Swedish epidemiology boss says questioned Covid-19 strategy seems to be working
It seems to me that the lesson we should be learning from Sweden is different.<p>The measures undertaken in Sweden weren&#x27;t sufficient to control the spread of the coronavirus at the start. They saw exponential growth like anywhere else that did not impose a lockdown. But the growth stopped faster than predicted by any models of herd immunity. They&#x27;re now seeing 300 new cases a day, compared to 1100 at their peak. They&#x27;ve had about 1% of the population test positive, and about 0.1% of population die - and neither of those numbers look likely to grow significantly. You can quibble over testing statistics or death reporting, but they&#x27;ve had about 50% of the testing rate of Florida [0] and the excess deaths are within a factor of two of reported deaths[1].<p>If only 20% of people are immune to Covid-19, with a base reproductive rate of well over 1, this slowdown simply couldn&#x27;t happen. The truth is there&#x27;s something else going on: either it&#x27;s way more infectious (but less dangerous) than realised, or more likely, a very large proportion of people have baseline immunity to the infection. It spreads rapidly through those who had no previous immunity and then burns out.<p>So it&#x27;s not that Sweden did things right. They chose to be the control case for the lockdown experiment, and they got lucky that the virus isn&#x27;t as bad as we thought. Back in March, it was a totally reasonable belief that the virus if unchecked will spread to 60-70% of people and kill 1% of those - we&#x27;d only seen the spread rates from the early days of the pandemic in China. Now, the only observation we have from leaving the virus unchecked points to a much lower number.<p>It&#x27;s still rational for governments to err on the side of caution and wait for more data (especially on long-term effects), and to manage the pandemic to avoid saturating hospital and ICU use. But it&#x27;s not rational to treat a disease that threatens to kill 0.1% in the same way as one that threatens 1%. If we see similar results in Florida - a region with good data and a reckless&#x2F;casual approach to lockdown - we should see a peak in terms of new cases&#x2F;day in the next three weeks and then it will be time to really accept that the risk is lower than we thought.<p>[0] almost all stats from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldometers.info&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;country&#x2F;sweden&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.worldometers.info&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;country&#x2F;sweden&#x2F;</a><p>[1] excess deaths from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.euromomo.eu&#x2F;graphs-and-maps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.euromomo.eu&#x2F;graphs-and-maps&#x2F;</a>