Already happening in Sweden: https://nationalpost.com/news/world/covid-19-as-swedens-deat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_C...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in...
https://www.thelocal.se/20200414/understanding-swedens-figur...
The way to prevent a lot of deaths is simply to prevent people from catching it at all.
Anecdotal word from family members working in ERs is that none of them have been on a shift with a successful code run on a covid patient. CPR is low single digits 30-day survival based on Chinese numbers released this week. It was something like (1) patient survived out of 37 attempts.
The question of if the 10-30% of vent survivors would have survived without a vent is fair, but that's a maximum efficacy at this point.
Vents are definitely not the answer everyone thought they would be.
Doctors seem to be doing a better job of informing patients (or families) of those issues before intubating, especially if they have multiple risk factors, and a surprising number of cases have opted not to vent.
But also:
1) There are quite a few really sad stories of patients getting dropped at the ED curb by a spouse as if they'll get checked out and be right back out to go home, only to be immediately intubated and sedated, and ultimately dying without family by their side and no chance to say goodbyes.
They now make a lot of effort to make phone calls or video chats to family before intubating anyone, but it's still rough without anyone being able to be there, and then not being able to speak either. And it just adds to the weight of what the nurses have to deal with, emotionally.
2)There's also the murky topic of straining hospital resources. You obviously don't know ahead of time who the 10-30% of survivors will be and you want to save whoever you can, and hopefully we never get to the point of true rationing. But...
It's hard to be blind to the fact that it's a huge amount of risk, resources, and physical & emotional effort that are seeing relatively little success. I don't have an answer. Hopefully we get better at it.
Germany is seeing better results by ventilating earlier, FYI.
But I don't know, severe permanent lung damage guaranteed, delirium and dementia likely, and the misery of the treatment itself, all for a 1-in-5 chance of surviving (where survival is measured only at 30 days)?
I'm not saying nobody should be allowed to make that choice -- they should -- but I don't know that I would.
For example, my country's CDC has the official number of confirmed cases in the low hundreds with a dozen deaths, but anyone wise enough knows that between the ridiculously low number of samples tested (less than ten thousand in a population of a couple hundred million), the poor public health infrastructure, the anaemic government response and general public health illiteracy, the real number of cases is easily an order of magnitude or two higher.
Are you suggesting that as long as your hospitals aren't overrun, inflection rates aren't worth knowing ?
If by "strategy" you mean herd immunity, Sweden isn't doing that. No one is publicly claiming to be trying that anymore.
I have to say, as someone usually loathes my generally scientifically-blinkered federal government (Aus), it's relaxing and pleasant to be able to think quite well of them for once. Australia at this stage seems almost like a case study in how to handle a pandemic like this intelligently. Time will tell, of course.
Sweden is at 118 deaths per million vs 53 per million in Denmark or 94.5 in the US
Australia is at 2.52 per million
Sweden has a population of something like 10 million while the greater Sydney area alone has a population of 5.98 million so population density isn't the reason why Sweden has so many more deaths.
Voluntary lockdown means that some people still stand too close at the supermarkets, still plenty of people socialising around my area as normal & different companies apparently have different ideas when it comes to work from home policies
To be fair many countries are locked down as much as Australia and are also doing worse so I'm not sure what it is that is working so well there.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
Their numbers aren't reflective of reality.
Same as the US and Canada I suppose.
It looks like it was estimated to have arrived in Sweden two days earlier.
SF itself is more densely populated than Sweden’s most densely populated city which appears to be Stockholm (7700/km^2 vs 5000/km^2). Stockholm has a population around 20% larger than SF.
According to Wikipedia, California is smaller than Sweden.
So there may be some dense pockets in Sweden but it certainly isn’t more densely populated than California and it doesn’t appear that there are large cities that approach the density of NYC/SF.
https://covid19.quersive.com/chart?c=M&e=SE&e=US-CA&e=US-NY&...