In reply to Keegan99 They did close schools - just not primary if I understand. They closed universities and upper schools. I could have that backwards.

In reply to fig96

fig96 said:

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DadHammer said:

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Duncan Idaho said:

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DadHammer said:

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That's only 0.17% of their population.

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Which would be 620,000 people here....just saying. And keep in mind that while they didnt do a government mandated lock down, they did encourage people to stay home and limit travels, so it was more of a soft lock down. They weren't having infection parties at the capital like we did here.

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You can stay at home the rest of us are moving on. The virus is here to stay and you can't hide from it.

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What does that response even have to do with what he said? People want to be so combative here.

The discussion is whether they've done the right thing, and the jury is still definitely out. They also really haven't done anything THAT different than we have, they've just done it generally voluntarily.

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Which is a huge difference from a mental/moral standpoint. Still, making it mandatory that millions lose their jobs while many others get by on a technicality to keep their jobs is just tough to swallow. And I'm one that kept my job and haven't missed a day of work since this.

In reply to Keegan99

Keegan99 said:

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UTExan said:

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Sweden now looking at over 17,000 projected deaths. Way up.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden

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Looking at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

To get to 17,000 deaths, the Swedes would need over two straight months of 185 deaths, with 185 chosen since it is the most daily deaths they've had to date, and which occurred two weeks ago. The mean daily deaths over the subsequent two week period has been 65.

So where is the growth?

There is no indication that infections or deaths in Sweden are increasing at anything resembling an exponential rate. The active cases curve over the last month is very nearly linear.

Based on the logarithmic curve for deaths it will be a bit of a shock if deaths even reach 10,000.

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A major issue to consider here: Sweden's large immigrant population may account for most of the CV19 because they are lodged in more compact living arrangements as in this article from Reuters:

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It is common in all three countries for multiple generations of Somalis to live, like the Dakhares do, in crowded apartments, making it easier for the virus to spread from one family member to the next. They also tend to work in high-contact jobs healthcare workers, drivers and cleaners, for example with a higher risk for exposure.
Language barriers also are at play, and some have criticized governments in Sweden and Norway for failing to move fast enough in communicating about the virus to immigrant groups.
"By the time information translated to different languages was spread sufficiently, the infection rate among minority groups was already very high," said Linda Noor, a social anthropologist who is managing director of Minotenk, a think tank focused on minority-related politics in Norway. She said a lot of information in Norway was distributed through national health authorities' websites that are unfamiliar to many people in immigrant communities.

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-norway-immigrants/covid-19-takes-unequal-toll-on-immigrants-in-nordic-region-idUSKCN2260XW

Sweden has taken in about 500,000 immigrants since 2015.

In reply to UTExan

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As elsewhere, Swedish COVID-19 deaths are overwhelmingly among the frail elderly and those with serious chronic disease. Over half of Swedish deaths are in nursing homes. Of those who died, 90 percent were over 70 and half were over 86, with just 1 percent younger than 50.

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From the NR article.

In reply to UTExan Do you have data on that for Sweden?

Or are you just making a guess on the ethnic makeup of those professions in Sweden trying to justify your worst-case prediction?

In reply to Keegan99

Keegan99 said:

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Do you have data on that for Sweden?

Or are you just making a guess on the ethnic makeup of those professions in Sweden trying to justify your worst-case prediction?

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The story from Reuters mentioned specifically that immigrants were in occupations such as health care. If you visit any care center, you will find that immigrant workers are in this particular occupation.
Also, this:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2020.1734220

In reply to Zobel I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. We absolutely could have taken essentially the same course as Sweden. Or we could at least learn from it and move that way now.

In reply to GAC06

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We absolutely could have taken essentially the same course as Sweden.

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Indeed, don't we have several states that are even more lax in the rules than is Sweden?

In reply to Keegan99 If I recall, CDC guidance originally was to do just that. But that decision happens locally, and I don't see how in today's political climate that would actually have happened. HISD still would have closed, and all the districts around Houston would have followed.

In reply to Keegan99

Keegan99 said:

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UTExan said:

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Sweden now looking at over 17,000 projected deaths. Way up.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden

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Looking at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

To get to 17,000 deaths, the Swedes would need over two straight months of 185 deaths, with 185 chosen since it is the most daily deaths they've had to date, and which occurred two weeks ago. The mean daily deaths over the subsequent two week period has been 65.

So where is the growth?

There is no indication that infections or deaths in Sweden are increasing at anything resembling an exponential rate. The active cases curve over the last month is very nearly linear.

Based on the logarithmic curve for deaths it will be a bit of a shock if deaths even reach 10,000.

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Why are you limiting the time period to 2 months. The infections could continue for a year or more and the deaths will continue to rack up.

I think Sweden's pop. is about 30 mil and it takes 60% of the pop to get it to reach herd immunity, then 18,000,000 people ultimately will get it (unless a vaccine comes along sooner - doubtful). And if the mortality rate is 0.1% - that's 18,000 people that will die.

The ultimate mortality rate is the probably the biggest unknown. That can swing the numbers pretty significantly. And if there is a therapy that proves to be highly effective it could be reduced.

The US has basically 11 times the population of Sweden, so do those numbers.

Sweden has just over 10 Million people, BTW. 6 million infections at 0.1% IFR would be 6,000-ish fatalities.

In reply to KidDoc

KidDoc said:

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Keegan99 said:

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Sweden placed a big bet on children not only being effectively unfazed by the virus, but also not being transmission vectors.

So far, it seems they were right.

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This is one of the weirdest things about this virus. The lack of it's effect on children PLUS it seems like children are not huge vectors. Both are very surprising and counter-intuitive.

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Shouldn't we be exposing healthy kids to covid 19 during the summer so we can have schools open in the fall?

In reply to Keegan99 That's not quite representative of what the article says. It didn't consider voluntary distancing. Their model actually explicitly omitted it. It's like asking a program to simulate x and y and then saying it was wrong for not simulating z.

You could say perhaps it was a bad decision to not try to simulate voluntary social distancing. But I don't know how you start to do that to begin with.

The open question is the effect of voluntary distancing.

Edit to clarify. If Sweden did all the same things voluntarily that U.K. did by mandate, we haven't really learned anything except that those actions work to combat the spread.

The article text is as follows:

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But Imperial also applied its UK assumptions to Sweden, warning that its rejection of lockdown was likely to leave the virus rampant with an R of between 3 and 4. That is to say: every person infected would give it to three or four others. Its modelling envisaged Sweden paying a heavy price for its rejection of lockdown, with 40,000 Covid deaths by 1 May and almost 100,000 by June.

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The second link is to this paper, which is not from Imperial, but which DOES take into account Sweden's measures, and which still projects tens of thousands of deaths.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.11.20062133v1.full.pdf

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Our model predicts that, using median infection-fatality-rate estimates, at least 96,000 deaths would occur by 1 July without mitigation. Current policies reduce this number by approximately 15%, while even more aggressive social distancing measures, such as adding household isolation or mandated social distancing can reduce this number by more than 50%.

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The issue with that characterization of the Imperial study is still that Sweden "rejected a lock-down" but still did not do nothing.

I'm a bit confused why the article seemed to conflate different studies, but reading that other study in full now.