For quite some time there was considerable derision hurled at Sweden by people who should have known better – Democrats, Greens, Laborites and Labourites.
‘Those brainless buggers are going to have a yuuuuuge death toll because they haven’t locked down and trashed their economies like we have’ they screamed.
Well, looky here, Mabel!
From this afternoon’s The Australian:-
Sweden ‘vindicated’ as Covid cases ease
Sweden has registered its lowest rate of positive coronavirus tests yet even after its testing regime was expanded to record levels in what one health official said was a vindication of its relatively non-intrusive Covid-19 strategy.
Over the past week the country carried out more than 120,000 tests, of which only 1.3 per cent identified the disease.
At the height of the pandemic the proportion was 19 per cent.
Meanwhile in the rest of Lockdown Europe there appears to be a second wave.
While the Swedish death rate had already collapsed to 2-3 per day in early August.
No Minister 
Reblogged this on Utopia, you are standing in it!.
Sweden GDP -8.6% deaths 5,835
Australia GDP -7% deaths 762
South Korea GDP -3.3% Deaths 336
New Zealand GDP -1.6% deaths 24.
Did you have a point you wished to make?
Gustie apart from proving you have leant nothing, aboslutely nothing since the start of the flu season six months ago, which is an achievement in itself, you little self selected chart proves nothing as it has no context.
I would rather be in Sweden frankly where there is herd immunity and a vey clever response, rather than NZ or Australia where underachievers like your self dont have a Plan B.
Oh thats right you’re waiting for the vaccine.
Gustie, how many years have we had a flu vaccine ??
You cant answer, I will, 78 YEARS!
Gustie, we haven’t “cured” the flu, or the common cold in that time.
Ill make a prediction for you. Provided you make it to 80 years old the chances you will die of some variant of the flu, together with any comorbidity you carry are extremely high. Good luck with that.
Your change of nym has not led to a change in your intelligence – you are still as thick as two short planks.
To achieve “herd immunity” will require about 70% of the population to be infected. Is that really what you are advocating? If so, you’re a bigger fool than I thought possible.
Gustie, we haven’t “cured” the flu,
That is true, but how many more flu deaths would there be without a vaccine? Are you advocating we abandon flu vaccinations because they don’t provide a “cure”?
or the common cold in that time
So what? How many people die annually from the common cold?
Hmm. Australian epidemiologist in Sweden says otherwise:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12364015
…although I note he considers Sweden is affected by “confusion and inertia” and doubts whether Sweden will be spared the economic effects of Covid lockdown experienced elsewhere. Which may or may not be the case, but I am wondering what specialist personal expertise he has to back those opinions. Sounds more like us here on No Minister saying, “yes it is!”…. “no it isn’t!” 😳😂
…and he says that one of false assumptions of Sweden’s “herd immunisation” strategy is that the virus can be stopped.
Ok, but isn’t that also an assumption of the lockdown strategy too?
And other than “waiting it out”, there seems no exit strategy for the later either.
Adolf yes, after a bad start by not sheltering the vulnerable, Sweden is doing better than most European countries. They seemed to have hit a sweet spot whereby widespread adherence to low cost, effective mitigation is producing a R number around 1. Things like social distancing, ban on large gatherings, sheltering the vulnerable and test, trace and isolate. I share Gravedodgers view that the initial load of virus is important to the outcome. Not only that but it impacts on a persons infectivness and whether that person will be a low load positive case. However they may be riding a tiger. They are miles away from herd immunity and things might turn around rapidly come their winter.
The claim made earlier by Gustavo, that the population needs 70% exposure to the virus to obtain herd immunity, does not seem to be the case. Given T-cell exposure to similar coronavirus RNA strands in earlier outbreaks it seems that a good chunk of populations may have immunity even without exposure to COVID-19. There are certainly results turning up where people appear to be immune even though they have no anti-bodies to this virus. As a result there have been some articles published that propose that herd immunity for COVID-19 may be occurrng even with a population exposure of only 20%, although that will obviously differ between national populations.
Sweden, huh? Well, NZ certainly could have chosen to do the same as Sweden, ie imposed restrictions fairly similar to our alert level 2 and kept them in place the whole time since March, seen a huge number of hospitalisations, suffered thousands of deaths AND seriously damaged our economy. Having done that, our situation now would be that we’d expect alert level 2 restrictions to remain in place for an unknown time into the future, and one or two people a day would still be dying from the virus.
That really doesn’t sound very attractive, so what are the positives? Well, it’s possible that Sweden maybe hasn’t damaged its economy as much as we have. Maybe.
The irony is that if Ardern’s government had followed the Swedish model and presided over 6 months of restrictions, contracted the economy by 8%, overwhelmed our decrepit public health system and inflicted thousands of unnecessary deaths on the population, right-wingers would be denouncing them even more furiously than they are now. I can’t see how we’re supposed to take this shit seriously.
I don’t know if Adolf was comparing Sweden to NZ so much as putting up the counterpoint to arguments made months ago that Sweden was going to suffer worse than other European nations – both in terms of economics and COVID-deaths – if it did not follow the Chinese lockdown model adopted by the likes of France, UK and so forth.
That would now appear not to be the case, and now that we’re well into September I think we can dismiss recent claims that the Swedes will suffer a 2nd wave like the other Euro nations as people return from their Summer holidays.
One aspect that’s interesting to me is why Sweden, given it’s wealth and tech capabilities in Public Health, did not follow the South Korean and Taiwanese approaches, which were also not focused on a lockdown strategy.
Greece is also interesting in that it did do a fairly tough lockdown (not that I’ve followed it too closely) and has pretty good stats despite having similar problems to Italy with an aged population, crap economy and crap Public Healthcare system.
The drop in the death rate is certainly interesting and not what most epidemiologists were predicting (as far as I can recall). This outbreak and the responses to it are going to keep researchers busy for the next couple of decades trying to figure out why things worked out the way they did in different places, I reckon.