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Why Can’t We Be More Like Sweden?
Why can’t we be more like Sweden? Boy, I never thought I’d write those words, but I just did. You may ask in what way would I like the US to be more like Sweden? Well, it turns out they are the only country in the western world in which the government has not unilaterally shut down society in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, they are just as interested in the economic, social, and psychological health of their citizens as they are in minimizing death and illness from the coronavirus. They are, therefore, treating their citizens as responsible, rational adults.
So far, Sweden has closed its borders to non-EU nations, has restricted public gatherings to less than 50 people, and, well, that’s about it for enforced prohibitions. Otherwise, the government has issued a number of advisories including asking people to practice social distancing, work from home if possible, students over 16 are asked to study from home, and those 70 and over are urged to self-isolate. Most private businesses remain open, restaurants still offer table service, private meetings and parties continue apace, and elementary schools are open. This does not mean that Sweden has not yet felt any pain from the virus. According to the NBC News article I linked to as of March 31, Sweden had recorded approximately 4,500 cases of coronavirus and 180 deaths therefrom.
I’d be interested in what the people here at Ricochet who have been paying much closer attention to the numbers than have I, such as @rodin and @arizonapatriot have to say about Sweden’s coronavirus policy. I’m also interested in what the numerous Ricochet physicians think about the policy.
Since there is one country in the west that has not followed the shutdown, perhaps we’ll be able to test which method worked the best: the command-and-control model of every other country or the more laissez-faire approach of Sweden. Of course, there are many differences between countries which affect outcomes. For example, Sweden has a much lower population density than many of the hardest-hit areas, each country has a unique population age distribution, and so forth.
As for me, I’m rooting for Sweden.
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Thanks for this information. I like this incremental approach a lot. It is very different from what we’re doing here in the U.S.
I forget now which long-time Florida congressman (a Dem) used to called himself a raging incrementalist. When I heard that, it was one of the few times I’ve had good thoughts about a Democrat.
There’s an even better way to frame it that didn’t occur to me in my original comment:
Sweden is taking a reactive approach whereas the rest of the world is taking a proactive approach.
Basically, Sweden is waiting until the problem grows to a certain level of discomfort before ratcheting up control measures another step, whereas the rest of the world (outside of Italy, Spain, and China) turned the dial to 11 before the virus took off in their countries.
The proactive approach is recommended by nearly every single epidemiologist and public health expert. And there’s some good reason for that. First, every basic chart of exponential growth clearly shows that locking down society earlier reaps huge (theoretical) benefits in lives saved. Second, the biology of this particular virus: specifically, the fact that people can become contagious very early after infection even without symptoms, but it takes much longer to die from the virus. If the number of infections doubles every 3 days but people don’t start dying until 21 days, that’s (theoretically) more than a 100-fold increase in infections that have occurred by the time the death rate starts making everyone uncomfortable.
So there’s decent support for the hypothesis that pursuing the reactive strategy is just closing the barn door after the horses have fled.
But there’s the rub: it’s still just a hypothesis. Three data points – albeit large ones – is not sufficient to make conclusions with the kind of certainty the world needs.
They don’t need to react just to the death rate. That’s the statistic that I watch most closely, but it doesn’t need to be the only one.
If you follow the doubling times at ourworldindata.org (one of the sites I check every day) you see that in every country where deaths have started piling up, the death rates have been going down, i.e. doubling times are getting longer. But they are going down excruciatingly slowly. The U.S. was at as doubling time of 3 days for a long time, now it seems to have settled down to 4 days. The worldwide doubling time is at 7 days. That’s still a high death rate, of course. So it isn’t a matter of people getting uncomfortable with ever-higher death rates (which are on a very slow downward trend) but of getting uncomfortable with the sheer numbers of deaths.
It’s also interesting that the rate of increase of confirmed cases in almost every country where the disease has taken hold is lower than the rate of increase of deaths. I’m trying to form a model in my head to take account of that, and haven’t yet done so. I hadn’t really been following those numbers until yesterday.
Mendel, these are good points. I’ve floated a few estimates/guesses for the time lag between infection and onset of symptoms, and between infection and death. Your post hypothesizes 21 days for deaths, which seems to be pretty close.
I’m not sure how much we know about this. The CDC says symptom onset is between 2-14 days after exposure (here). The WHO says “most commonly around five days” (here), with a range of 1-14. This Lancet article estimates 17-19 days between symptom onset and death, though this is based on a small number of cases from China. These sources suggest that your 21-day hypothesis is pretty good.
The problem is that this does not match the data. Italy locked down around March 8-9. With a 3-week lag, we wouldn’t expect deaths in Italy to start declining until around March 29-30. But there was a bid decline in this period in Italy — the growth rate dropped from around 35% daily circa March 8-9, to under 10% daily circa March 29-30. (My charts are here.)
This is perplexing.
Jerry, I was basing my estimate mostly on that Lancet paper. In any case, I doubt that we can read that much granularity into the data. First of all because there’s quite a range of time to death, so any effect there would be spread out and difficult to pinpoint. Second, we don’t know at what time point people were getting tested for the virus – if parts of the country were overwhelmed by cases, it’s possible that many people weren’t getting tested until well after the onset of their symptoms (and of course most cases probably never got tested at all).
Like so many of these data topics, if the question is is any way tangential to the total number of cases in Italy, there’s probably no good answer because their testing is obviously very inadequate.
Although our US media remains hostage to Big Pharma interests, the fact is, every single hour of every single day, there are more reports about how the anti malarial hydroxycholiquine is turning the corner and saving COVID victims, especially in France and Germany where the public has a media promoting such, and does not have provincial Dem governors forbidding such.
Those who are truly fiscally conservative should promote the use of the effective anti malarial, as its cost is around 20 bucks, whereas the coming vaccination for COVID will be over $ 400 per jab.
If you do the math, and once the vax for COVID is available, Big Pharma will be transferring 132 billions of dollars from a vax mandate for COVID 19, from our insurers and various gubmint agencies like MediCare, and Medicaid.
BTW, there is also success in turning back the effects of COVID 19 by using MSM.
I don’t see how the US media are hostage to “Big Pharma.” They instinctively attack Big Pharma when it suits their own interests.
Just an update here: based on reports in the European press, it sounds like Sweden may be getting ready to start imposing lockdowns. Apparently the parties in power are negotiating granting the prime minister emergency powers to shutdown different elements of society by himself if he feels it necessary. Moreover, he went on TV to announce that people need to steel themselves for thousands of deaths, and a few major public health experts are predicting that all ICU beds in Stockholm will be full by this weekend.
So I think there’s still a decent chance that Sweden flinches in the near future.
Me, too, @tigerlily.