to other years, and if you look at the area under the graph for total excess deaths for this year so far, it's not that much higher than for the 2018 flu season, which was a much lower spike but it lasted for much longer. It's very likely that over the next months, barring a vaccine, excess deaths in countries that have very few corona fatalities so far will go up and linger higher for a long time.

There was a study posted here recently that showed a very high correlation between the chance of dying from corona now and the 'normal' (ie: before-corona) chance of dying in the next year, through different age groups, health risk factors and some other variables. I think it's fair to say we have to wait for at least one or two years before we can draw any conclusions at all about which countries handled this right and which didn't, or if it even mattered at all. One data point that indicates that maybe there wasn't really a way to prevent all these deaths, is that when you compare countries where the number of hospitalized corona patients spiked similarly before any measures were taken, it seems there is next to no difference in the progression of infections and deaths between countries with ultra-strict lockdown measures and countries that were a little less strict. Things like face masks, closing schools or banning outside activities appear to have had no effect whatsoever.

And yes, some number of deaths is inevitable. That does not mean that every life saved isn't still a life saved. There is not a set quota of deaths that will inevitably happen, and you can choose to have them happen sooner rather than later. Any extra deaths will mostly be on top of the number of unpreventable deaths.

How can you be so certain of that, considering the dynamics of the infection rate are exponential. If you look at the curve for the Netherlands it went from 'nothing serious, its just 1 or 2 hospitalizations a day' to full-blown 'within 10 days all hospitals will be overloaded'-panic literally within one week. Add one 'super-spreader' event into the mix like the soccer match in north Italy and you create a huge spike that is only seen two weeks later when its already too late.

The exact same thing happened in all of the countries that had the longest lead time between 'nothing to see here' and 'this is really bad we have to do something', the shapes of the excess deaths graphs for these countries are all the same, lock-down or no lock-down. Which makes sense because these were the result of not doing anything for weeks because no-one was taking this seriously yet. I think you cannot just point to the numbers now and conclude the policy in Sweden is to blame for their high numbers of deaths. Especially not considering countries have been opening up for ~3 weeks now, moving more towards the model Sweden has had since day one, and so far no effect on infections or hospitalizations have been observed.

This did not happen automatically. This happens because those countries first got infections under control, and put systems in place to keep them under control.

Sadly, the discourse affects the results. When everybody believes a lockdown will work, it does. When about half the population isn't sure about it, it just wastes money.

It would be great to have some countries go all-in in one strategy and others all-in in another, and compare results later -- but when people talk, you end up with lots of countries effectively doing something in the middle, without the advantages of either extreme but essentially all of the costs.

As far as I can see, calling Tegnell a scientist is incorrect. He may have a Ph.D but does decisively not behave scientifically. Instead he should should be called a bureaucrat, which much better describes his behavior.

The catastrophe that is swedish covid-19 strategy, probably started as something like this: http://www.openias.org/swedens-covid19-strategy

They believed Covid-19 was much more infectious and much fewer people were seriously affected, than we now believe.

This was understandable at the time, since it's known that early on in an epidemic only serious cases are noted, and so infectiousness is underestimated and mortality usually overestimated. However, towards march it became definitely clear for most everybody else that covid-19 was fairly serious for many people and the Chinese mortality numbers were not vastly exaggerated.

Because of his belief in an exaggerated infectiousness, Tegnell believed herd immunity would be reached fairly fast. Most of april Tegnell spent on justifying his faulty assumptions, believing herd immunity was to be had in Stockholm in may. To justify this, they used highly dubious modelling and wishful thinking: https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/125408476749626163...

Sweden currently is now sitting in a horrible quagmire. The infection is still uncontrolled and mortality, though below its peak, is still significant. Testing infrastructure has still not been built out, and is still not done on all symptomatic cases. Likely because the infection was seen as having a similar severity to flu, and therefore it was presumed better to just stay home for a few days, than to go and get tested.

Tegnell can not admit having been wrong, because of bureaucratic honor. The population which are, like in all other countries, generally not very scientifically literate or interested, have not quite fully grasped the situation. But judging by the latest polls of confidence in the government, many are starting to suspect something is not quite right.

I fully support a very open debate, and believe all opinions have a right to be heard. But the Swedish situation should not be confused with science. It saddens me to say, that only very few countries have been more passive, bureaucratic and unscientific handling this crisis. And that seems to have cost quite many lives and much suffering for swedes.

This is a strawman!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfN2JWifLCY [1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/folkhalsomyndigheten-drar... [2] https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/3Jyxmq/flockimmunitet-i...

A lot of people have been talking about herd immunity, but FHM has been quite clear from the start that they don’t think herd immunity will make Corona go away.

  A lot of people have been talking about herd immunity, but    
  FHM has been quite clear from the start that they don’t 
  think herd immunity will make Corona go away. 

Here is an interview with Anders Tegnell from 16. march:

https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/6j7vaO/anders-tegnell-h...

Flockimmunitet skulle därmed även kunna bli aktuellt i Sverige.

– Vi har varit lite försiktiga med att använda det ordet för det andas ju lite att man har gett upp och det är ju inte alls det som det är frågan om, säger Anders Tegnell.

– Men grundtanken börjar nog bli mer och mer relevant ju mer vi ser av det här viruset, att det är dit vi behöver komma. Vi kommer inte att få kontroll på det på något annat sätt.

Translation:

Herd immunity could therefore also be relevant for Sweden

- We have been a little careful using that word [herd immunity], as it sounds a little like we have given up, and that's not true at all, says Tegnell.

- But the basic idea becomes more and more relevant the more we see of this virus. We need to reach herd immunity. We are not going to be able to control this virus in any other way.

In Sweden the policy is to mostly let people do what they want (at least when compared to other countries), unless they're in a risk group then they should take some additional measures. You expose people that don't have a big risk of getting seriously ill to a disease, they become immune and the risk group can reduce their additional measures. I would say that's pretty similar to herd immunity even without it being explicitly called that. Right now I think that's an acceptable strategy[0], when this started there maybe were too many unknowns to go down this route?

[0] There are some unstated assumptions here such as how long people would be immune against it, how many people have serious complications afterwards but don't die and so on, so it's definitely debatable.

Both Johan Giesecke (a consultant for Folkhälsomyndigheten, which is Tegnell's workplace) and Anders Tegnell has repeatedly been saying, that modelling suggests, herd immunity will occur in may.

Along with many others, who are working at the Karolinska Institute, that are closely cooperating with Folkhälsomyndigheten, like the the professors Jan Albert, Anders Björkman and Tom Britton.

Here is Johan Giesecke saying it in english: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxITQQ8F3w

He apparently billed Folkhälsomyndigheten (FHM) for some of his interviews, as he thought himself speaking for FHM.

FHM refused to pay after a journalist inquired into it. They said that interviews was not part of Giesecke's responsibilities. He answered that he had discussed the interviews and what he was going to say, with people in FHM, and therefore considered them part of his consultancy contract.

Here is Tegnell saying there will be herd immunity in may, in swedish: https://www.nrk.no/urix/tegnell_-_-det-kan-bli-flokkimmunite...

The situation is a mess, and it feels as though many people are trying to muddle the waters, by spreading confusion.

https://i.imgur.com/Wca1VeY.png

I'm not sure what changed.

I wouldn't worry too much about it.

From another comment below:

Sweden vs Czech Republic (both 10M):

New cases (7 day average): https://i.imgur.com/fciq4Ra.png

Total deaths: https://i.imgur.com/do9Zbvn.png

Can’t reveal my source but one region of England had over 80% complete compliance with government guidelines. That was as of a month ago.

That's an odd thing to say. What is the reason?

In my opinion he _lacks_ charisma. He's just a scientist. Which is good.

They are also basing their strategy on the belief that getting the disease grants immunity, which, according to WHO, there is currently no evidence of.

Perhaps saying that they were "wrong about almost everything" is an exaggeration, but they were certainly wrong about a few very important things.

There strategy is focused on the long-term. Obviously allowing a higher infection rate is going to lead to more deaths initially, but their argument is that eventually everybody everywhere else will be infected (it will keep coming back), in which case the death toll over the long run is the same.

>They are also basing their strategy on the belief that getting the disease grants immunity, which, according to WHO, there is currently no evidence of.

There's no direct evidence of but it's still incredibly unlikely it's not the case, given what we know of how all similar viruses behave.

Of course not having full lockdowns will give a higher Covid death rate (at least initially) than lockdowns.

If you measure that data point and use it to determine "success" then you are saying that a strategy known to be a failure was chosen, and it failed...

> the belief that getting the disease grants immunity, which, according to WHO, there is currently no evidence of.

That was a poor wording from the WHO. The reality is that scientists were always so sure that clearing an infection gives some (at least short term) immunity that it was never in question. It still isn't in question. Any policy can easily take that into consideration. What was (and still is) questioned is how long this immunity works, and how strong the immunity is for those with no or very mild symptoms. Luckily, signs are saying that even that looks positive.

Tegnell seriously believed it would be possible to have the virus spread through Sweden's healthy population, having them build up herd immunity, while not infecting those in risk groups, and ending up with a very low number of fatalities while keeping everything else running.

This man has zero ability for system's thinking and intelligent forecasting. I'm not sure if this is something one would need as a epidemiologist working with virus research. But one surely needs it if one is the leading figure shaping a country's complex response to a new virus.

Thanks for the addition regarding immunity, I forgot that one. Will take myself the freedom to add this to the list.

> Uppskattningen att mellan 8 000 och 20 000 svenskar kan komma att dö av coronaviruset är inte helt orimlig.

https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/tegnell-om-dodstalen-har-sa...

A few days later, in an interview he said that the country's elevated death toll "really came as a surprise to us." https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-sweden-lockdown-...

- Foreseeing the possibility of local transmission in Europe during the early stages despite first cases popping up in Italy (when many informed, interested lay people understood that this will happen with high probability).

- Not recommended any measures to prevent thousands of travelers returning form Italy, Austria and the US from spreading the virus in Sweden in early March.

- Claimed that there won't be any risk for widespread spread in Sweden.

- Over and over again made claims that "the peak of transmission has been reached" once it started in Sweden during March/April - every time incorrect.

- Underestimated the fatality rate (by being overly optimistic and by a assuming that most infected with the virus won't show any symptoms - a totally baseless assumption).

- (Ironically) denied the existence/significance of asymptomatic/presymptomatic transmission (he's still not admitting that it plays a significant role).

- Not foreseen that asymptomatic/asymptomatic transmission will, through workers, bring the virus into elderly care.

- Made multiple, way too optimistic claims about when Stockholm might have reached herd immunity (May, June) - in reality, it's far far away.

- Making assumptions about effective, lasting immunity without the existence of any actual evidence for it (thanks tsimionescu for the addition).

- Ignored/denied the potential of wide-spread usage of masks to reduce transmission (instead, only focusing on its disadvantages "False security", "people not using them correctly")

- Claimed that children don't spread the virus in significant ways (as far as I know, there is no consensus about that).

This is just an excerpt. I'm an armchair epidemiologist (however one who has monitored this situation closely since February), so I am not stating that I got everything from the list above perfectly right. But I am informed enough to understand that he has been mostly wrong, ignorant, or unwilling to take in new information. Which makes me wonder: Why outsource everything to an "expert organization" when they perform so incompetently.

I have no time now to present you with sources for each of the things from this list. You can either do that yourself, conveniently assume that I'm making all this up (which I don't), or present me with anything he did/claimed which actually turned out to be correct. It's harder to find that, than to find things he was wrong about.

Personally I also think he lacks Charisma. But judging from how large parts of the Swedish population at least until recently loved him, some even got themselves tattoos, he clearly seem to have something which captivates the broad masses.

This one personally I couldn't and still can't understand. People saw since at least late April - early May that there was a strong correlation between the use of masks and the number of new cases going down (most visible for me in countries like Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, maybe there were others, too), by that point there was almost no downside asking everyone to wear a mask (at least indoors), so, again, I can't understand why some informed people were against it.

> Claimed that there won't be any risk for widespread spread in Sweden.

This is incorrect. That was a momentary assessment "right now we don't see that risk". That obviously never meant "We can't see that this will ever happen".

> Over and over again made claims that "the peak of transmission has been reached" once it started in Sweden during March/April - every time incorrect.

When was the first time this happened? I think what people found weird was that cases and deaths kept going up afterwards. But that doesn't mean the peak of transmission hasn't happened. The peak of hospitalizations/deaths etc was Apr 24 or thereabout, that means peak of transmission was a couple of weeks before that. When did he first say it?

> (Ironically) denied the existence/significance of asymptomatic/presymptomatic transmission (he's still not admitting that it plays a significant role).

He's arguing that there is still no clear evidence it is. I'm going to give him a pass on that. You might argue that one should act as though it might be because we don't know so better safe than sorry - and I'd agree with that too.

> Made multiple, way too optimistic claims about when Stockholm might have reached herd immunity (May, June) - in reality, it's far far away.

I also found these confusing. But perhaps he looks at different numbers such as the bend in various curves rather than serological numbers (in that case he's very bad att communicating clearly what he means). I'm still optimistic that actual immunity can be much higher than serological tests show, because people turn out to have innate immunity /immunity that isn't IgG/IgA. But yes - he shouldn't be so optimistic in public I think.

> - Claimed that children don't spread the virus in significant ways (as far as I know, there is no consensus about that).

Again, if you look at it as "Don't take any action based on anything that isn't scientifically clear" rather than "Assume worst case and act accordingly". What's becoming clear is that the FHM is extremely afraid of the consequences of mitigations (lockdowns, school closing) on public health. Example: if you count a semester lost at school as 6 months life lost - then you can start to make the numbers add up. I don't know exactly how they value things - but I trust they know what they are doing. Essentially I think that the FHM assign a high value to parameters such as personal freedom, domestic abuse, mental health, future healthcare budget... and a rather low value, to the value of a year of life for people 75 and over. This sounds ethically cynical (especially in e.g. a Catholic worldview). To me it's absolutely natural to set up these equations and balance deaths vs. other things (Not just "the economy" but "public health" in general, including the wellbeing of school children etc).

"You might argue that one should act as though it might be because we don't know so better safe than sorry - and I'd agree with that too." Indeed. I remember taking a flight on March 1 and being on high alert and pretty nervous, because already at that point, I had been reading in non-Swedish media about indications regarding asymptomatic transmission, and I was assuming that local transmission in Europe already was ongoing in various countries. While I didn't catch the virus, in hindsight, it clearly was a correct assumption. I early on internalized that instead of relying on advice from Tegnell and his health agency, I had to rely on my own understanding/sense-making, information consumption, on foreign experts and common sense.

"I don't know exactly how they value things - but I trust they know what they are doing. " For me, it's the opposite: Absolutely zero trust. And I had not even an opinion about him and his agency before Corona (I didn't even know of him). So this is not the result of a long-standing mistrust of Swedish authorities. This is the first time I am so strongly feeling a total lack of trust.

I don't doubt that they are professionals but they are lousy communicators that somehow believe that sounding positive doesn't make them sound incompetent eventually. Sounding pessimistic and then positively surprised would be equally bad (scientifically) but would have much better optics!

"Därför verkar peaken dra ut ytterligare något eller några dygn mer än jag trodde, säger han och tror att kulmen kommer att nås i början på nästa vecka." https://omni.se/anders-tegnell-om-kulmen-jag-var-lite-for-op...

Personally I don't buy this being mostly a communication issue. I see this as an actual inability in intelligent, complex, system's thinking. In his brain, there is no large "simulation" of a global pandemic. There is a very small perspective, focusing only on Sweden, and only on the here and now, and the evidence that already has been produced. With this, one is doomed to be always behind, to ignore a lot of valuable knowledge, always being "too optimistic", and accumulating fatalities along the way. Obviously, his team doesn't seem to have contributed with a lot more either (or they have been ignored by him, who knows how the internal dynamics are)

He might be a scientist. But there are good scientists. And there are bad ones. Right?

But I would add that if you take a risky decision in a scenario where the potential downside is mountains of corpses on the streets (or a Lombardy scenario), and then it turns out not to happen, you might have not made the objectively right decision. In hindsight, you got lucky, so it was OK; but maybe confronted with the same situation again you should choose differently. (I guess Tegnell would argue that he had reasons to be confident that Sweden wouldn't become Italy, and that it wasn't just a matter of blind guessing.)

I get the impression social media is killing off this sort of approach (or maybe it's some other cultural driver). There seems to be a clear trend toward monoculture for everything.

From what I've read about SARS-CoV-2 it doesn't reproduce that way, it mutates relatively slowly in the usual random minor errors fashion.

Because of the slow mutation rate of SARS-CoV-2, we're able to easily trace its spread across the globe by comparing genomes of collected samples. [1]

This of course also bodes well for vaccination efforts, as well as developing robust herd immunity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombinant_virus#Natural_reco...

[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/03/how-coron...

So we will get herd immunity to COVID-19, or all be dead. And that hasn't happened in the last million years.

There is no vaccine yet, so the only sure thing is herd immunity. The US is especially vulnerable because we have so many patients in so many locations - testing and tracing isn't going to work in the US. The horse left the barn on that one.

"The SARS-CoV-2 spike is significantly different from any other Sars that we have studied"

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

Once in a while a flu virus learns to trigger the immune system of those with immunity to flu viruses, and then flu pandemics happen, but that is a rare occurence relatively speaking.

herd immunity is a property of the herd and not any single person, though.

In Sweden, 4,500 people have died. In neighbouring Norway, 237 people died. Even adjusted for population, Sweden has 10x the deaths.

I'm a scientist as well and my math skills say their strategy sucks.

That's a pretty noisy value since sunday reported zero. Because there is no weekend reporting, a 7 day average is better. That average is around 45.

>Norway, meanwhile, hasn't had a single death in 9 days

But Norway has lockdown ? of course its a trade off

No it doesn't. We have prohibitions on large gatherings but private individuals may come and go as they please, visit each other's houses, etc.

Sweden is not the highest in Europe, per capita, it’s fifth [0]. So it’s pretty bad out of 31 countries but better than Belgium.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...