> 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.