OZ has a problem.
NZ is in a similar situation as VN where a local transmission appeared today without known infection chain. It only takes one error and you're back to square 1.
The death rate has been declining pretty much linearly since April. Restrictions were lighter than pretty much everywhere else in Europe, and have been successively loosened since they were implemented in March.
But your comment implies that Sweden is "doing something" recently, and that there haven't been any results until recently either.
And neither of that is true.
> we will see in a few months when the people get tired and want to return to normal life
Uh, it already is pretty much normal. There are signs everywhere reminding people to keep distance, restaurants have fewer tables than usual, and large gatherings are still banned, same as everywhere else. There never was a "reopen" debate in Sweden, because there wasn't really anything to reopen.
But the media image of Sweden is incredibly distorted right now, it's pretty fascinating to watch what happens when a country goes against a major news narrative.
Can you comment on what measures have brought down the infection numbers? Why were they so high in the beginning and why are they falling so quickly now?
After implementing measures it can take a few weeks to show results since detected cases can lag a lot behind actual infection events and there's local transmission chains (inside families/communities) that need to burn out before case numbers fall.
Also speaking of measures, to my knowledge, the government did not take hard measures but rather suggested a lot of the same things that other countries put into law and the Swedish population is very compliant. So it is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison.
Working from home, banning large gatherings, remote education for universities and secondary schools, reminders to keep the distance, table service only at restaurants and more space between tables.
> the infection numbers?
Sweden, like pretty much every other country, has no idea how large the number of unknown infections were back in March and April. The only certain numbers we have are ICU patients and deaths, and those have been declining constantly since mid-April. Presumably, actual cases follow the same curve.
> Why were they so high in the beginning
Exponential growth before any measures were taken.
> why are they falling so quickly now?
They're not falling quickly now, deaths and ICU patients have been falling linearly since mid-April. Death curve here: https://adamaltmejd.se/covid/
As to why, my best guess is that this virus simply wasn't much different from any other flu virus. A bit more deadly, but whatever measures people in Sweden took was enough to curb it. Also, herd immunity is probably much easier to achieve than earlier models suggest.
Also, note that the death curves for Sweden and the UK are pretty much identical despite wildly different amount of restrictions implemented: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
> After implementing measures it can take a few weeks to show results
Yes, and actual analysis of mobility shows that people voluntarily took a lot of measures before actual recommendations were put into place. Same as everywhere else. Most EU countries implemented their lockdowns weeks after the peak.
> Also speaking of measures, to my knowledge, the government did not take hard measures but rather suggested a lot of the same things that other countries put into law and the Swedish population is very compliant.
Yes. That said, mobility dropped less in Sweden compared to neighbour countries who had stronger recommendations and rules in place. You can compare the mobility curves between countries at the bottom of this page: https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden
> I'm not IN Sweden, so I only have the media image.
I'm sorry, the media image is absolutely bananas. I have never seen such blatant bias to skew everything to make Sweden look like a zombie apocalypse to drum up support for lockdowns. But it looks like lockdowns are much less effective than people think. And it looks like a small amount of meaningful measures pushed the effects of this down to less than a regular flu season.
Unmitigated, it would have been worse, but it's been mitigated everywhere, and here we are.
Most countries experience excess deaths during flu season, and some flu seasons are worse than others. Sweden absolutely had excess deaths for a couple of months this year, but you have to look at the bigger picture.
So here are graphs of total deaths per million per month for the past 40 years in Germany, Sweden, France, and Belgium: https://medium.com/@FrankfurtZack/unprecedented-overall-mort...
Now, 2020 isn't over yet, there might be a second wave of covid-19 in the winter, but given how the virus has died out with the small amount of measures taken, I don't think that's very likely. So far, 2020 in Sweden is tracking below average total deaths, even if you include all the covid-19 deaths.
If this year was "devastating", then what would you call the flu season of 1988, 1993, or 1999? Those flu seasons saw higher excess deaths than 2020 in Sweden, and no-one noticed or cared. No news articles, no reports, no lockdowns, no face masks, no travel closures, nothing. We did nothing out of the ordinary.
Now, covid-19 is more lethal than the viruses of those flu seasons, and we have no vaccine for this one, so some response is warranted. But the current worldwide hysteria is unprecedented, we have never before cared this much for this few deaths.
If you want to compare COVID-19 with the flu I think that the data so far suggests that letality rate is about 10 times higher and the number of infections is also about 10 times higher due to lack of immunity from previous infections.
I don't say that the "normal flu" is harmless, either. Nor that COVID-19 is like the plague or "harmless" like the flu. Nor that we should simply do nothing when the next infection wave comes.
It's not a flu virus and I'm not aware of anyone who thinks it is. Is this a language issue, or what do you mean?
No, it's not a flu virus, but it's definitely comparable. This thing looks nothing like ebola or measles or herpes, for example.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
Ok, it's 20 times as deadly if you count in this weird fashion.
The reason the influenza attributions are estimated higher than actual counts is because we know we're systematically underreporting influenza deaths. It also doesn't look like the US is underreporting covid-19 deaths to the same degree, so saying that the reported numbers are equally true for both diseases doesn't make sense when we know one of them is more underreported than the other, right?
Cause of death is also not an exact science, did a patient die from something or with something? Which something actually killed the patient? All of it? Some of it?
The only 100% true statistic we have is total all-cause deaths. I posted a link above that graphs total deaths per million per month going back 40 years for a couple of countries, and 2020 does not stick out in any way, shape, or form. The excess death spikes from covid-19 looks very similar to excess death spikes during regular flu seasons.
If it's 20 times as deadly, why isn't that reflected in the all-cause deaths?
Check the stats for yourself: https://medium.com/@FrankfurtZack/unprecedented-overall-mort...
How many people already had it in Sweden? About 5%? And how many will get it until herd immunity is reached? About 70%? Then it seems that it will probably come back next winter and probably with force. What we've seen this spring and summer may only be a tenth of what's about to come.
Those numbers are only some estimates and we don't know for sure but time will tell.
> What we've seen this spring and summer may only be a tenth of what's about to come.
How?
We've gotten better at treating covid-19 as the months passed, we figured out that ventilators was a pretty crap treatment, and instead figured out that oxygen, steroids and blood-thinners worked much better.
A large part of the population has already had it and built up immunity to it, and because of how a virus spreads through a population, the best spreaders are usually hit first.
The population that died from it were mostly the old and frail and at-risk, and we've gotten better at protecting them with time as well.
When we were unprepared, this thing killed less people than a regular flu season does. Why would it suddenly kill ten times as many people, now that we are prepared, and now that a significant part of the population is immune? What possible chain of events could lead to that outcome? Magic?
Granted, the 70% number is based on an R0 of 3.5 and homogeneous transmission. It's probably lower than that in many cases. In some cases it like prisons or close contact workplaces or other close contact activities it's going to be even higher as some incidents show.
The T-cell immunity is something we don't understand very well yet.
I hope that only 20% of the population will be enough to stop it, i really do, but right now i don't think it's very likely. We may have the first solid data points after the winter.
Yes, we get better at treatment and protective measures. As long as the hospitals are not overrun this may lower the fatalities a great deal. In Sweden it's looking quite good right now. In some areas in the US not so much for the coming weeks. When the hospitals are overrun, you can't help much and the fatalities will increase a lot.
Until next summer I will not judge which strategy works best. But I'd rather err on the safe side health wise and advocate for stronger protective measures even if it may mean a higher economic cost (that won't crash the economy completely). If we err on the wrong side, we could lose both, health and economy at the same time. After the numbers are in, we can say with hindsight what would have been the best course of action.
That's the problem with the NZ model of draconian lockdowns. Of course it can work, but only temporarily, and you can't stay locked down forever. I doubt the people of New Zealand are prepared to lock down over and over again every time the virus re-emerges.
The Swedish model is one that people can live with for long periods of time.
Could you clarify this? I wasn't aware of any local transmission for months but I suspect an 'if' is missing from your sentence.
I think that a full breakout takes a lot more than one error and it requires a whole chain of them and a lot of systems to fail. We have had errors like this.
The battle now seems to be keeping those quarantine contained. There are near daily escape attempts and some are going to public places or covering significant distances.
(https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...)
The case here https://ncov.moh.gov.vn/ on "11:00 25/07/2020" seems to be a local transmission if the google translation is correct. The infection must have happened two weeks ago and they are currently contact tracing. Taking an average of 4 days, we are now on generation 2-3 of follow-up cases (or even more if the infection source/chain is older and has been spreading for a longer time). Let's hope that nobody else got infected and there are no asymptomatic patients running around by now, unaware that they are spreading it all over the country.
Taking an R0 of 3 (since they don't have any hard measures right now), we are currently expect 3 * 3 * 3 cases if this person somehow got it from out of country. Finding those cases could take a bit of time and then we would look at 3 times more cases to find every 4 days. Assuming that some youngster got it and this older person is the first one to go to the doctor we could easily have 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 729 cases by now and that would probably already be out of control without instating a hard lockdown on all possibly affected regions and testing the whole population like China did.
Citation? I'm not seeing it on any of the usual NZ news sites, and I rather suspect it would be big news.
edit: oh, i see, I've misparsed your sentence. VN is where the local transmission occurred, not NZ. nevermind.