With the caveat that I haven’t looked closely at Sweden I think before drawing any conclusions you’d have to see how much behaviour changed - yes, the bars etc remained open but did Swedes voluntarily stay away, distance etc as well as other nations which were (notionally) compelled to do so.
Also - is Sweden actuallt that much “better” than other nations - it seems that it is actually something of a mid-field performer in the Covid stakes
It certainly did better than the UK or Spain but has had many more deaths than NZ, Germany or, even, France and still suffered a GDP hit (even though low in comparison to UK, France or Spain).
But that assessment seems to date from ‘the first part of the pandemic’ - the point of the article I linked earlier was that evidence is emerging that Sweden’s approach might be better in the long term - indeed is already proving to be better.
I’m not personally arguing for either the French strict legally-enforced confinement approach or the evidently much more informal Swedish approach, by the way - but I do think there’s a long way to go with the collection of good evidence, and it will be interesting to see where it eventually leads.
Fair point - I couldn’t find a quick comparison for up-to-date figures.
But my point still stands - we don’t necessarily have data that shows Sweden’s approach is “better”, and to say that Sweden “did not have lockdown” implies that they did not change their behaviour - which is probably untrue.
If they did something “right” that the rest of us got wrong it might be useful to see if we can copy it - but we need some analysis to see what the “right” thing was.
Some discussion here (article was August but presumably the data not much different to the graphic that I posted) - key points seem to be a) there was a change in behaviour of similar scale to neighbouring countries b) Sweden did not do as well as its neighbours on deaths and c) maybe with more affected by the 1st wave the 2nd will be smaller/not happen in Sweden but we don’t know yet.
Is it really socialising per se or socialising with people who are covid positive. If we tested even with the 30minute test used at German and Italian airports we would be to get a control instead we are a rudderless ship!
I think that’s an inference rather than an implication Paul! - naturally, people change their behaviour when they know they are liable to catch a disease, but that’s very different from a legal lockdown, forcing businesses to close en masse, etc.
Do you think the figures in the more recent article I linked are inaccurate? Some of the links within the article actually go through to sites (eg. europa) that have even been updated since - today in fact.
I am saying we need to be careful in drawing inferences from it - especially because the fact that Sweden did not have a mandatory lockdown does not mean behaviour remained unaltered.
