No not her!

I mean the mathematical models used by epidemiologists to forecast how the Chinese Lung Rot disease was going to progress.

While it’s true that we are still some months away, perhaps a year, from a full assessment of the health impacts of the Wuhan Flu, enough time has passed since it started in China in January for some conclusions to be drawn.

First up of course is something known since at least February when it was hitting Italy, as well as China, and that was that the primary victims were old people, especially those with co-morbidities; other diseases. Anybody younger than 60 with no other illnesses was highly unlikely to even show much more than cold-like symptoms, let alone die.

But the other great debate that is still churning along as we pass the peak and head into its decline is what strategies were the best for combating the disease, with the lockdown of the healthy populations – to greater or lesser degrees – being the most common solution of governments.

There were a couple of exceptions to this, notably in Europe, but also among the US States which, thanks to the Federal nature of their government, could react differently. The Federal government, particularly President Trump’s administration, could issue guidelines and offer support, but the primary decisions as to what to do lay in the hands of the State Governors, as usual.

Stockholm during Wuhan Flu

The most prominent nation that refused to follow the lockdown policy is Sweden, and they got hammered by the media and epidemiologists around the world about this, which was amusing because it was Swedish epidemiologists and health experts who recommended against the lockdown.

Sweden has suffered 3,646 COVID-19 deaths as of this writing: a rate of 361 / million popn, putting them 6th worst on the global list.

But the epidemiological models predicted far worse for Sweden’s approach. These models were very similar to that of the British Imperial Model that predicted 500,000 dead Brits if lockdown was not done. In the USA the IHME models followed the Imperial version closely, although the growing revelations of terrible programming in the Imperial Model have cause people to wonder how similar they really all are.

Nevertheless, the one aspect they’ve all had in common is predicting horrendous death tolls unless governments went early and hard on population lockdown. In the case of Sweden the models effectively took the attitude that it was too late for lockdown and mitigation, as reporter Johan Norberg notes in the Spectator UK:

Sweden did not close borders, shut down schools, businesses, restaurants, gyms or shopping centres and did not issue stay at home orders.
…
Maria Gunther and Maria Westholm at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s biggest daily, just took a look at two of the most influential models in Sweden, both were inspired by the Imperial College study and published on the preprint server MedRxiv in April. Both were used by critics to argue that the Swedish model would quickly break our health care system – and that we had to make a U-turn into lockdown, as Britain did.

The vertical scale in these graphs are the daily numbers of patients requiring ICU treatment.

H. Sjödin et al: ‘Covid-19 health care demand and mortality in Sweden in response to non-pharmaceutical (NPIs) mitigation and suppression scenarios’, 7 April. 

The graph suggests critical care demand would peak above 16,000 patients per day by early May, and pre-pandemic intensive care unit capacity would be exceeded 30-fold.

.

J. Gardner et al, ‘Intervention strategies against Covid-19 and their estimated impact on Swedish healthcare capacity’, 15 April.  It was an even more pessimistic assessment, showing a peak of over 20,000 patients by early May – with an ICU requirement around 40 times the actual capacity.
…
82,000 Covid-19 deaths by 1 July.

As the article goes on to note the Swedish Public Health Agency rejected these models – which again it must be noted were from early to mid-April and simply took for granted that it was already too late for lockdown. Sweden had rolled the dice and now would have to ride the consequences of mass infections that would overwhelm their healthcare system as Italy’s had been, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Still, it’s not as if the Agency did not plan for some surge:

It instead planned for a worst-case scenario that was much less pessimistic, suggesting a peak around 1,700 ICU patients in the middle of May. Still more than three times more than the pre-pandemic capacity. Sweden, almost alone in the world, refused to lock down.

And here are the actual numbers: around 500-550 per day since mid-April. No surge. No exponential growth. Not only was Sweden’s ICU capacity not exceeded the pandemic never even came close to swamping the system.

And the Swedish numbers would be even better had they done a better job protecting the highest risk populations of retirement homes and other places where old people were concentrated. The Agency and the government have acknowledged they screwed that up.

As the article summarises:

One reason why the models failed is that they – just like most countries’ politicians – underestimated how millions of people spontaneously adapt to new circumstances. They only thought in terms of lockdowns vs business as usual, but failed to consider a third option: that people engage in social distancing voluntarily when they realise lives are at stake and when authorities recommend them to do so.

Shocking thought I know. Trusting your people to do the right thing. The irony is that without the cooperation of people the lockdowns themselves, even with all their harsh police measures, would not have worked.

In Britain, it’s argued that if the number of Covid deaths is far lower than the models predicted, well, this is the result of lockdown! Some even argue that the difference between the predicted and the actual is the lockdown effect. But you can’t say that for Sweden. We banned gatherings of more than 50 people, but that was about it. All other behavioural change was voluntary: something the models did not properly understand.

And Sweden did this without screwing over their economy or their civil liberties by setting the cops and their own citizens on each other.

I thought I’d play with some of the Statista.com numbers for Sweden. So based on the previous ten years the nation by May 8, 2020 would have normally expected 32,040 deaths, whereas they currently have 38,409. That difference is a little less than twice the counted Wuhan Flu death toll, which could mean several things: virus deaths uncounted; deaths arising from people being too scared to go to hospital for needed medical care; Statista.com screwed up? It’s a large list of possibilities.

But let’s assume they’re all virus deaths. What does that do to the expected death toll for 2020? Since the Wuhan Flu infection and death rates have plateaued they will decline. So it’s reasonable to assume that the overall death rate falls back to the 2010-2019 average: adding on the current excess deaths it would mean 97,024 deaths for 2020, higher than any time in the last decade.

And what does that do to the total population death rate? It puts it on the same level as 2010 and 2012. And while you could add on another thousand Wuhan Flu deaths it’s also quite possible that the death rate will be lower than average for the rest of the year because elderly people have died sooner than they otherwise would have. At this stage it looks like Sweden has not suffered any significantly abnormal death impact.