Coronavirus: Why the Swedish experiment could prove Britain wrong: Sweden's decision to remain open for business is in direct contrast to Britain's strategy of locking down the country

In Sweden, an interesting experiment is playing out, which may soon reveal that Britain is way off when it comes to modelling the number of coronavirus patients who will end up in intensive care.

The country has bucked the near-global lockdown trend, choosing to allow schools, businesses and sports venues to remain open and relying on the good sense of its citizens to control the virus through social distancing and maintaining good hygiene

But the country has chosen this path largely because its prediction of how its health service will cope is vastly different from the trajectory that British modellers have forecast.

The vast ramping up of intensive care beds in the UK in recent weeks was driven by modelling from Imperial College, which suggested up to 30 per cent of people who are hospitalised for coronavirus will need intensive care....

My assumption is that if they’ve been basically doing nothing to combat it, why are they not already in a full blown disaster?

The main things that come to mind are 1) they aren’t actually doing nothing; 2) that the disease came later to them in notable numbers. Sweden in the winter isn’t exactly a vacation spot, even for skiers; and 3) the low population density you mention.

Sweden only had its 3rd death on 3/16, and its hundredth on 3/27. Before then, there had not been enough time for the deaths to begin. There is a lag from symptoms to deaths, and then another lag from deaths to recoveries.

3/16, Sweden has its 3rd death.
3/20, 16, 0.98% fatalities/case
Date case dth rcvr dth/case
3/23 2046 .27 .16 1.32%
3/24 2299 .40 .16 1.74%
3/25 2526 .62 .16 2.45%
3/26 2840 .77 .16 2.71%
3/27 3069 105 .16 3.42%
3/28 3447 105 .16 3.05%
3/29 3700 110 .16 2.97%
3/30 4028 146 .16 3.63%
3/31 4435 180 .16 4.06%
4/01 4947 239 103 4.83%
4/02 5568 308 103 5.53%
4/03 6131 358 205 5.84%
4/04 6443 373 205 5.79%

It seems to me that you would want to get it and get over it if you actually believed it is nothing to be concerned about. That’s what I keep reading here from many FReepers. That you just get a little sick and after a few days you can go back to work. After all, you only have a 1 in 50 chance of dying. So you are about 6 times more likely to die from a heart attack, right? I guess people who advocate the herd immunity really don’t believe in the process after all. Still would like to hear from people here who decided to get it and get it over with.

Not a numbers post - just impressions of a guy from nordland on German and Swedish stats:

[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

https://www.thelocal.se/20200310/timeline-how-the-coronavirus-has-developed-in-sweden

“Thirty-three people have died so far after testing positive for the new coronavirus, including 15 in Stockholm. Of those, at least six were Somali-Swedes, a board member of an association for Somali-Swedish medical doctors in Sweden told public broadcaster SVT’s current affairs programme Agenda.”

Instead of locking down they country they simply advised people on social distancing and a lot of the “new Swedes” decided to just ignore the advice. They’re blaming language skills and lack of information but mysteriously the lack of language skills doesn’t seem to hurt East Asian and East European migrants in the same way. I’m seeing various migrant groups behave in rather different ways on the streets of supposedly locked down Helsinki, too, and it’s all very predictable.

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.]

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