In Covid19 Deaths/Population/Country, Sweden went from bottom of the heap to top 10 in the last month. We will see what happens in the following month.
Oh, and their Economy got shellacked anyway.
What exactly have they gained by this experiment?
Perhaps they will take less of an economic hit than some other countries, but we don't know that yet. Their government also recently approved a bailout.
UK tried this early as well with Boris Johnson, they are now top 5 for Covid19 Deaths/Population/Country
USA just cracked the top 10, and rising fast.
Top 10 (only including countries >1 million people) with [deaths/million]
1. Belgium [540]
2. Spain [464]
3. Italy [415]
4. France [327]
5. UK [267]
6. Netherlands [540]
7. Sweden [237]
8. Switzerland [192]
9. Ireland [156]
10. USA [144]
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
What have Sweden gained?
Their economy is currently more functional than pretty anybody else’s. Their borders are open. They have had 2,021 deaths at the time of me writing this. The whole “deaths per million” is funny. India could suffer 500,000 deaths today and still only be ranked in 4th place by that metric tomorrow.
As
@fattest_foot said, Sweden are way ahead of the curve.
They’ve still built field hospitals and increased PPE and medical equipment and prepared for the worst. They’ve not done nothing. They just not locked down. The Swedish government didn’t mandate anything. They simply advised people and gave them some guidance. Nothing more.
They don’t have to agonise over the order in which they should lift lockdown measures and to what degree and for how long. They kept bars, pubs, shops and restaurants open. Schools for those aged 16 and under stayed open. Even their largest cinema chain has kept movie theatres open but capped auditorium capacity at 50 people per showing. There is very little for them to do now. They just keep going as they are. They had 185 deaths yesterday, but only 84 today.
In the opinion of the people behind their strategy, they traded more deaths at this early stage, for fewer deaths further on, and that countries who locked down are simply doing the reverse, because they will be hit by multiple waves of the virus over the next year or so.
Sweden aren’t going to experience a second, third or fourth wave because they’re already in a post-lockdown state and have been since the start. Whatever waves they might experience, will all happen right now if they’re going to. If herd immunity is something that can be achieved in less than a decade and helps, Sweden will be the first country to experience it. They’re already talking about Stockholm possibly having herd immunity by mid-May or June.
As I said earlier in this thread, or perhaps on another thread, they’re able to do this because their national attitude/collective temperament and respect for the government is very high and their population is quite small (10 million) and much of it is scattered over a large area. My native UK kind of tried this approach but thankfully we gave up and locked down because our collective temperament is not conducive to doing what the Swedes are doing. We have too many idiots over here. It would have been pure chaos. Sweden however have the ability to pull this off because they’re a different kind of people and a different kind of society. The only thing they wish they’d done sooner is ban people from visiting care homes.
That said, all countries have been hit hard in care homes, which brings me to a another point. I think Swedish death figures may include hospital deaths AND care home deaths. The UK doesn’t do this at the moment. We might be omitting about 10,000 deaths from our count because we don’t want to know how many people have died in care homes. The numbers increased greatly in the weeks leading up to Friday April 10th, I can’t begin to imagine how much worse they will be by the time they are reported properly in the next week or so.
Also, I read that every time the Swedish government discovers that someone who had the virus has died, that person is registered as a COVID-19 death if it happened within 30 days of the diagnosis – even if the cause of death was cancer or a heart attack. It means that Sweden reports the number of people who die
with COVID-19, not
of COVID-19.
I don’t know how true that is, but if it is true then it puts Sweden even further ahead of the game, and that if everyone else registered deaths in the same way and counted their care home deaths, Sweden would probably drop down the rankings.
Either way, as things stand right now, Sweden are in a better position than pretty much every country in the world, economical, socially and in terms of total number of deaths because everyone else, even the likes of Germany and South Korea will experience an increase in deaths when they re-open schools, workplaces, bars and cinemas etc.