Stockholm expected to reach herd immunity in May, Swedish ambassador says
npr.org
npr.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22982885
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22919074
They haven't got anywhere near that. And none of the flawed antibody studies show anything like this level of infection.
"No evidence" that recovered COVID-19 patients cannot be reinfected: WHO: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-who-id...
Isn't temporary immunity the norm for these types of viruses? There's not reason to think this virus is different, is there?
I think it's great what Sweden is doing. I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong. Their hospitals are not overwhelmed.
Nothing any other country has done will prevent covid from spreading through the population and killing the same number of people eventually. They've only slowed it down a bit, not stopped it. It doesn't appear that it can be stopped, there will not be a vaccine in time. The same people will die in the end, right?
Actually a few have done that.
Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives. FYI Korea has done it without harsh social distancing. New Zealand with similar advantages to Taiwan looks to be approaching this as well.
"I don't follow why you think they have done something wrong."
The issue is risk - their current daily-case rate is still growing somewhat and it's been shown that 'social distancing alone' doesn't fully flatten the curve. They have a higher death rate than their neighbours, though it's not super high.
Any real data point to support the 30% rate for Stockholm would be a big deal because officially the country only has 18k cases.
This was my understanding, also. I gathered the thinking was that they are seeing deaths up front instead of stretching the curve and seeing the deaths spread out over a longer period of time.
I assume that as time goes on there will be more accurate counts of covid deaths and infection rates.
I just don't see the hard data justifying throwing Sweden's strategy under the bus.
The 'hard data problem' with their strategy is that they are willing to write of x% of their population without knowing what the real death rate is, which is obviously very risky.
They went ahead with this plan it seems some time before we even had good visibility into this number.
The Ambassador isn't releasing any data to back her claims, which is not good, but Stockholm has had 1K deaths which mean we can infer the Swedes think the 'true death rate' is 0.3%.
But other nations put it higher, in some places above 1%.
If it's 1% ... that would mean 3.4M dead Americans. About 100K dead Swedes. That's big.
They are hoping for more like 20-30K dead which even then seems like a large number for a place like Sweden.
Again - Korea is holding Coronavirus at bay and very few have died. Obviously, no land borders, but neither does Sweden really (or they could/have closed them).
I haven't heard of any current data that supports a 1% death rate, the numbers I see lately seem to be around .2%, which is 1 in 500 people, and have been getting lower as more data comes in. This just doesn't seem to be as bad as was first feared.
Unless South Korea can deploy a vaccine in the next couple months it doesn't look like they'll be able to stop the virus eventually going through their population like it will everywhere else.
It does not appear that the enough of any population wants to live for a couple years in lockdown waiting for a vaccine to save 1 in 500 people, or less, who didn't have long to live anyways.
NY city numbers are 0.8.
Risk is the issue, it's irresponsible to risk the lives of an entire nation when that number is still unknown - even at 0.8% that's pretty high to try for herd immunity.
[1] https://unherd.com/2020/04/which-epidemiologist-do-you-belie...
Sweden has had a couple thousand covid deaths, less than 25% of NYC in a comparably sized population, both currently finding that around 25% of their populations seems to have antibodies. https://www.vox.com/2020/4/28/21240381/coronavirus-sweden-de...
They seem to be as far as long as NYC towards herd immunity, with just under 25% of the deaths.
The above article characterizes the Swede's plan as a failure based on comparisons of their death rate to the less-affected entire US population, but I'm not sure if that's a valid comparison, in that the Swedes will benefit from herd immunity before anyone else. Plus there are benefits to not having to lockdown.
I am left wondering why Sweden has so much lower a death rate than NYC, with similar antibody counts.
I agree with your statement that risk is the issue, something that our brains are not always wired to correctly evaluate.
BUT - we can compare deaths to 'actual antibody rate' when doing broader sampling.
For NYC we have 12K dead as of 2 days ago (and it will be 15K even with 0 more cases, because it takes time for people to die).
They had a 20% 'antibody rate' in the city from a report released a few days ago.
NYC proper is 9M people, so that's 1.8M positive, 15K/1.8M is 0.8% 'true death rate'. Which is not that far from the earlier estimates of 1-4%.
Germay is saying 0.58% based in their random smaples.
The Swedish Ambassador said 1/3 of Stockholm has it. Stockholm is 900K people so that's 300K. They have 1K dead, will be about 1.3K so that's about 0.4% 'true death rate'.
0.4% is nicer lower then NY and Germany it seems, but it's not like Swedes are special beings, we can't assume they're going to be too-too far off other, similar places.
So the 'true death number' is probably somewhere in the range of 0.4-0.9% as of the information we have right now.
This is kind of a high number to be shooting for 'immunity' especially when A) We didn't have that number before B) We still are not sure of the number now C) We don't know if people will be immune (are asymptomatic people immune?) or how long that will last. And of course, those are big numbers. 0.6% of Americans is a little over 2 Million people. That's a lot of people.
Finally, there is no doubt that some countries have had success. Taiwan, Korea, NZ, even Australia have done really well with it. Swedes are smart, wealthy people, they literally talk about themselves as being 'humanitarian superpowers' it seems reasonable that intelligent people would use effective measures to protect their own population.
>Korea and Taiwan have effectively stopped Covid and it looks like they will keep numbers at bay long enough for a vaccine to develop and have therefore saved countless lives
They haven't actually done it, they're trying to do it. We can only determine if they're successful once its over. Even if you temporarily reduce the spread by forced quarantine/lock-down, you have to also look at the natural reservoirs for the virus, human or otherwise that will ensure that the disease doesn't go away. It originally started will a few people, and now the entire world is affected. That can still happen again in a local setting. This thing spreads like crazy as we all know.
The vaccine talk is not realistic IMHO. It will be at-least a year (likely a LOT longer), there is no way Korea (or any country) is going to be in a lock-down for an indeterminate period.
They most definitely are. They don't even administer oxygen to patients, they old, uninfected people die because they don't want to use the extremely few respirators we have.
Sweden's death rate per day per capita is an order of magnitude higher than any neighbouring country, and is not decreasing, unlike our neighbours'. There's absolutely no reason to believe that there will be mass death in e.g. Finland later.
every time I see the reduction to only 2-3 neighboring Scandinavian countries as the comparison set, I can't help but think that people are moving the goalposts to support their conclusion.
Yes, it's important to recognize comparables, so we can learn something, but we're not just looking for approaches to this dilemma that work in Scandinavian countries. Sweden is worse health-wise and better economically than countries most similar that totally shut down, but they are doing a lot better than other countries both health-wise and economically than other countries that shut down.
Choosing only their direct comparables, and someone will come to their conclusion that their solution was a failure, when the truth is that it was neither a total failure nor total success and we should look into it in more detail to extract some lessons that can be applied more broadly.
Dismissing Sweden as a failure would be like Alexander Fleming discarding the penicillin contaminated petri dish as a failure instead of observing more closely and learning something valuable.
They’re also much worse than a lot of not directly comparable countries, but if I would bring that up then people would just dismiss it as not comparable.
The bottom line is that the swedish strategy doesn’t work in Sweden and nothing indicates that it would work anywhere.
The difference is obviously due to the fact that New York City is a global destination with huge inflows of people in and out of it. do you think that other Scandinavian countries are getting nearly as much travel in and out as Sweden is? I highly doubt it and I think that you are cherry picking to support your own agenda.
Sweden should be compared to other global centers of commerce not to back waters like Finland and Norway. No offense to those countries but they don't register as a blip economically compared to Sweden and we all know it.
Are they counting deaths that happen outside hospital in those figures?
> Earlier today we tweeted about a new WHO scientific brief on "immunity passports". The thread caused some concern & we would like to clarify:
We expect that most people who are infected with #COVID19 will develop an antibody response that will provide some level of protection. [1]
None of us had data in the beginning, and our leaders chose different paths, some erring more on the side of caution. I agreed with these efforts personally, because the little data we did have at the time supported these actions of "locking down."
More time has passed, more data has come in. Increasingly, I'm starting to be convinced that I was incorrect in my original assessment, and that the lockdown wasn't necessary in the broader United States and Europe, outside of dense urban areas. (It should be noted that if you remove NYC from the equation, the US really has had no issues with hospitals being remotely close to capacity.)
Sweden ran an experiment, and so did the rest of the world. It could have gone either way.
My oldest brother owns a small business, as a professional dog trainer for high-end clients. He had just expanded into a new facility with much more capacity, hiring employees and taking on a lot of debt. His new facility is idle now, and his business is in trouble. He is personally distraught. The lockdowns were an experiment on what would happen to a society if you shut down most commerce, except for the lucky few like HN readers who get to work from a laptop.
I'm pretty appalled at the unwillingness of HN readers to, like me, admit that maybe, just maybe, we all made decisions with little data, and that the increasing data and time elapsed is showing that most of us, myself included, were incorrect. That's ok, because it's really not anything people should be blamed for. However, it is a very bad thing to be unwilling to change one's mind after new data comes in.
This is where the politicization of the issue is problematic. Leaders feel like they are betraying their "tribe" if they change their mind. At this point, continuing the lockdowns without acknowledging nations that didn't lockdown and are doing well is a form of generational warfare: wealthier people, often older and at higher risk and with little to lose economically, against poorer, younger people in the midst of their prime working years.
We, the HN readers, are in the managerial/professional class elites who don't get hurt the same way other people our age are getting hurt. But don't worry, if we keep this up, it's going to get all of us as well.
We gambled that the virus was so bad that destroying our economy, wrecking the lives of 10s of millions of people, and seriously risking famine, was all worthwhile to slow the progress somewhat.
And boy does it ever seem like we were wrong.
Sweden evaluated the risks of not locking down vs. the risks of shutting down an economy, and made a gamble. We took the same exact game, but bet on the opposite side.
As I said in my comment, none of us knew. It's just becoming increasingly apparent, based on data, that we didn't need to lock down as much as we did. The places that didn't lock down and were prophesied to be screwed, well, they just aren't. That's a tough pill to swallow for anyone.
Just pointing out, we DID gamble. All of us did.
HN readers are in a bubble. Most tech workers had college educated parents, or are recent immigrants to the USA. They don't understand the bulk of the nation they live in, let alone what it's like to be suddenly unemployed or have your small business shut down. Therefore, they only saw the one side of the gamble, and are blinded and insensitive to the economic destruction we have incurred by "playing it safe" on the medical front.
I'm not disagreeing with the decision that was made. I'm disagreeing with doubling down on it out of pride and not wanting to admit we were wrong. We were wrong by the way. Keep that in your head, because it's true. The data is in. We were wrong. The rednecks holding "Don't Tread on me" flags, without any data, HAPPENED to be right on this one, because reality is messy and doesn't give a rats ass about your pride, or my pride.
I WAS WRONG. I THOUGHT THE LOCKDOWNS WERE THE RIGHT MOVE AT THE TIME. The data says otherwise. I'm willing to admit this, but not many on here are. That's what happens when you live in a bubble. California's horrible wealth inequality (top in the US) makes this even worse. I have neighbors that drive pick-up trucks and run small businesses that have been shut down. If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably don't.
If you make a bad decision but it works out OK, then it's still a bad decision.
If you make a good decision and it doesn't work out, you still made a good decision.
Sweden made the wrong decision, it doesn't matter that they didn't actually become the next Italy or Spain, it was wrong to risk becoming so.
The same X% of the community will need to contract the virus to have herd immunity. If the healthcare system is not overloaded, then the mortality rate is the same, just sooner. We should look back after this has occurred, either through community spread or a vaccine has been invented and successfully deployed
Swedish representatives have repeatedly called it a "myth" that there were not drastic changes in their lifestyle. The truth is, the Swedish population was extremely compliant and conscientious of recommendations, so that mandatory lockdowns were never fully 'mandatory' but the change in behavior was voluntarily taken.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...
-50% of Swedish employment is now remote
-Overall, travel from the Stockholm region had decreased by 80-90%
-85% of ferry bookings for a popular ferry had been rescheduled or canceled
-Popular holiday destinations reported a 90% reduction in patronage
-50% drop in public transportation usage in urban areas
-Stockholm streets have 30% less vehicle traffic and 70% less pedestrians
-All travel abroad recommended against until June 15
Laws enacted:
-Gatherings of 50 people or more were banned, with threat of imprisonment
-Expansion of sick leave protection
-Reduced access to bars and restaurants(although table service allowed)
-Banned visits to nursing homes
And if things had become worse than now, how would that have impacted the economy?
The USA didn't lock down. Individual states locked down, at different rates. Some didn't lock down at all.
Take a look at the data and see if you can find a difference between the early and late lockdown states, particularly the ones that border each other.
I'm amazed at how blind people on HN are to the fact that the entire nation didn't take a homogenous approach to this at all. We have 50 different strategies that we're deployed.
Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free.
Not all states locked down, at all. That matters. Travel between states, for the most part, fell to record low rates. This happened voluntarily, before legally mandated lockdowns were triggered.
You asked "what would have happened if we hadn't locked down."
I pointed out that not all places locked down, and many locked down later.
"Trying to tease out the data your asking for isn't possible due to inadequate reporting, inadequate testing, and the fact that travel between states is free"
It's not hard to look at the Johns Hopkins data set, which contains data at the county level for the US. Not much "teasing out" to do there. It's right there. If we use admitted cases as a benchmark for actual infections, assuming it's proportional at a relatively constant level, it's not hard to do.
Fear does funny things to people. It makes them irrational and incapable of thinking clearly. It makes them susceptible to mass group behaviour and lowers their resistance to authority. The last three months has kept people in a constant state of fear and panic driven on entirely by the media.
As people are getting over their fear, there's still that nagging voice in the back of their mind telling them they're going to die.
Fear of death leads people to act in contradictory and irrational ways. Death is inevitable sooner or later. Getting over the fear of death helps you to stay rational during situations where everyone's panicking. As your fear lessens, you begin to question decisions you made during that fear state because usually they're not the best decisions.
It's that whole fight or flight response thing. In the end as rational and reasonable humans think they are, as soom as stress overwhelms them to that point of panic and fear, the lizard brain takes over and people act on instinct. Fear is a powerful emotion, it protects us from threats and danger, but succumbing to it leaves you powerless and vulnerable to control. Nearly every dictator of the 20th century has come into power because their populations were afraid of something and they used that fear to take control.
That's what the majority of the world's been doing for months. Different people tend to come down from that state at different rates but as this goes on and continues to be not the apocolypse that was pushed on everyone, more people will begin to question what they've allowed to happen.
Inciting fear is a constant and age old tactic of those that would oppress to gain power over those they would oppress.
The politicisation of the issue is tragic for that exact reason, it has frozen people into their camps, making it harder to make correct choices given new evidence going forward.
A few days ago, I started listening to a podcast where the panelists were all somehow assuming that flattening the curve preserves the integral (the area under the curve). I personally always thought that flattening the curve results in less overall deaths, because you avoid the deaths due to the overwhelmed hospital capacity. It appears now in NYC we are at the point where the hospitals can easily handle all the Covid19 cases, with room to spare.
If you are in such a situation (hospitals below capacity), is the "area under the curve" a conserved quantity? I am still of the belief it is not: as time goes by, the medical community perfects the protocols to treat Covid19 treatments, so what it used to be a 1% fatality rate can become a 0.8% with the newest advances. However, while the "area under the curve" is not constant, it's almost constant. Is it then worth paying the economic price? Every single additional month under lockdown may drive a few more businesses into permanent destruction. Is that worth it?
I'm not so sure anymore.
That's all the Americans to have died in every war combined, roughly.
That is a lot of people and I don't suggest most people would be willing to just allow that to happen.
Are we not greater than that as a civilization?
But if destroying American society is the cost of containing the coronavirus, we can't pay it.
The US has an immense set of tools and strategies available that would, if used intelligently, certainly prevent America being destroyed without compromising public health.
However, many Americans, as seemingly you do, refuse to consider or admit that these tools exist and can easily be deployed if the political will supports them.
The only thing “destroying America” is right-wing politics refusing to use the tools available to counter the hugely deflationary step-function we are in.
But I've also seen people propose mitigations that would destroy America, and use "political will" as a euphemism for "acceptance of giant quarantine camps for all sufferers and their close contacts" or "willingness to sacrifice all social contact indefinitely". I don't think it's a good thing if political will drives us to do things which are counter to our values.
Are we so great that we have totally conquered disease? That we can keep everyone alive forever?
Certainly not. To assume otherwise shows an astonishing level of hubris.
Your comments mark you as one of the people politicizing this. As if small business owners who have seen the data change and question why liquor stores can be open and they can't are all right wingers.
By the way, your comment is naive and foolish. Grown-ups in hospitals make the decision on a regular basis that yes, a 25 year olds life is more valuable than an elderly persons.
The right wingers deny science on climate change. Now I'm seeing left wingers deny science on covid19 antibodies. (They already do it with nuclear power)
I've seen 5 antibody studies all say the same thing, and the left wingers just attack all of them reflexively. Sweden was right. We were wrong.
> As if anyone is arguing this.
The comment I replied to literally argues this in its single declarative sentence.
> yes, a 25 year olds life is more valuable than an elderly persons
You literally just argued it.
> Your comments mark you as one of the people politicizing this. As if small business owners who have seen the data change and question why liquor stores can be open and they can't are all right wingers.
If you don't think declaring old people to be sacrificial is political I don't think you are living in a world that understands what politics is. If you think a policy based on criteria that results in denial of care to most black people, who are at a disadvantage in the "years of health" calculation, while providing care to the majority of whites isn't political, what is?
> The right wingers deny science on climate change. Now I'm seeing left wingers deny science on covid19 antibodies. (They already do it with nuclear power)
> I've seen 5 antibody studies all say the same thing, and the left wingers just attack all of them reflexively. Sweden was right. We were wrong.
This is definitely non-sequitor, and moves toward just ranting. It doesn't add to the conversation.
However, there are downsides to this philosophy. For instance, it means that any amount of resources should be spent equally to keep alive 75 year olds and 25 year olds. This approach can result in some seriously negative outcomes for public finances, which could be better spent on education, etc.
Lives can't be traded, so we can't know the market value of lives. But I'd wager that most people over 75 would trade their life for a 25 year old life, if they could.
That's only one way to demonstrate that most 75 year olds believe their life to be less valuable than a young person starting out. From a more selfless frame, most 75 year olds would also assert that a 25 year old should be prioritized over themselves
Now, notice that I did not mention so far anything about unemployment, bankruptcies, tenant evictions, foreclosures, or any of the other myriad of economic illnesses. I kept the discussion strictly about healthcare, and who dies who lives.
I'm in favor of keeping the lockdown for a bit longer, but keeping it for many months doesn't make too much sense, even if you completely disregard the economic consequences.
Analyzing where we currently are within that context - do hospital workers have all the PPE they need? Are all companies now able to properly equip their workers? How about individuals? From what I've seen, most everyone in public is still running around in home made cloth masks, so it seems like we're still trying to regain our composure with basic supplies.
This is one narrow metric and there are obviously other concerns such as how serious everyone is taking this - basically zero at the start of March, but decently now - which can buy us a lot. We could and should see more types of businesses opening up, but these businesses need to demonstrate that they will be taking appropriate hygienic precautions. I was in a bank last week, and despite all of their new procedures, the rep I sat down with was literally open-faced coughing into his elbow. He shouldn't have come into work, but economic pressure and expedience are still overriding common sense.
We certainly shouldn't be talking about the current state of affairs as if they were a mistake, implying that it's reasonable to just let the economy dictate that everyone return to business as usual. The economy exists to serve humans, not the other way around. I feel for small business owners like your brother, but his actual problem is that black hole of debt. The appropriate way to help small businesses is to address the elephant in the room, rather than looking for justifications to go back to ignoring it for yet another decade.
Excluding NYC, the US is on par with Germany. We never came close to being Italy.
I thought for sure we were going to be. I saw data that led me to believe it. The data is richer now. There is more of it. I was wrong. Reality is telling us that for once, there is good news.
This virus isn't as bad, and the lockdowns can be eased. That's the data NOW.
My God, why is it that since Trump got elected, that every position on a factual argument turned into an ideological hill to die on.
I changed my mind, yet it's like I'm wearing a maga hat for saying it.
Regarding my brother's business:
His debt was no issue when he had customers. The government shut down the economy for the first time in the history of the US. He didn't account for that when taking out the loan. This decision now seems unnecessary. If data starts to show that I'm wrong, I will AGAIN change my mind.
I just wish others on here would try that themselves.
In general I would say your perception is in line with the general divisiveness of our times. I personally identify as a libertarian, but when I talk to people I'm always perceived as $OTHER because I don't match their overall narrative.
But concretely, if you said specifically what should be reopened, or included details about how your brother was planning on keeping contact down, then there would be something constructive to talk about. I myself think there are businesses that are closed that should be open - the small retailer vs "essential" corporate chain thing is especially galling, especially for garden stores.
But instead, when saying things can be generally "eased", and even saying that the reactionary shutdowns were a "mistake", it supports obtuse action like Texas reopening malls, restaurants, and movie theaters - probably the worst type of places for people to remain aware of social distancing. (I'd take this back if I saw people in malls actually staying apart and following arrows, but after what I've seen in grocery stores I'm not hopeful)
And reopenings may look small business friendly, but rather: https://i.redd.it/f2ry8pgk84v41.png . Basically the main relief avenues for individuals and small businesses require being completely shutdown.
Framing the initial decision as a "mistake" makes it seem like you are repeating a talking point. The goal was to avoid disaster, so a lack of disaster doesn't imply anything. What did necessitate a shut down is a federal government that failed to act for two months, told people to continue on as normal, and actually interfered with the individual states obtaining medical supplies. It's like if a bus driver had a heart attack so one of the passengers took over and stomped on the brakes, and then was told their action was a mistake because they could have simply kept driving the bus.
> His debt was no issue when he had customers
IMO the debt was an issue the whole time, regardless of his being able to service it. While debt can be useful, we've had artificially low interest rates going on two decades, depleting businesses of operating cash reserves. Financialization causes fragility, as it locks businesses into narrow assumptions, and those assumptions can change.
People have a tendency to experience a bimodal or even multimodal distribution and come to the conclusion that there are two or more distinct equally probably possible values, when the truth is that there is a spectrum between those values and that the probability of experiencing the different modes are not equal.
In this case, we could plot immunity on one or two axes. The first access would be the duration of immunity, from no immunity to lifetime immunity and the second axis would be the strength of the immune response from no immunity to total immunity.
In the case of this coronavirus, if similar coronaviruses are any indication, we're probably dealing with something with a modal peak with mild to strong immunity for 3-5 years. If you're re-exposed in that time people, you get very mild to no symptoms and re-new your immunity. If you get re-exposed outside that window, your symptoms are more likely to be severe with the severity proportional to how long your body has had to forget how to respond.
Furthermore, not all humans are equal and have the same immune system, so it's possible that there is a small subset of people whose immune system isn't capable of forming an antibody response that lasts very long.
With this all in mind, for most people, re-infection isn't likely a risk and if you are re-infected, your symptoms will be milder. The real problem here is that this disease will almost certainly become endemic that humanity will deal with forever, so we should just go ahead and return to normal at a pace that our healthcare systems can handle.
>The real problem here is that this disease will almost certainly become endemic that humanity will deal with forever, so we should just go ahead and return to normal at a pace that our healthcare systems can handle.
But if you accept the current 2% fatality rate, that means 2% of your countries population might die. Is that acceptable for a developed country?
Are you really a developed country if your relationship with death is such that you're only capable of considering lives saved and not properly considering the consequences of what you're doing to save those lives?
Right now we're welcoming all sorts of authoritarian surveillance that we will have long after the virus is no longer a threat. Is that legacy worth 2%? I don't know the answer to that question, but I can't consider any place developed if they aren't really having that conversation. The legacy of our actions will outlive all of us. What legacy are we going to leave? A surveillance state? An awful economic situation for those in their prime working years? A national debt whose interest only will claim greater proportion of the country's economic output?
Would you go to a concert if lockdowns were lifted? Travel in the US ground to a halt before lockdowns were enacted. People aren't stupid.
We aren't that different from the Swedes, despite the fact that everyone says that to argue against socialism here.