Coronavirus (Covid-19) in Other Countries (not Philippines or UK)

I watch Sweden on Worldometer every day, most of the time the daily results don't show on the main table, and often the daily results in the more detailed links are not updated for up to a week.

That 31 peak needs to be scaled by times 6 to get close to the UK on the same day, that was on the 9th I think, there are other potential issues in a country like Sweden with a small population and large geographical area the large area will have an affect on transmission as most transmission will be in densely populated urban areas, I don't know the population distribution in Sweden.

This screen grab below is not a good direct comparison because this is tail end weekend reporting but it is still relevant 6 times 31 is not that far off the UK 194 total and they are several weeks behind us still .

It's a small country John in terms of population, and in terms of health care Sweden has a very admirable record.

Probably because it is valid.

They are one example that is directly contradicted by the experience in the USA, I would not be arguing if it were not for claims of Swedish Herd immunity, I still find that claim premature in the extreme.

A quarter of the population live in the Stockholm metropolitan area, I just looked that up, whereas in the UK the population of London is 12% of the entire country roughly.

That is going to affect the dynamics of transmission in Sweden and apparent herd immunity.

To add to that Stockholm has the second largest physical area of any metropolitan population it is huge which means that density is much lower than the like of London, London is 600 odd square miles Stockholm is 3300 sq miles, so 2.4 million Swedes in 3300 sql miles vs 8.7 million people in 600 square miles.

One would think that virus spread in London would be greater as a result of greater population density and some tests do suggest high antibody prevalence in London but are we seeing herd immunity in London?

https://www.express.co.uk/news/worl...ockdown-covid19-strategy-new-restrictions/amp

That article was published on Tuesday.

Our population is 6 times greater than Sweden.

I won't argue the point that they eat better than we do, what I am arguing is the claim that they reached herd immunity which is patently not true given new infection rates in Sweden.

I think that ECQ has been finished for a wee while, it should be GCQ now, there has been a bit of back and forward with this.

Multiply the bottom one by 6.45 which is the correct population factor.

Look at November 17th



29 times 6.45 is 187 deaths.

UK November 17th 598 deaths (image below), the epidemics are not in exact sync but yes 1/3 the deaths I could have picked more favourable days for my argument but I'm not going to do that, numbers are numbers and the graphs show the trends fairly clearly.

Looking at the two graphs you show, my gut feeling is that they are at about 2/3 the overall UK death rate.

Deaths per million in Sweden 654, deaths per Million in the UK 838, yeah Sweden is doing a bit better, but they claimed they had reached herd immunity and they clearly hadn't, we never claimed that.

The claim is also that they did nothing, which is not true the young did very little but the rest of their population were socially responsible, it will take a better statistician than me to do a proper comparison but these graphs don't seem to be saying anything about herd immunity and very little about lockdown vs voluntary 'lockdown' or social responsibility and also Swedes tend to take long summer breaks of 3 to 4 weeks, lots of cultural differences.

If you forget about the graphs and go simply by mortality, deaths per million in Sweden 654, deaths per million in the UK 838, that's 75% of the UK total, now compare to Germany to date-


Mortality in Germany is less than a third that in Sweden and less than a quarter if the UK to date.

I am disagreeing with those who are saying that lockdown and other measures make no difference because a lot of countries have clearly demonstrated that you can influence the course of this infection, take South Korea a population of 51 million and 10 deaths per million to date or Singapore ultra dense population which is half the size of Sweden total deaths per million in Singapore 5/million, less than a hundredth of the Swedish experience.

Sweden said do nothing let it burn and they did not do particularly well in global terms.

South Korea never locked down like the west nor did Singapore both those countries implemented mask mandates closed down certain industries and worked out how to trace people really quickly they also acted immediately not delaying for 2 months before taking any kind of action, other countries like Vietnam and Thailand did the same and have miniscule numbers of deaths.

And take China, the source, where they missed handling the initial spread but then locked down in draconian fashion while at the same time mandating masks and brutal action against anyone attempting to hide instances of the illness where people were bundled off to isolation, their action clearly got it under control at a mortality level of 3 per million.

Now suppose we had done nothing and let it burn through the UK we could have expected up to probably 600,000 deaths we could have been standing at 150,000 to 200,000 deaths by today and then we would really look much less healthy than Sweden.

The problem is that the only true comparison is IFR Infection Fatality rate and to this day no one knows what that is for this virus as we don't know the true number of people infected in any country, most indications would suggest that IFR is about 1 to 1.3% but because analyses in each different country relies on multiple factors often specific to those countries and how they handled it we really can't say what the IFR is in each country but if we could then we would see which countries are healthier than another.

What if you are right and the IFR in Sweden is low because they did little to prevent spread and yet not that many died so lets say their IFR shows Swedes to be really healthy and only 0.2% die so IFR = 0.2 so for Sweden over the full course of their epidemic would experience be a total of 20,000 deaths, if the UK were equally healthy with the same IFR that would result in about 134,000 UK deaths here, that's with zero lockdown in both countries.

Now let's assume that the UK true IFR is 1% because the UK really is not that healthy so in the context of Covid Sweden would be 5 times healthier, apply that to the numbers and 600,000 Brits die if we listen to the anti-lockdowners.

The problem is that without knowing the true IFR and assuming that all countries are equal then seeing Sweden's experience and applying the anti lockdown logic that Sweden didn't so we shouldn't, results in the UK having 600,000 dead because in reality the UK really is a lot less healthy then Sweden.

But if countries do have radically different IFR's then Sweden's great results with a lack of lockdown would not equate to the UK's results with a lack of lockdown.

Remember the antibody test would be the game changer speech where did that go, that would have given us some idea of the true IFR, but they brushed that one under the carpet and you still can't easily get a reliable antibody test on the NHS unless you work for the NHS.

For the life of me I don't understand why they did not do extensive antibody testing with the Roche and Abbott tests, they would have had a far better picture of the true IFR and what we could really expect from lockdown measures.

Actually I do know why it's because we have a terminally incompetent bunch or morons in charge of this country.