Re:Anders Tegnell defends Sweden's virus approach
by alkonaut on Friday June 05, 2020 @06:13AM
(#23426883)
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.
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/