Sweden bans public events of more than eight people

Also, way more people are indoors in November in Sweden than August. Many people travel to remote cabins in the summer - August in Stockholm is about as deserted as San Francisco during Burning Man. They're mostly back by September, bringing more people in proximity. I'm in Seattle and Washington is locking down again, as colder temps have brought the long predicted fall spike.

The basic R0 is believed to be around 5.7, so even with precautions such as social distancing, masks, and hand washing (which won't be followed flawlessly), it's still trying to mitigate something outstandingly infectious. You need to bring the R0 to 1.0 for the number of cases to only increase at a constant rate, as for anything above 1 every 10 cases will lead to more than 10 new cases, which compounds as it spreads.

The virus is in cats, so it is not going away.

Sweden has a healthy population, tons of spare healthcare capacity, inexpensive healthcare, a high propensity to social distance, an outdoorsy culture, low socioeconomic disparity, and very few people living in multi-generational households. The US, sadly, has none of that.

Also, Sweden did have a few restrictions in place. They shut down high schools and universities, and strongly encouraged WFH if possible. Arguably, most of red state US had even looser restrictions than that.

HN's perspective on lockdowns might be skewed by the fact that most of us here live in places that actually did have a good faith reasonable response to COVID, but it didn't really work in the absence of a coordinated nationwide response.

I have no idea whether this is actually the case in Sweden or not, but it seems like one possibility could be that people/businesses were originally taking additional measures beyond what was legally required but then stopped.

Now that multiple vaccines are around the corner, minimizing infections can most definitely save lives. Would they have done better if they had been stricter? Yes. But there was no way to know this back then.

Imagine that there was no vaccine and the pandemic became an endemic that nobody could escape... and the only viable option was herd immunity. Had that happened, the Swedish strategy would have put them ahead of most. They would have taken a smaller hit to the economy while not losing that many more lives in a given period (do note that, in that case, the period would have been much longer and most of those who died last year had pre-existing conditions and something else would have most likely killed them within the next few years anyway).

To be clear I'm not claiming that all pandemic control measures are ineffective. We just don't have strong scientific evidence that they are effective at the national level over long periods. Sometimes things just happen randomly. Is it possible that Sweden just flipped the coin to heads a bunch of times in al row and now it finally came up tails?

Swedes spend a lot of time outdoors, especially in the summer. (Not suggesting more than elsewhere; most places seemed to have better numbers in the summer.) Now that the weather is turning less pleasant, more people spend more time indoors. Therefore, transmission is rising again.

> Sweden should have enjoyed a flat and sustainable level of infections.

So I think therefore that this didn't really happen, which means now we get our second wave. In some places, such as the nearby town of a few thousand, we are actually only starting to get a first wave as we never really had a first wave yet.

Still almost no mask wearing, though. Not sure when or if masks will happen here, although I have seen packs of them at the market now.

Again, I am no expert and I have not looked at actual transmission numbers throughout the summer etc. This is just my best guess.

Edit: What I mean is, I don't think most regions of Sweden had sustained levels of transmission during the summer, in case that wasn't clear.

I think we can now conclude that covid19 behaves seasonally, just like other respiratory viruses.

But nobody knows exactly why. There are many theories, but none universally accepted: Summertime higher vitamin D levels from sunlight, maybe this gives better immune defense. Sunlight disinfects surfaces. Colder air is dry, respiratory droplets stay afloat longer and spread better in dry air. People's mucous membranes stay healthier in more humid air, maybe they are more susceptible for virus attacks in dry air. Maybe the patterns of how much people meet each other indoors is different in cold weather.

Monumental incompetency/groupthink at our small CDC-equivalency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) during the spring. Disaster was narrowly avoided by heroic work by healthcare workers/hospitals. A lot of people died though. Death per capita levels are similar to US levels, not to rest-of-Nordics levels (e.g. Norway/Denmark/Finland). This isn't acceptable.

Herd immunity was the obvious plan all along although it was publicly denied. Recent "leaked" emails have revealed the truth.

The same people responsible for the above are still in charge. It will be a long winter.

Source: Jag är svensk. (I am Swedish.)

Actual delivery of vaccines to the general public is probably still a minimum of 6 months away, even assuming we have enough vaccine doses to cover the general public. We are in the middle of accelerating case counts right now, and we don't have the luxury of waiting that long.

What is the difference in testing for covid at the beginning compared to now? I seems that no one takes into account that the world wide deaths are down as infections spike, and that the two week latency doesn't seem to be a factor.

Sweden's daily mortality rate is .2 vs the US at .3 and EU at .6. All of them have a daily case rate of around 40.

while they have an uptick in cases, deaths are steady.

Edit: What this chart makes pretty clear, who dies from covid 19. Sweden has < 100 people who were not older than 50 who died, while elderly got completely wrecked.