Covid-19 May have already peaked in Sweden

[MorkandMindy]

UPDATE: Covid-19 has NOT peaked in Sweden or any large place
By all means protect retired people and those who can work from home until the case load of Covid-19 has abated, and perhaps old people indefinitely, but several unintentional and intended experiments indicate Covid-19 has about run it's course with the majority of the population.

1. Outbreaks in prisons. Look up the numbers and decide.

2. Sweden has deliberately chosen to not to isolate to the level other Nordic countries have. Wait a few more days to confirm it but it is beginning to look like the disease there has peaked. It may have the same number of deaths as other countries just a bit more quickly.

This is not an unconventional belief but the long accepted one in the 'flatten the curve' philosophy, that there will be the same number of cases just that there is a big benefit from slowing them down at present to allow the health facilities to catch up.

3. I'm not saying go out, but get ready for the return to normality in a week or two, it might be over by then.

 

[MorkandMindy]

The Swedish results, it will take a few more data points, a few more days, but it looks like it might be peaking

 

[MorkandMindy]

The basic theory being that Covid-19 has already infected far more people than know it and is approaching it's peak.

Here's a well-respected person speaking about the present point in the pandemic:

 

[JohnAshton]

No, it is resurging again.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Rats. Well I'm in the US and retired so I'll continue to 'flatten the curve'.

 

[JohnAshton]

We have just far too many Americans acting like this.

 

[MorkandMindy]

As I understand it there's theory 1 and theory 2

Theory 1 - Covid-19 is very infectious and has reached most points on the globe AND has spread surreptitiously through a lot of the population, maybe a quarter or a third already, therefore most people are not badly affected by it, some have died but IF that many have been infected evidently most are hardly affected.

Sweden appears to be following Theory 1 and believes it is close to a point where so many people are now immune that the disease will die out.

On April 12th a peak had been passed and the infection rate was falling, but the next day infections rose again and exceeded the previous peak and have done so yet again.

Evidently Theory 1 is wrong.

 

[MorkandMindy]

Theory 2 is that the virus has come nowhere near saturating the population, is really dangerous and must be stopped in every way possible.

So I tried the numbers myself. Taking a CFR - Case Fatality Rate - figure of maybe 3%, it varies a lot with age, then because 1/1000 NYC dwellers have died of CV-19, this suggests the total proportion who were infected was 3.3%, a long way from obtaining herd immunity even in one of our most infected areas.

So I'm going with John Aston's post and have moved totally over to Theory 2 - stop it where ever possible. I agree Theory 1 is no longer tenable.

 

[MorkandMindy]

In a cruel irony John Conway, inventor of the Game of Life simulation died on 11 April having first shown symptoms of Covid-19 infection three days earlier.

He was a phenomenally talented mathematician.

 

[RDKirk]

"Herd immunity" is what the world had before there were vaccines. The world had "herd immunity" to the Black Plague, to smallpox, and to polio.

That was not a tenable situation anywhere. The Swedes are not the intelligent people I thought they were.

 

[JohnAshton]

Sweden is beginning to harvest a new rise in cases.

 

[MorkandMindy]

There might be a nasty bite revealed in those charts, the cases scale on Sweden is roughly in proportion to the populations of the two countries, Sweden has (had) almost twice the population of Norway so the graphs can be compared usefully.

But the death count in Sweden is way out of proportion to population and even more so to the cases.

I'll take a wild guess here, that in people who take precautions but are unfortunate enough to get the virus, maybe just one virus particle, the infection is a little slower to get off the ground than in the careless, who might get a bunch at once, and the slower start from one particle gives the immune system a slightly better chance to get started.

It's still dangerous especially for older people, but for the Swedes who got the infection it was even worse.

 

[hedrick]

Here's some data: Sweden Coronavirus: 18,640 Cases and 2,194 Deaths - Worldometer. There's huge day to day variability. I think it's going to take another couple of weeks to know for sure what's going on. The death rate looks like it's increasing, but that's a lagging indicator. Infections is not a wonderful metric because in most countries it's based on testing that doesn't take the whole population. But it looks to me like it's at best steady.