As time wore on, Sweden's rate of infection and "case fatality rate" stayed high while in other countries (like Italy) their numbers had dropped off drastically. The number of cases and deaths in Italy peaked around the end of March. But then things started dropping off, and by the end of May, Italy was basically done with the coronavirus. On July 19th Italy was down to just three deaths.
But in Sweden, by the middle of June, there was a lot of second-guessing and second-thoughts. There was dissention within their government. It looked like something different would have to be done. And then...
On June 24th, the number of new cases in Sweden peaked at 1,803. By June 28th it was down to 475. Jump forward to July 20, Sweden is down to just 36 new cases.
But what about deaths?
Sweden's death rate peaked in the middle of April and then began steadily dropping. On July 20th Sweden had zero COVID19 deaths. They are, for all intents and purposes, done with the coronavirus.
Sweden has 10,330,000 people. They are reporting a total of 78,048 COVID19 cases and 5,639 deaths. If we look at the raw numbers, Sweden's "case fatality rate" is 7.2%, which seems quite high. But really only 0.055% of their population has died from the virus. The current number for the U.S. is 0.043%.
So the situation in Sweden is not as bad as it seemed. And at this point they are basically done with the coronavirus while the U.S. keeps struggling with increasing infections and deaths. So in the long run, will Sweden look like the smarter people?
2 comments:
Perhaps they will look smarter. Perhaps they will also look less humane for not attempting to protect those who were vulnerable. But we probably won't know which for some years when hopefully all this is but a distant memory. Probably the only thing certain is that the U.S. response probably won't be looked at in a positive light by the rest of the world.
Was listening to an interview of a Swedish scientist yesterday about this very subject. According to him anyway, they are very worried because their experiment has failed. Too many people stayed home (like the U.S.) so they didn't achieve herd immunity as a country and they are worried that their will be another peak coming now (like the U.S.) that will continue to disrupt their economy which is what they sought to protect with this experiment.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. My specific area is now seeing the makings of a second bump in cases. After weeks of nothing, we had a gradual increase these last two weeks and yesterday that total doubled. Like other places, 80% of all those cases are under 18 y.o. I'm not too optimistic about school this fall anymore.
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