What is the criteria for defining an acceptable number of deaths?
Given how much higher they are over other nations—even taking into account excess deaths—I would say they have failed that metric.
The Swedes are betting that nobody in the world will be spared from COVID and therefore the delta in deaths is temporary. They are front-loading it while attempting to keep the economic impacts as low as possible. They anticipate the rest of the world will be contending with shutdowns, re-openings, shutdowns, re-openings, and when all is said and done, the death rate per capita will be the same the world over.
So far, they the Swedes have bet one way, much of the rest of the world has bet the other way. Time will tell, but it is much too soon to make that judgment today.
Partly because they are export dependant and nobody's buying & partly because enough swedes are staying home (not going to pubs etc.) for the economy to tank but not enough to avoid 10 times as many deaths as their neighbours.
So, yes, time will tell. But for now they are getting the worst of both:
Many dead and no economic benefit.
Do you think Corona is going anywhere?
If you have a look at the current infection rate in a lot of European (and others) countries, even reaching 50% of the population infected would take decades.
So yes, I believe that delaying is not the only possibility.
It's currently mandatory masks in public, keeping distances and washing hands, and no big crowds.
Life feels pretty normal over here.
I'm talking from the perspective of a European country with <100 cases/day.
A lot of places are starting to reinstitute lockdowns.
It's also a bet that medical treatments won't improve and a vaccine won't be developed.
It seems speculatively like this is due to age-linked expression of ACE2.
You could apply this to things like airport security and check how the sum of all the time passenger spend in line compares to the lives saved. My guess is especially in the airport example the lines have taken more human life than terrorists.
Similarly if I died of covid now, it isn't just the 40ish years of life ahead I lose, but the impact on my wife, children and wider family. I've seen friends lose 72 yo grandfathers - who could have provided years ahead of fun and good memories with their grandkids.
This is not how society works. We could drastically curtail the number of deaths by outlawing cars, alcohol, and social interaction indefinitely, regardless of covid, but we don't. Refusing to understand that tradeoffs are involved is not helpful.
vs.
> what an acceptable death rate might be
Maybe you just misspoke?
I will try to clarify this once more:
from an high level/abstract point of view, all deaths (I am now specifically referring to the coronavirus, but this works for deaths in general) should be avoided. This is obviously not possible in practice, hence some deaths have to be accepted. What can be considered acceptable is relative, but it helps to look at the countries that have managed to keep their deaths low and take their numbers as a yardstick for other societies.
- Nobody knows if there was some excess mortality here, because there's no monitoring.
- There were thousands of "suspected cases" in the official reports, which remained suspected cases and never progressed to a confirmed case or a confirmed non-case (as they would if they were tested) until they stopped reporting numbers.
- People with confirmed close contact with known cases were told to isolate and were only tested if they showed symptoms (this is also normal practice in many/most Western countries).
- The supposed "large" number of tests carried out in Vietnam represents only 0.2% of the population.
- A significant portion of those tests are of people who had to be tested anyway, rather than community testing (e.g. overseas Vietnamese arriving home; the large number of charter flights that were allowed as exceptions from Korea and other countries, for employees of large firms with factories in Vietnam - e.g. LG - who did not stop during the lockdown).
- The lockdown was largely not enforced, and while streets were much quieter than usual, there were many people outside throughout. Smaller bars and restaurants only closed for a few weeks, and of course nobody wore a mask inside them. Many informal businesses (e.g. street food) never closed.
I think Vietnam's "success" is largely down to some environmental factor (average temperature/humidity, sunlight exposure, the general "outdoor" way most people socialise) keeping the number of infections or the severity of those infections down, and I think the chances that COVID caused exactly zero deaths are almost zero.
- folks that are high-risk and quarantined are monitored (guards posted outside residence)
- if you fail to self isolate, you go to a gov’t camp
- all int’l flight have been stopped; only repatriation flights are happening
- for those foreigners who made it in before the flights stopped, they all went to gov't facilities
- if someone tests positive, they will lock down all the people around them for 24hr, disinfect common areas and test
> if you fail to self isolate, you go to a gov’t camp
There are a few instances of this, which of course the govt made sure were widely reported. It's very unlikely in general that they would know, though.
> all int’l flight have been stopped; only repatriation flights are happening
This is completely false, as you can verify on any public flight tracker website. The number of flights is greatly reduced, but they never stopped. Also, extra charter flights were put on for (at least) Samsung and LG employees to come from Korea, regularly, even in the middle of the lockdown. The "all international flights stopped" line was repeated many times in the local media, and most people here believe it, despite it being untrue.
> for those foreigners who made it in before the flights stopped, they all went to gov't facilities
Not true at all, I know many people who did not have to.
> if someone tests positive, they will lock down all the people around them for 24hr, disinfect common areas and test
They notify the people around them and tell them to self-isolate. They spray some bleach around. They do not test unless symptoms are shown.
Maybe there is a bit of variation across Vietnam? I’m just sharing what my in-laws observed where they live.
When I say “all international flights” stopped, I mean, you can’t just hoop on the next flight to Vietnam. Yes, there are still repatriation flights happening and flight for certain purposes, but “normal” air travel has stopped, no?
So regardless, would you agree that Vietnam is going far beyond a lot of countries in trying to control the spread?
Perhaps. My experience was with HCMC and Hanoi.
> When I say “all international flights” stopped, I mean, you can’t just hop on the next flight to Vietnam. Yes, there are still repatriation flights happening and flight for certain purposes, but “normal” air travel has stopped, no?
Actually, there were normal, scheduled flights throughout the lockdown. There are right now, there were last week, and there were every week before that. You can trivially confirm this on a flight-tracking website (one of the ones that goes on the ADS-B data, so you see actual aircraft tracks, rather than just a flight schedule website which may show you flights that didn't actually operate). Visa waiver, visa-on-arrival, e-visa and visa issuance for tourists completely stopped, so in practice a tourist can't board a flight to Vietnam, but a small number of flights have continued running throughout, indicating sufficient demand from people who are able to fly here (Vietnamese citizens, people with residence permits, people who were able to get issued non-tourist visas in their home country, ...)
> So regardless, would you agree that Vietnam is going far beyond a lot of countries in trying to control the spread?
I'd say they're pretty much on par with any of the places that aren't a massive failure. But I also think the question of which country did it better or worse is not very interesting, and mostly a pointless political distraction from useful questions like which control measures have a meaningful effect and which don't.
I was there in February, for around a month.
As a foreigner, I was regularly receiving SMS updates about covid infections. There was a website which detailed exactly when and where people were testing positive. Hotels and guest houses, if allowed to remain open, were being closed for deep-cleaning.
Buses and trains were stopped and my temperature checked, towns and islands were quarantined where someone tested positive, contact tracing appeared to be in full force and foreigners were requested to register their movements and check in daily(iirc) to a web portal.
Again, this was in mid-February.
Luck and climate seem to be factors, but Vietnam acted when they had a low caseload and handled outbreaks sufficiently well to keep R below 1. It wouldn't be all that surprising to me if there really were no covid deaths there.
I didn't post to score points against you or at all discredit your personal experience.
> I have to disagree with the idea that Vietnam didn't take it particularly seriously
I didn't present that idea, so I'm not sure how you can disagree with it.
Have a nice evening.
"As in wartime, almost every sector, including aviation, healthcare and food production, has been mobilised and dedicated to containing the pandemic."
They fought the virus, not each other. They won.