That rate is in line with the US and most European countries. The US lost 40 million jobs and spent $4 trillion dollars to achieve the same outcome as Sweden.
And now the US is reopening and attempting a similar approach to Sweden. You can’t shut the world down for months and months waiting for a vaccine.
You compare two of the worst approaches in the world and present a false fallacy of "shut down the world" when in fact the countries with stricter quarantine/tracing/tracking approaches had far better outcomes:
Germany, and Japan, and Korea, and Taiwan lost far fewer jobs, killed far fewer people per capita and nearly eradicated the pandemic while it is still rampant in the US and Sweden.
Japan is an interesting one. They did next to nothing.
Life is almost back to what it was before atm. How did Tokyo not have a massive outbreak is an absolute mystery. But it did not.
Was it that 99% of people when told to started wearing masks and people do not hug or shake hands? We have no idea, no tracing, very small amount of testing, no house arrests of any kind.
They didn’t do “next to nothing.” They used a cluster-based approach through their public health center network, that was put in place to combat TB in the 30s. Turns out, that was pretty effective at combatting COVID.
> In 1935, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, Japan opened its first public health centre (PHC) in Tokyo. The country then put in place a programme that led to the building of another 187 nationwide. They survived the war and the occupation. But the thing of note is that before and after the war, their priority, says Taniguchi, was always to “stay watchful all the time” for the emergence of TB cases. If one was found, they were tasked with rushing to the patient's residence, checking for clusters and sterilising the house
Seventy-five years on, 469 PHCs are in operation across the country, with each manned, on average, by 64 medical professionals, including one to two licensed doctors. They still locate clusters, track links and conduct tests. It is this “accumulated wealth of expertise, rarely found elsewhere” that has made the difference. Japan has not had to rely on mass testing strategies because it’s health care history had already left a cluster-crushing strategy embedded in its system
> They didn’t do “next to nothing.” They used a cluster-based approach through their public health center network, that was put in place to combat TB in the 30s. Turns out, that was pretty effective at combatting COVID.
Also, IIRC, their culture is naturally more socially distanced than western ones (e.g. mask wearing was already common in some situations, bowing instead of hand shaking, etc.).
Mask wearing, yes. I’m not sure about the other parts. Unmarried people live with their parents well into adulthood. There are less children, so maybe that’s a factor. But most stores, restaurants, and other venues in Japan would seem cramped and overcapacity by Western standards.
not really: in five months we (humans) have gathered ideas on how to treat the disease; we've ramped up the production of masks, ventilators, tests, an so on; we've educated the population on how to be safer; we've set up special paths to manage infected people in hospitals so we can avoid contamination; we've increased IC beds; we've learned how to identify the disease earlier rather than just consider it a flu; and many other things.
Everyone is still at risk but the risk today is lower than 5 months ago.
It is a doubling or tripling of other places. 5% of all deaths due to a single infection.
The US lockdown had concrete effect, limiting cases to what the hospitals could manage. Further, we understand more now (1000's of studies and papers published in a few months).
To compare blindly ignoring the disease and crossing fingers (Sweden's approach) vs wait-measure-respond, I know which way I prefer.
Doubling or tripling? Belgium 8.2, UK 5.8, Spain 5.8, Italy 5.5, France 4.4, Netherlands 3.5, Ireland 3.3, US 3.3.
The US lockdown may not have had any impact. Mobility trends are disconnected from government orders. The people more likely stemmed the tide in the US more than any government action.
Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that.
> Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that.
Sweden took less drastic action than the US. Sweden did take some action early, encouraging social distancing, increased hand hygiene etc. Then again, in Sweden you can take sick leave with full pay. More people will stay home if they feel sick.
Parts of the US took more drastic actions, but very, very late (during a pandemic where number of cases double every 4-5 days, one week is late, several weeks is very late). Shutting down borders to foreigners doesn't cut it when the virus is already spreading in the communities.
While they ended up in almost the same place, you really cannot compare them. The Swedish circumstances are so different from those of the US, that you cannot expect the Swedish same strategy to work the same way in the US.
And before you claim that the Swedish strategy is a success, consider how Sweden compares to its Nordic neighbors, where you can compare the circumstances.
Per 1,000,000 inhabitants:
Sweden 4042 cases, 450 deaths
Denmark 2040 cases, 101 deaths
Finland 1247 cases, 58 deaths
Norway 1567 cases, 44 deaths
But yet Norway's prime minister thinks they overreacted with their lockdown:
>Leaders in some European countries have suggested enforcing tough lockdown measures early in the COVID-19 outbreak may not have been entirely necessary.
>Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg said during a television interview last week with state broadcaster NRK that its approach had been over cautious.
>“I probably took many of the decisions out of fear. Worst case scenarios became controlling,” Ms Solberg explained.
>She assured viewers that strict restrictions were imposed based on the international state of the disease at the time, but said that on reflection perhaps they were misguided.
Why are we cherry-picking Nordic neighbours? Because they happen to back one of several competing narratives? We can find plenty of other countries that have implemented stringent lockdowns and have similar or higher cases and deaths per capita.
That's the beautiful thing about these almost meaningless cross-country comparisons - the data is so low-quality and heterogenous that you can pick a pair of countries and validate pretty much every hypothesis with it.
The comparisons aren't meaningless, cause they are very similar. People who want to defend Sweden don't like how terrible Sweden looks. Because of idealogical reasons around locking down a lot of people want Sweden's strategy to work, and they torture themselves into weak arguments to justify killing a lot more people. If you can't compare them for some reason, then you basically can't do any comparisons because you ruled out their nearest neighbors.
That is exactly right - you can't do any cross-country comparisons, because the data simply is not comparable across countries. It can be used to a limited degree for tracking the epidemic within a country over time, and even that's got plenty of caveats. But cross-country comparison is a non-starter. Here's an incomplete list of giant confounders:
- for cases: how widespread was the testing? How quickly did it ramp up (e.g. how many tests per 1M in relation to 1000th case)?
- for deaths: what counts as a COVID death? Is death with COVID = death from COVID?
- how soon after the onset of the epidemic in the particular country were lockdown measures enacted? How long did they last? How stringent were they in reality vs on paper?
Well I think you can compare, but with caveat you have to compare amount of testing, and various other situations. I only see people who say "you can't compare" to be those who want to minimize their own problems. It's endemic to the US where multiple states have been caught reducing the numbers, firing the people who organize them and prohibiting them from talking about it.
So wait, if they are reducing the numbers, we'll then turn around and use them for comparison?
There are many countries who figured out how to play this numbers game. Russia, for example, faithfully reports any and all cases of COVID and simultaneously employs every trick in the book to minimize the number of deaths. They have already and will continue to win propaganda points from people who then use these meaningless death numbers to compare to another country's far more accurate death numbers and proceed to draw garbage conclusions from garbage data.
Again, as someone else up thread pointed out, you’re just comparing various notches on the “bad response” scale. Your calculus doesn’t work if you compare Sweden to Taiwan or the US to South Korea, even with adjustments to population.
If your argument is that “it doesn’t make that much of a difference choosing between doing nothing and pursuing a bungled, haphazard response,” then sure, a lot would probably agree with you. But these are not the only choices any of these countries had.
The economic damage is part and parcel of the overall mismanagement, which is why Taiwan and South Korea are doing better with both handling the pandemic and the state of their economies.
I specifically said Europe. You all are the ones who continue to move the goalposts.
In context of the European response Sweden is doing just fine. Japan and Korea have a different culture around surveillance than people in America or Europe. What worked in those two countries isn't relevant because Europeans and Americans reject that kind of surveillance.
Sweden has done about as well as any other western country in regard to the coronavirus and they did it without ruining their economy.
Sometimes I think people here on HN are just hoping the economy will tank.
I honestly hope the economy gets back to normal, I just think you need to have a rational and thorough response, like South Korea and Taiwan in order to do that. Otherwise, you’re talking about the possibility of regionally endemic disease with sporadic flare-ups that’s constantly throwing things off course.
You also can’t really shift goal posts comparing Taiwan to Sweden because we’re talking about a global pandemic that originated in China. It honestly doesn’t matter who’s doing best in Europe if people are better off in SE Asia, both in terms of economic damage and that caused by disease. Hand-waiving at “cultural differences” seems mostly an excuse because there is as much difference in culture between the high-performing countries in Asia as there is between the low-performing ones in Europe.
You're cherry picking data points. JP Morgan amongst others have studied all the data and found no correlation or even declines in infection rates before and after lockdowns:
Sweden is about middle of the pack. Most of that is because of the virus getting into care homes, which a lockdown can't prevent anyway given the staff have to come and go, and blocking the elderly from all visits forever is deeply inhumane. Given their age many of them would rather catch the virus than live longer but always be alone, and have said so.
So far it appears lockdowns didn't affect the virus much at all. However, they are definitely killing people if you look at the changes in suicide rates, the backlogs for cancer treatment that have built up and so on.
The problem with believing that Taiwan and South Korea are doing better for fundamental reasons is that it may simply be random. Japan did very little or nothing, probably due to trying to avoid the Olympics getting cancelled, and had similarly good results. The differences in testing levels and definitions between countries alone make comparisons based on reported infection and death rates meaningless.
"JP Morgan amongst others have studied all the data and found no correlation or even declines in infection rates before and after lockdowns"
This claim doesn't pass the sniff test, doesn't match a clear signal that anyone can see on graphs of data from Wuhan, NYC and Italy as well as other US states, and doesn't comport with our basic understanding of how infectious disease spreads. The fact that it's featured in a political website that uses the words "research... allegedly found" in its first sentence is just the cherry on top.
Our basic understanding of how infectious diseases spread is completely wrong, otherwise epidemiological models would correctly predict disease and they don't.
I don't really know how to answer your other objections. Their analysis looked at more countries than your list, your "sniff test" isn't a substitute for actual analysis, and the fact that a wide range of news websites summarised the results is to be expected (the actual report appears to have been sent to clients rather than posted on the web).
I can't even find the actual study itself, and the results Google produces are just a laundry-list of right-wing newspapers with an anti-lockdown agenda. With all that said, the summary of the research appears to be "in the immediate aftermath of a lockdown, when the lockdown hasn't even been fully relaxed yet in many jurisdictions, infection rates are lower than before the lockdown." This isn't exactly big news. (Also, the study is out of date: rates are now spiking in a number of states that have moved out of lockdown.)
I can’t really parse this “article,” which appears to be from a right-wing opinion site, mostly linking tweets from a CNBC anchor.
Taiwan and South Korea being random seems a spurious claim. Taiwan’s Vice President is an epidemiologist invested with a great deal of executive authority in dealing with public health crises and has guided the country’s response from the outset. South Korea was trending in a quite bad direction with the church outbreaks and quashed them through massive interventions in testing and mobile hospital capacity. And neither country has mass-scale lockdowns like the west (because they didn’t need them).
Taiwan and South Korea also had first hand experience with SARS, and were much better prepared for COVID. Mask wearing was already a thing there, they had supplies, and they had contact tracing in place and ready to go. They did a good job with this.
Other countries can invest in the same readiness. It's always a decision of limited resources and many opportunity costs (poverty, infrastructure, climate, security, etc).
Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?
> Different countries with different experiences and difference cultures will make different decisions. That's ok, that's how it should work. Can't have it any other way in a democracy, right?
Sure, but both South Korea and Taiwan are wealthy liberal democracies. I know this isn’t your intention, but a lot of commentators seem to appeal to some kind of Western exceptionalism, completely refusing the examples of SE Asia democracies as a valid measure of comparison. To me, that seems like insanity, because again, they’re also wealthy liberal democracies and have had the best-in-class responses thus far.
Just the beginning of it. There are antibody treatments, new knowledge about ventilators vs oxygen, triage and testing advances. All because we took the time for that.
And now the US is reopening and attempting a similar approach to Sweden. You can’t shut the world down for months and months waiting for a vaccine.