The stats are at https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utb... . For non-IE browsers see https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6... for plots.
On the right top is "Sjukdomsfall per dag" - "illness cases per day". You can see the big peak ending around early July, and the new peak rising. Of course there's better ability to detect cases.
On the right middle is "Nya intensivvårdade fall per dag" - "new intensive care cases per day". IT's about 1/10th of the April peak, but at 2-3/day is several times higher than the low point of 1 about every 2-3 days.
On the right bottom is "Avlidna per dag" - "deaths per day". It's harder to tell without smoothing, but it seem to have increased too.
Have another cup-o-joe and tell me why I'm wrong ;)
As I wrote in the comment you replied to, "Of course there's better ability to detect cases." I thought that was obvious enough to not need further elaboration. I seem to have been wrong, so I will further clarify.
June is roughly when covid screening was available to everyone. Eg, the local pharmacy offers antibody testing. You'll see that's when the number of known cases went up even though the intensive care and death rates decreased.
Thus, it makes no sense to compare as you did October's reported case incidence - when widespread testing was available - directly with April's - when it was not.
In addition, the question I replied to was "has the spike in cases corresponded with a spike in hospitalizations?" The answer is still "yes". There has been a roughly four-fold increase in reported cases over the last six weeks, and there has been a roughly four-fold increase in the number of intensive care cases over the same period of time. That's by eyeball, so increases might not match that precisely, but it's still a correspondence.
Since the lockdown we have is no longer effective at keeping the rates low, it makes sense to "sharpen" the recommendations.
Tell me how I'm wrong that that's not a correspondence. And hopefully with less snark.
As for the curves. Do I interpret your point correctly as follows? The major factor of the discrepancy was the undetected cases in April vs October, due to lower testing? Does that hold true when comparing with the quite low numbers coming out of antibody screening? I remember this being drastically overestimated (4x?).
I cannot say if the major factor was due to lower testing. I can only say that the testing regimes were significantly different and so cannot be compared as directly as you did.
The fact you can’t really infer anything from the other graphs without a microscope might be a clue as to how much of a deal this is.
Though to point out, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease#Concepts says "many cases, terms such as disease, disorder, morbidity, sickness and illness are used interchangeably" and "The terms illness and sickness are both generally used as synonyms for disease;" so I'm not clearly wrong.
It then goes on to make your point "however, the term illness is occasionally used to refer specifically to the patient's personal experience of his or her disease. In this model, it is possible for a person to have a disease without being ill."
As you can see from my earlier comments, I agree that the "sharpening" of Swedish recommendations is nowhere the big deal that the referenced article implies it is, and the local media is not making a big deal of it. It's preparations for any local outbreaks, ahead of time so people can be prepared, and knowing that existing practices are no longer as effective.
But, why the emphasis on "without a microscope"? Isn't early the right time for things like this?
How long should we wait before we can accept that the increase here is tiny and much smaller than elsewhere?
Again, eyeballed numbers, but you make it sound like something is significantly different.
Isn't the goal to keep the numbers from getting larger, like we see elsewhere?
Don’t forget that you can’t take prevention measures without causing other effects; if you keep people locked into their homes they will become unhealthier, if the economy crashes they will have a lack of food and health care.
But as is very well known - it's the topic of this HN posting! - we here in Sweden aren't locked into our homes, even with these new recommendations in place.
So since this posting and conversation is about Sweden, I don't really see what you're getting at. Are you expressing frustrations you have with the restrictions where you live?
I don't think it's impossible to keep the Swedish economy going, with enough food and health care, while also keeping the infection rate low by being a bit more mindful of what we do when there are local outbreaks.
And I think the 4x rate since 1 September is enough cause to be more mindful. Otherwise, it'll be 10x in a month, and more after that.