It would have been an interesting test case if they had forged ahead with the do-nothing, go-for-broke “herd immunity” strategy. Interesting, that is, from a scientific standpoint to see what kind of results they got (not so interesting, of course, if it had gone catastrophically badly and you’re a Swede who ends up on a vent). Now, though, it sounds like they’re belatedly doing more or less what everyone else is doing, so it’ll be hard to really draw many conclusions from what happens there.
Italy was the first country to try minimal measures, and reached the "oh crap" point a little earlier than Sweden. Sweden has the advantage of a younger population, so maybe if they protect their elders, they will not suffer as badly.
With only 10M people and no huge cities, Sweden should be able to manage public health measures far better than most bigger countries.
Still, since herd immunity has never been seen with a coronavirus, we should probably verify long term immune response among the recovered before attempting.
If you’re an elderly or high-risk person who doesn’t want to end up on a vent, stay home. If you choose not to, it’s not a failure of the government, it’s your own decision and your own failure.
For those under 45, the disease has roughly the same or lower death rate as the flu. Only tin foil hat wearers would stay home to avoid that minimal a risk to life. They could never get in a car or have sexual relations with another human being if they were that risk-averse. The government has no business forcing people to avoid risks that a reasonable person would readily accept as the price of freedom.
The death rate is currently a bit higher than the flu for those 45-64. But if that’s adjusted for asymptomatic and untested cases as flu statistics are and as some articles have tried to do for coronavirus, the death rate for that age group could also come down to flu risk levels.
Yup. It just might show all this draconian overreaction. didn’t change the course just destroyed our economy for little benefit