I have been following Sweden throughout the pandemic, interested in seeing what result they get with their hands off approaches versus the lock down approach. Purely from medical curiosity and not from political interests.
A few things need to be understood before diving into the data. Viruses are opportunistic organisms. They hunt hosts. Early on, hosts are plentiful and the transmission is easy. After you get to a certain point, hosts are harder to find, and the numbers drop. Next, to judge the effectiveness of Sweden, GB, or any other country it will need to be judged AFTER the pandemic ends and all the data is in. Looking at daily or weekly snapshots are not accurate.
Historically, respiratory pandemics run 18 ± months from outbreak to peak transmission to the crash of number of new cases. There are still new cases after that for a time, but the logarithmic growth in new cases is done. Think of it like a pot of boiling water. A few bubbles transform into many until the pot boils over and it simmers down. Maybe another analogy is the atomic fission model with ping pong balls and mouse traps. While not exactly the same, it is a decent representation of how virus number grow, crest, and crash: 1:35 mark. So let's look at Sweden. It is a country of about 10 million people. It has a major population concentration around the capital. For comparison, the State of Georgia has about 10 million people, with a major population concentration around the capital. Let's look at the data now:
Total cases - 1,101,000 Deaths - 14,640 Active cases 10.641
Georgia
Total Cases - 1,185,571 Deaths - 21,698 Active Cases - 74,752
Pretty similar results lockdown/masks vs. no lockdown and very casual mask usage and social distancing. I caution agaist making definitive conclusions because Georgia is not Sweden, but the obvious is the obvious. The virus did what viruses do with or without the harsh measures.
For those interested, Click through the site and look at the graphs between US and Sweden and spread of the disease, how many months until the numbers peaked, and the current number of deaths and new cases. Sweden did experience a double wave before the numbers crashed. The US had the typical rise and fall, however we are seeing a rise in new cases popping back up. The more important graph is daily deaths. So far, daily deaths have not spiked up with the number of new cases. Once again, I caution against drawing conclusions just yet, but so far, the Delta varient has not been responsible to a huge spike in deaths. US C-19 deaths peaked about Jan-Feb 2021 and have crashed. We shall see if the Delta changes that.
Interim Conclusions
Nobody has criticized Sweden for a number of months now. Turns out their strategy got results similar enough to everybody else. Why is that? Once the virus was out of Wuhan, it was going to hunt hosts. Unless you lived on an island that could be locked down, the virus was going to get transmitted no matter what. The original shutdown strategy was to designed as a temporary measure to prevent hospitals and health care from being overwhelmed. Then it was politicized "to slow the spread" ax was ready. In the end, the virus was going to spread no matter what.
The medical community has no way other than an effective vax or complete herd immunity to "stop" the spread. Note: nobody has ever said "stop" the spread, only "slow the spread". Politicians are the ones that are desparate for a solution that does not exist beyond the above. Swedes have more trust in their government because they believe their government wants what is best for all Swedes, and what gets them re-elected. Thus, the Swedish government was able to take this appraoch without an opposition Party blasting them at every turn. Note that the decision makers in Sweden got plenty of criticism during the peak months of transmission, but I'd say looking at things right now, their way was no worse than the lockdown/mask fiasco. statestatestatestatestate
I got banned on another web site for a debate that happened on this site. That's a first
