Because countries in Asia did manage to arrest the outbreak, so that was the standard from then on once we knew it was possible.

Their success is, I think, highly correlated to their mass testing campaigns. South Korea had drive-through testing facilities up within 48 hours of the outbreak, so they knew exactly how the virus spread and who to quarantine or not.

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.

Masks seem significantly more important than tests.

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

> 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.

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

Japan, South Korea managed the outbreak by testing/tracing and no lockdowns. Exactly.

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 definitely did not do test and trace.

Japan did 90%+ mask coverage.

why could they not scale testing?

> 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”.

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/

Confirmed case numbers is a pretty weak trend metric since it depends more on how many you test than how many are ill. Many countries have their outbreaks shrinking but their testing capacity growing, meaning they might find the same number of cases (or even more) every day, despite there actually being fewer and fewer suck people.

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.

Thank you. Judging by deaths the crisis in the US has eased gradually since end of April.

> People are quick to forget that the Swedish strategy was everyone's strategy in February.

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.