All not great in Sweden.

[BeElBeeBub]

Has anyone been against preventive measures on this Forum? And that isn't classed as a lockdown as people were free to do what they liked. But if you want to call that a lockdown, well that is a lockdown I would support.



Besides, this response isn't really negative to Sweden, especially as their R0 seems to be below 1 now with hardly any stringent measures. And you are right, their economy has been affected by what their geopartner did, and that is something that Sweden cannot control.

You're right, it would be more sensible to refer to every country's actions as "preventative measures".  "lockdown" is just a colloquial term for the very extreme set of measures involving stay at home orders.



What makes PMs effective or not is the population's compliance with them



If a country had a wonderfully compliant and sensible population, then the only PM would be "Stay more than 2m away from people outside you household at all times.  If you have symptoms isolate your entire household for 14 days"



That's it.  That would cover everything.  Restaurants and pubs would close, gyms would shut down, festivals would be cancelled etc etc and the transmission would fall.



On the other hand, if you had a rowdy population you would need really harsh measures like curfews, permits, mandatory closures of bars etc.



One of the greek islands had a really harsh set of PMs where you had to get authorization via app/txt to leave you house at all.  Authorization was only granted for specific things and fines of E350 were levied for breaking them.  They had to put those measures in place after an outbreak caused by a priest holding secret mass.



Sweden has had fewer mandatory PMs and a lot more advisory PMs but the population seems to have followed them more rigidly (not buggering off to a second home or driving to a castle for an "eye test" to pluck an example at random) so the effect is much greater than the same set of measures in a less conformist setting. Google shows that transit stations have been 30% less busy than normal and work place activity is 25% down which is pretty significant



They also set these measures comparably earlier in their outbreak which makes things easier.



They have still only just managed to keep a lid on the outbreak, In per capita terms they are not far behind the UK, Spain or Italy. Crucially their cases and death rates are not falling at the same rate as other countries (including the UK).  



They currently have the highest new cases per million in Europe.



They have managed to fight the virus to a standstill but not to push it back.  If the UK had followed the same trajectory(*) as Sweden we would have had about 43k deaths instead of the 60k we currently have (of which we know about some 43k).



For example we would have had ban gatherings of more then 500 in early march and over 50 from mid march.



In hindsight the "perfect" response would have been for the UK to adopt slight more restrictions than Sweden but in mid or early February.  At which point the virus would never really be able to get going in the UK, especially if we had boosted up our track and trace and isolate service.  Of course one problem would be that isolating everyone with a fever or cough in early Feb would be very disruptive (but that's where the testing comes in)



I suspect that if the government had tried that it would have been criticized (unfairly) for over reacting, especially as the UK would never have been "hit".



By mid march the window for the UK to adopt "Swedish" style PMs was past.

[B0ycey]

I'm not saying their response was wrong.  I'm saying (as he is) that it was not the perfect response some have painted it as and he believes they should have (in hindsight) locked down harder than they did.  It's important to note the idea that Sweden didn't lock down isn't correct.  They had a less stringent lock down than many but they certainly did restrict things and they did things earlier.



For example they banned gatherings of more than 500 on the 12th of march backed up by up to 6 months in jail. That was the week before the UK allowed Cheltenham races to go ahead.  At the end of March Sweden dropped the limit to 50 where it is today.  Even so their performance has not be good and their economic performance is predicted to be not much better than their neighbors (although some of this can be attributed to their neighbors economies as well)



If you can start the restrictions early enough they don't need to be as harsh as you only need to get a little bit below 1 which is easier when it's very rare.



Conversely if you start too late you not only need to get the R value far below 1 but it's hard to do so because it's very prevalent.

Has anyone been against preventive measures on this Forum? And that isn't classed as a lockdown as people were free to do what they liked. But if you want to call that a lockdown, well that is a lockdown I would support.



Besides, this response isn't really negative to Sweden, especially as their R0 seems to be below 1 now with hardly any stringent measures. And you are right, their economy has been affected by what their geopartner did, and that is something that Sweden cannot control.

[BeElBeeBub]

Do people not read beyond the headline on here? Tengell didn't say their model was wrong. He just said he would have perhaps done somethings differently on hindsight. Because guess what? This is a new virus and people are learning new things everyday. But it is important to note, he still didn't advocate a lockdown.

I'm not saying their response was wrong.  I'm saying (as he is) that it was not the perfect response some have painted it as and he believes they should have (in hindsight) locked down harder than they did.  It's important to note the idea that Sweden didn't lock down isn't correct.  They had a less stringent lock down than many but they certainly did restrict things and they did things earlier.



For example they banned gatherings of more than 500 on the 12th of march backed up by up to 6 months in jail. That was the week before the UK allowed Cheltenham races to go ahead.  At the end of March Sweden dropped the limit to 50 where it is today.  Even so their performance has not be good and their economic performance is predicted to be not much better than their neighbors (although some of this can be attributed to their neighbors economies as well)



If you can start the restrictions early enough they don't need to be as harsh as you only need to get a little bit below 1 which is easier when it's very rare.



Conversely if you start too late you not only need to get the R value far below 1 but it's hard to do so because it's very prevalent.

[B0ycey]

Do people not read beyond the headline on here? Tengell didn't say their model was wrong. He just said he would have perhaps done somethings differently on hindsight. Because guess what? This is a new virus and people are learning new things everyday. But it is important to note, he still didn't advocate a lockdown.

[BeElBeeBub]

From Guardian

Sweden passes France for Covid-19 deaths per capita

The number of deaths per capita from the coronavirus outbreak in Sweden has now surpassed that of France, as the country also recorded a bumper rise in infections due to the release of previously withheld statistics from a Stockholm test lab.



According to the latest update from the public health agency, 74 more people have died from Covid-19 in Sweden, pushing the total death toll to 4,542. With 450 Covid-19 deaths per 1m people, it means Sweden now has a higher coronavirus death rate than France, which has recorded 443 deaths from the virus per 1m population, according to tallies kept on the Worldometers website.



Sweden's unwelcome rise up the coronavirus rankings on Wednesday came after its chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, who is credited with masterminding his country's light touch outbreak strategy, admitted there was "quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done".



Asked in an interview on Swedish radio whether too many people in Sweden had died, he replied: "Yes, absolutely," adding that the country would "have to consider in the future whether there was a way of preventing" such a high toll.



"If we were to encounter the same disease again knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would settle on doing something in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world has done," Tegnell said. It would be "good to know exactly what to shut down to curb the spread of infection better", he added.



Also on Wednesday, a further 2,214 confirmed cases of coronavirus were announced – the highest daily increase in cases yet in the country. According to , the big daily rise in cases came because a laboratory that had hitherto only reported positive tests to patients publicly released data on 1,385 positive tests for the first time.



Sweden has reported 40,803 cases since the coronavirus outbreak began.

As they say, it would be great to know exactly what activities to shut down to stop the virus.



If it turns out (as some have suggested) that outdoor transmission risk is very low with some precautions, or out and about shopping is low risk we can target measures at only the things that cause infections (say indoor dining, public transport, door handles or whatever).



On the other hand if you don't know *what* scenarios to stop, it's reasonable (especially in the face of an exponential rise of a disease with unknown but higher than normal IFR) to stop as much as you plausibly can i.e. lockdown.



Ideally, having locked down and got back to a low number of infections and with a good system for tracking infection rates in place, you would carefully open up various scenarios and check the infections to see if the resumption of that particular activity has caused too much if a "bump" in infections.



It looks like the Swedes erred a little too much on the lax side, although they did manage to prevent the explosive growth. Perhaps if they had locked down to where they are now, just much earlier they might have kept a lid on things better.



At least they seem to be able to recognise their errors unlike the UK which has run the perfect response, apart form all the deaths.