If/when we get a vaccine for sars-cov2 it will be the way to go.
No previous corona virus has been stopped by herd immunity. All by quarantine and eliminating spread.
Not worth it. We have vaccines for influenza, and the death toll is ~100-fold less than covid-19 for unrestrained spread. Every year the influenza strain is different enough that mass shutdown would have to be redone every year
Do you have any factual basis for this belief?
It’s simple math. What is the size of the population? What percentage of those people need to be infected to reach herd immunity? What is the fatality rate of the infection? For the US, that would be 330M people x 70% (optimistically) x 1% fatality rate = 2.3 million deaths.
And the glaring problem with your premise is that it’s clear that we don’t understand this virus well enough to know who is at risk. Every age group has had deaths. People with no history of smoking, pollution exposure, hypertension, lung disease, cardiac disease, kidney disease - they’ve all died to this virus. So while we can try to protect at-risk people, we really don’t know who those people are. Which comes to the 2nd biggest reason for slowing this thing down - time. Time to do the research so that we do get to understand the mechanisms and risks of this virus, this disease, so that we can open things up again while protecting people with knowledge and understanding, instead of flailing about in fear and causing more damage.
People are dying.
And some people simply won’t care… until it happens to them, personally.
And by then, how many innocent people whose deaths could be prevented will be dead, I wonder.
God, why do so many people have their heads so firmly planted up their ass?
The overwhelming success of the Dumbening combined with a severe lack of mass empathy, I reckon.
Sprinkle in a dash of propagandistic misinformation campaigns and lack of critical thinking being taught at most public schools, and you have the makings of our current shit show of a timeline!
How can you throw that around when you 1. Didn’t bother to calculate the death total for the herd immunity you’re proposing, and 2. Appear unfamiliar with the concept of driving R0 down to eliminate spread?
This primary shows the amount of testing not the true number of infected people. There have been done more tests in Norway where the population is half so they have found more positive results for less severe cases.
In Sweden test is just done on people that are need of care in hospital and people that work in the healthcare sector. If you feel sick and is not in need of hospital care the instruction is just to stay home and no testing is done.
Another comparison is Iceland that has done most tests per capita, they have 1801 confirmed cases and 10 deaths of a population of 366,130. So one dead in 180 cases. This is likey a number closer to the true death rate of the infection
Comparing the number of dead vs confirmed cases is meaningless if the amount of testing policy is not identical.
Deaths per million people according to worldometers.info/coronavirus
SWEDEN 301 deaths/1M pop
DENMARK 89 deaths/1M pop
FINLAND 46 deaths/1M pop
NORWAY 40 deaths/1M pop
It seems like their death rate would be so high because they have a way higher rate of actual infection than confirmed cases. Every country is working with this deaths-to-confirmed-cases ratio, and I think it’s misleading in almost every case.
When we look at underlying conditions that aggravate COVID-19, Sweden rates far better than countries like the US. 10.5% of Americans have diabetes, for instance, vs. 4.8% of Swedes. With lower prevalence of aggravating conditions, it stands to reason that a higher percentage of Swedes could be infected but show no symptoms. And when you show no symptoms, you’re less likely to be tested…
But Sweden’s deaths per population is still very high, even in comparison with their neighbors.
The virus seems to spread better indoors in crowded rooms, that’s why you have more influenca in winter. Now that it is getting warmer and people go outdoors it’s easier to keep distance.
That headline is very unfair. I hope that people will listen to the interview instead of just posting snarky gifs… As a Swede it is fascinating how often our country is used by foreigners as an example to prove some point in their domestic politics.
I think that the public health agency has done a great job, as does most Swedes. Especially since these measures have to be maintained for a long time. Remember that this pandemic will last more than a few weeks. Looking at the curve of infections and deaths, the curve has been flattened and there are still intensive care bed available even in the most affected regions. Most deaths are among the very old living in nursing homes around Stockholm. In the rest of the country the measures to protect the old have so far been more successfull. Compared to our neighbouring countries we have more deaths. But within the country there is also a huge difference between Stockholm and other large cities. Other factors probably also play a part, such as the fact that Sweden had a holiday which a lot of people go skiing on when the outbreak happened in Austria.
The problem is that we will not know the results of different policys until maybe 2022 or so.
A few more things to consider is that Swedish death statistics are a lot more precise than most countries in the world because of how the death registry from is crosschecked with the personal numbers of people tested. They also include people who were infected but might have died from other causes, because the authorities have stated that they rather report to many cases than to few.
Does this mean I think other countries should adopt the Swedish model in countering the disease? No, and neither does Tegnell. The Swedish model is based on that you can stay at home with pay from the first day you feel any kind of mild symptom without risking loosing your job. It is based on access to healthcare and a social safety net.
Don’t take number tooo seriously:
The tounge in cheek comments “if I don’t test I don’t have sick” bear some truth.
Like as if anyboby thinks the numbers from like India are actual representation of reality. Some countries simply are unable to bring up real validated data.
I prefer Slovakian and Czech approach. They reacted quickly and made mask wearing mandatory. The numbers speak for themselves:
Poland also reacted quickly, but with less severe lockdown (no non-essential business closing at all) and later introduction of mandatory mask wearing and is now gradually easing restrictions (started May 1st), we’ll see where that goes:
Mass shutdown would obviously not make sense, but current pandemic may make mask wearing in public transit during flu season more socially acceptable in Europe.
And even that assumes that hospitals won’t be overwhelmed, so some restrictions are still necessary and for a long time. With unrestrained spread death rate will be higher.
Thank you for this, I was hoping a Swede would chime in. Many of these are points I’ve tried to make in this thread. If Tegnell was such a dufus and his policies so self-evidently dreadful he wouldn’t have such high confidence from the Swedish people, who are not idiots (despite the jokes my neighbors here in Norway like to tell).
I think the biggest differences between what is happening in your country and what is happening here is (a) the genuine, serious mismanagement in care homes that happened there, and (b) your national skiing holiday taking place a week before the Norwegian equivalent. If Norway hadn’t cancelled the Holmenkollen just in time things might be as bad here.
There’s not much evidence that mask wearing outside has more of an effect than just proper social distancing. As you can see from the following chart, Iceland and Norway (no masks) have roughly the same curves as Slovakia and Czech (you can’t see Norway on the chart because it is right under the Czech curve).
See also:
I do wish we had mandatory mask wearing in stores here. I was talking to a colleague yesterday about this, we couldn’t figure out where we’d even buy one.
It means precious little. There’s no way any information coming from official Russia organs can be seen to be accurate. To Putin, information is a weapon. He will have hospitals and health ministries on a tight leash.
Here’s an article from the NYT making a case that with 20-20 hindsight, we should have cut off all travel from Europe much earlier than we did. It inadvertently makes the case that we should have quarantined NYC from the rest of the country, too, because NYC waited way, way too long to lock down.
It seems likely that a post-coronavirus world will be a world with less permeable national borders than we have become accustomed to. Every country is going to be watching for the outbreaks of new viruses and closing down its borders in the early stages.
A post-coronavirus USA may have less permeable internal borders as well. I imagine that states which have been very lightly touched by the virus such as Arkansas, West Virginia, Oregon, Montana, Hawaii (helps to be an island) Alaska (helps to have lots of near-vacant Canada in between), would like to close their own borders, except that the need to bring in things for their residents to eat and to use pretty much makes that impossible.
