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Europe
No, Sweden isn't a miracle coronavirus model
2020-05-06
[Japan Times] - The World Health Organization has been generous with its praise throughout this pandemic. China, Singapore and Ireland have all received plaudits for their handling of the coronavirus crisis.

Now that a new turning point is in sight, with the infection’s spread slowing and draconian lockdown measures being gradually lifted, the WHO is promoting the Swedish way of doing things. "Sweden represents a future model. ... If we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns," the WHO’s Mike Ryan said, praising the way Swedes are trusted to "self-regulate."
The fact that WHO praises them is enough for me.
Sweden’s hands-off approach to lockdown has certainly been different to that of other countries, from France and Italy to the United States and China. Large public gatherings are banned, but restaurants, bars and schools have stayed open, and social distancing is encouraged rather than enforced by police.

Trust in the public is high, and so is the public’s trust in the strategy. Swedes seem happy with the global attention. "Many countries are starting to come around to the Swedish way," Anders Tegnell, the country’s chief epidemiologist, told USA Today.

But like so many stories of national exceptionalism in this crisis — the United Kingdom at one point was convinced it could avoid strict closures, painting them as unscientific, before eventually doing a U-turn — this one is debatable and premature.

U.S. President Donald Trump, no doubt annoyed at stories in the American media heaping praise on the Swedes, tweeted one obvious riposte last week, noting the high price that Swedes have had to pay in terms of COVID-19 fatalities. Sweden’s 2,586 deaths compare poorly with Denmark’s 452 and Norway’s 207. Taking population into account, Sweden has suffered more deaths per million people than the U.S. (although deaths aren't always counted in the same way).

When looking at all-cause mortality — which is probably a better gauge of the real level of coronavirus deaths — Sweden has been hit with "very high" excess deaths since the start of the year, according to the European body monitoring these statistics. In Denmark, they’ve been "low."

...We don’t know what other nations might have gone through if they’d followed the Swedish model — France estimates its own lockdown saved 60,000 lives. We also don’t know how much immunity has been acquired by the Swedes. An official report estimating that a third of Stockholm’s population would develop antibodies to the virus by May 1 was withdrawn after an error.
Yet people accuse Nail Ferguson of pulling numbers from his ass.
We do know that Sweden’s COVID-19 journey hasn’t been exceptional. Like other countries, it has experienced a surge in deaths in care homes, where about one in three virus deaths are estimated to have taken place. Visiting relatives and staff are expected to "self-regulate" but, according to reports, they don’t always do so. The Swedes have also had a lack of systematic testing and equipment shortages.

Things might have been even worse without the Swedes’ demographic and cultural defenses. This is a population that does social distancing already in many ways. More than half of the country lives in single-person households, working from home is common and access to fast broadband is everywhere.
In other words, they're dying out anyways - so they don't care.
...At the same time, migrant workers in the country are being infected disproportionately, according to a recent national survey. The hyper-individualist expectation to "self-regulate" looks too complacent for immigrant communities who lack access to information.
Of course, the hyper-humanitarian Swedes will never dream of expelling the gimmegrants - but if they're dying anyway...
...Given that we haven’t reached the end of this pandemic, more circumspection might be in order. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said: "Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward."

As we approach a turning point in the crisis, it’s tempting to look back and single out winners as the model to follow. But we don’t know what’s going to happen next. None of us has lived through it yet. And that includes Sweden.
Posted by:g(r)omgoru

#8  "Now, Sweden’s death projection via the IHME model has been downgraded significantly while many other locked down countries had theirs raised, including the United States nearly doubling. Sweden’s projection stands at 10,196 deaths." Today and similar information yesterday. Models wrong as usual. Global warming, Climate change all wrong. Polar Ice caps were to be gone now and oceans 300-400 feet deeper. Al Gore seems to be working with similar modeling. Garbage in garbage out.
Posted by: Dale   2020-05-06 14:39  

#7  Seems to me Sweden drank the beer in one gulp while the rest of us sipped. The results should be the same assuming hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
Posted by: rjschwarz   2020-05-06 13:01  

#6  ^(a) It is marketed as a miracle.
(b) You won't be studying it for future application cause, sooner or later, they gonna switch to a lockdown that makes California look like Texas.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2020-05-06 12:48  

#5  I'd agree with the headline, but isn't it what they call a "strawman"?

It is a different approach which can be studied for future application.
Posted by: Bobby   2020-05-06 12:39  

#4  Lex's comment mirrors a guy from Helsinki’s observations, re Nordlanders:
The numbers mean nothing since Sweden stopped doing tests long ago. It’s strange how a lot of people here have realized that Sweden just makes up crime statistics but haven’t realized that Sweden does the same at pretty much everything. No data, no problem is also the attitude of the rest of Scandinavia and Germany so their numbers can’t be trusted either.

Even deaths can be covered up because a lot of people who die are going to be elderly who haven’t been tested and they’re not planning to test most of the dead. Curiously the people who are dying after being tested positive are disproportionately migrants

I suspect that it turns out that Sweden is in fact doing it right that shielding the elderly instead of shutting down the economy is better in the end but it doesn’t mean that the disease is sparing Sweden or that the low numbers mean anything, to the contrary, they’ve decided to let it spread and to keep their estimates of the real number secret. We’ll maybe know them after the epidemic once they start publishing studies – but only if it does turn out to be the right bet.

If corona turns out to be deadlier then it will be the thing that pops the entire “Scandinavian model” bubble. People abroad have been making the mistake of trusting Scandinavian governments and their invented statistics because Scandinavian people are honest in person.
Posted by: Zhang Fei   2020-05-06 12:02  

#3  Love the whispered aside:
(although deaths aren't always counted in the same way)

Right. When you're discussing tallies, how things are counted is just a minor parenthetical.

Here's a clue: Sweden is deliberately including every possible COVID-related death, be it in or out of hospital. Norway doesn't include deaths in nursing homes.

If you do an apples-to-apples comparison using the same methodology for attributions cause of death, and if you adjust for Sweden's significantly higher Muslim immigrant population, Sweden's fatality rate us only slightly higher than those of Norway and Denmark.
Posted by: Lex   2020-05-06 08:40  

#2  Stockholm Syndrome:
A condition in which hostages develop a psychological alliance with their captors during captivity.

Lockdown Stockholm Syndrome:
A psychological state of mind that causes its sufferers to come to love seeing their economies and liberties being destroyed, whilst simultaneously being incapable of accepting that Sweden kept its society going without resorting to such measures.

I continue to be baffled by those who cannot bring themselves to admit that Sweden has carried out a relatively sensible policy on Covid-19, whilst the response of so many other countries has been authoritarian and frankly unhinged. The idea of quarantining millions of perfectly healthy people and stopping them from doing normal, healthy things is something that has apparently never occurred to any national leaders in the past, or at least if it did, they presumably never enacted it for fear of revolt.

No such fear today. It is simply staggering to see how so many people have not only come to accept the inevitable destruction of the economy and curtailment of civil liberties as a price worth paying to deal with an illness which is killing numbers on roughly the same levels as a bad flu season, but have actually become cheerleaders for the giant social experiment being done to them. It reminds me of the chilling and dispiriting line at the end of 1984: “He loved Big Brother.” Today, for reasons that are not at all clear to me, many appear to “Love Lockdown” — that is, they appear to be absolutely fine with having their liberties taken away from them; absolutely fine with having the right to do lawful work taken from them; and absolutely fine with having the right to do normal, healthy things taken away from them. If anyone has an explanation, do be sure to let me know.

But it gets worse. Not only do they seem to be perfectly willing to go along with these things, but they are appear to be utterly oblivious and even apathetic to the economic train wreck headed their way because of the policy they support. Why? What will shake them out of that apathy and complacency? Will it be when they hear about the Great Depression-era unemployment levels coming on us? No! Even that doesn’t do it. The chart below is one of the most genuinely frightening I’ve ever seen, showing as it does US unemployment rising by over 30,000,000 in just seven weeks to levels not seen since the 1930s. And yet when I show it, many just airily dismiss it with a shrug of the shoulders as if it’s irrelevant. Perhaps it will only be if they lose their own jobs and can’t pay the rent or can’t get stuff in the shops like they used to that it’ll hit home! Who knows?
Posted by: Bright Pebbles   2020-05-06 05:59  

#1  It is, however (IMO), a miracle of liberal fascism model
Posted by: g(r)omgoru   2020-05-06 04:16  

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