CV and mad panic behaviour

[LP]

Sorry,
I'm not seeing the problem in Sweden either....
How is it worse than other countries in that area.
They had an horrific run early in the pandemic...apparently they didn't lock down as hard as other countries.
But their numbers and deaths seem to have tapered off.
Are they getting a second wave worse than other places in Europe?

New infection cases are just starting to spike, so much for herd immunity by attrition!

So now Sweden's domestic politicians are talking regional lock-downs Victoria style. Having suffered horribly in the start with 319 deaths per million, more than tenfold higher than some neighbouring countries to preserve some fiscal posterity, they are now talking about wearing the very same regional pain as other location$. It looks like they have worn a bunch of deaths for nothing basically! The Swedes are spinning it as moving towards controlled and capped restrictions, in effect that is the same failed path that Britain had already tried.

Britain in the meantime has now legislated one of the world's highest personal fines to try and put a brake on the rapidly growing infection rate. My associates in the UK say things are looking very grim as Autumn arrives, especially with the growing number of re-infection cases and no signs of a wide-spread vaccine before mid-2021.

Globally there is a bigger problem, there are a number of studies coming out now showing significant long term cost of moderate COVID infections. These are infections that did not require hospitalisation, "Just a cold" type infections, except a significant percentage of those infected now have signs of heart and lung damage at 3 to 6 months after COVID infection.

Just a cold! :o

[LP]

For those waiting for a vaccine, as the politicians keep telling us that it is already organised if successfully developed.

I heard a nice summary of the chances of a successful vaccine from an immunologist talking on a Nature or Science Podcast.

Vaccine in trials proceed at the rate of 1 in 10 for each stage, with typically 4 or 5 stages but as many as 6 stages.

So that would mean;
Stage 1; 10% Proceed to Stage 2
Stage 2: 10% Proceed to Stage 3
Stage 3: 10% Proceed to Stage 4
Stage 4 through 6: About 10% Proceed Manufacturing

That is one vaccine out of every ten thousand investigated.

The speaker did reiterate that this will no be the case for the COVID vaccine, why;

Authorities have already conceded they must accept more risk to quickly find viable COVID vaccines!

Also mentioned was the fact that getting a vaccine does not mean being free of infection. Apparently many vaccines can reduce or eliminate the symptoms, but still leave the person open to be infected and capable of transmitting the virus to others, which is a major reasons many vaccines fail late in clinical trials, the vaccine makes you a super-spreader because you get infected without getting sick!

[kruddler]

For those waiting for a vaccine, as the politicians keep telling us that it is already organised if successfully developed.

I heard a nice summary of the chances of a successful vaccine from an immunologist talking on a Nature or Science Podcast.

Vaccine in trials proceed at the rate of 1 in 10 for each stage, with typically 4 or 5 stages.

So that would mean;
Stage 1; 10% Proceed to Stage 2
Stage 2: 10% Proceed to Stage 3
Stage 3: 10% Proceed to Stage 4
Stage 4 through 6: About 10% Proceed Manufacture

That is one vaccine out of every ten thousand investigated.

The speaker did reiterate that this will no be the case for the COVID vaccine, why;

Things may be sped up a bit due to the start of a vaccine for SARS a decade (or so) ago. Very similar diseases, so have a bit of a head start of sorts.

[LP]

Things may be sped up a bit due to the start of a vaccine for SARS a decade (or so) ago. Very similar diseases, so have a bit of a head start of sorts.

The two major candidate vaccines are using techniques never used ever before, there is no precedent for them. The conventional pathways are not going to be delivering vaccines anytime soon.

I heard a researcher who had worked on the original SARS, in fact their programme to develop a vaccine was cancelled a few years after the SARS outbreak subsided. They said even if it had not been cancelled they still might not have a viable vaccine 14 years later, but they felt they would have been much better placed with background knowledge to deal with SARs-CoV-2, of course the programme was cut to save money!

[kruddler]

The two major candidate vaccines are using techniques never used ever before.

Obviously you don't have to follow the same path, but i suspect some do.

[mateinone]

The fairer comparison is to compare Sweden with it's Nordic neighbours.
On this comparison, it has endured a shocking death toll and a shocking case rate (and the unknown long term effects of that).
It has seen a big jump recently in cases and it doesn't have herd immunity. It needs 60-70% of the population to have herd immunity, if the virus does not mutate over the next year or so and outsmart the antibodies, or if the antibodies don't begin to disappear (which there is some evidence it does).

To have herd immunity it would require infections to be at least 8x higher than they have been, which of course is possible as we know that the true number is not really reflected in the positive test number, but the new rise in infections suggest that herd immunity has clearly not been achieved.

Now they are talking lockdowns, I would suggest losing close to 6,000 lives based purely on the strategy you undertook could be declared a disaster

[table]
[tr][td]Country[/td][td]Cases[/td][td]Deaths[/td][td]Population[/td][td]Cases Per Mill[/td][td]Deaths Per Mill[/td][td]Tests Per Mill[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Norway[/td][td]13,545[/td][td]270[/td][td]5,431,254[/td][td]2,494[/td][td]50[/td][td]186,167[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Finland [/td][td]9,577 [/td][td]343[/td][td]5,542,777[/td][td]1,728[/td][td]62[/td][td]173,227[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Sweden[/td][td]90,923 [/td][td]5,880[/td][td]10,114,184[/td][td]8,990 [/td][td]581[/td][td]151,533[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Denmark [/td][td]25,594[/td][td]647[/td][td]5,797,058[/td][td]4,415[/td][td]112[/td][td]622,430[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Iceland [/td][td]2,561[/td][td]10[/td][td]341,767 [/td][td]7,493[/td][td]29[/td][td]786,609[/td][/tr]
[tr][td] Comparison [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Australia[/td][td]27,015 [/td][td]870[/td][td]25,569,269 [/td][td]1,057[/td][td]34 [/td][td]293,979 [/td][/tr]
[/table]

Ans of course we should have had MUCH less, 50-70% less at least
You were 17x more likely to die from this virus if you were in Sweden, than if you were in Australia

[LP]

It's not just the verified case count that is an issue, the number of infections exceeds the number of detections by some ratio.

Locally I heard a expert on radio state they think in Australia we only detect about 23% of infections, I haven't heard what the baseline is globally, but apparently Australia is quite good because we've tested about 1/3 of the population. That means here real infections could be 3x or 4x the detection rate.

When the number of test per head of population increase the detections increase, like Denmark and Iceland, where they have tested a large portion of the population, 60% or 70%

Now think of Sweden, where the death are almost an order of magnitude higher than Australia, Sweden's case detections exceed Denmark or Iceland but Sweden's testing is less than 15%! :o

Of course it's complicated because not everyone lives in the same geospacial, geosocial or economic conditions.

A lot of people put the stock in the graphs, but the graphs lag real-time by about 7 to 14 days, again based on an average some regions are faster others slower.

Detections always lag behind infections, if detections rise regularly at all, then infections are already on the steeper growth curve!

[Lods]

Don't for one minute think I'm underestimating the effects of this disease.
At 66 with heart and kidney issues I can't afford to get it.
I've been pretty much housebound for six months.
I'm still reluctant to stray far from home and I keep a record of all the places I've visited.
...and I'm currently living in QLD with very few active cases

The suggestion was that Sweden and the UK are heading for a world of pain.
I'm wondering whether they'll be any worse off than other European nations.

I'm not doubting Sweden adopted a poor strategy in the beginning.
I'm just curious as to how they will go long term.

So Sweden...yep, poor during the first wave.
But let's put those first wave stats aside for one minute.
At the moment we're seeing a rising trend in their second wave but how are they comparing  with others second time around
Are they(will they be) any worse off in their second wave than others.

The charts I'm looking at show a dozen nations with greater numbers of deaths per million than Sweden.
Are we singling them out because they seemed to follow a different strategy?


.

[mateinone]

Lods you could be right, it is possible they are being singled out, but then the comparisons are interesting.

So Spain and Italy (as an example) we know part of their high original death tolls can be attributed to underestimating the power of this disease to cause the chaos it has, they were hit earliest and I think any country hit in this way was going to suffer a similar fate.
The other thing about these countries is that besides sharing land borders with other continental countries, they have high numbers of immigrants coming through unchecked from Africa, which means there is no quarantine for many of these people and if they have the virus it is going through unchecked. Not only is it going through unchecked, but if one person on an overcrowded boat makes it to those lands undetected, then that entire boat will almost certainly be infected also. This creates a situation where each fresh boat has the potential to be another wave starter.

Sweden on the other hand shares a land border with Finland (7 day average 90) and Norway (7 day average 111) whilst maintaining a 7 day average currently of 298.
It does share a bridge with Denmark (7 day average 535), which Denmark have restricted entry to from Sweden, but Sweden has to my knowledge left open. Freight traffic is still open both ways.
Denmark being a continental (thought Nordic) country of course shares a land border with Germany (7 day average 1780).

The reason for bringing that all up is that with less migration to Scandinavian countries than continental countries, there is less unchecked travel through borders and less chance for the virus to spread. England should have less issues as they have the ability to restrict traffic (as we do), but being a "destination" country there are also more attempts at illegal entry and all the problems that come with that, especially as until mid August they had removed the 14 day quarantine between itself and France (which by the way is self-quarantine). Why the UK didn't go into harder lockdowns I really don't know they left themselves on the precipice of a huge outbreak by sitting in a middle ground and hoped it would die out. It seems quite idiotic when you think about how they brought it down from 5,000 a day to 500 (about our average here at out peak), but started to ease restrictions, in that time is has increased 10 fold.

With regards to a dozen countries having worst death tolls per million than Sweden, this is true.. but it's neighbours are all between 60-100 ranking for deaths per million and sitting 14th (12th if you remove countries of less than 100,000 population) is not really a glowing endorsement.

You are right though, I feel like Sweden is being specifically judged because they made the decision that the financial importance was greater than the importance of life. There is no doubt they could have reduced their death toll by at least 70%, or if human terms at least 4,000 lives were sacrificed in an attempt to let the rest of the country live their lives. When you make a decision like that, you need to come out a clear winner, which Sweden hasn't done and it has resulted to them considering lockdown measures..

The UK has clearly mishandled their crisis, they are a destination country for sure, but they had fair warning, whilst most people who had the virus upon hitting continental Europe will have likely passed the worst of it by the time they setup in the Calais region to try and cross to England, there will be a lot that have picked it up during their travels from the south of Europe up to Calais and I suspect these camps often have large numbers of infections due to the transient nature of the people passing through there. Still, they should have been able to control their case load much better than they have and I don't know why they have not locked down through each county with hard lockdowns and tried to grow from there.

So yes continental countries are suffering worse than Sweden, but it is still suffering worse than it to land border  neighbours.

To be honest though, I would not want to be in any European country right now. Even Austria who, in my opinion, handled the first wave better than pretty well any other European country (along with maybe Norway) is suffering a lot at the moment. It is not surprising, it is a landlocked country with 8 borders and a number of those countries are exploding. Their deaths per million despite this are 87 (ranked 70th).

[Thryleon]

Don't for one minute think I'm underestimating the effects of this disease.
At 66 with heart and kidney issues I can't afford to get it.
I've been pretty much housebound for six months.
I'm still reluctant to stray far from home and I keep a record of all the places I've visited.
...and I'm currently living in QLD with very few active cases

The suggestion was that Sweden and the UK are heading for a world of pain.
I'm wondering whether they'll be any worse off than other European nations.

I'm not doubting Sweden adopted a poor strategy in the beginning.
I'm just curious as to how they will go long term.

So Sweden...yep, poor during the first wave.
But let's put those first wave stats aside for one minute.
At the moment we're seeing a rising trend in their second wave but how are they comparing  with others second time around
Are they(will they be) any worse off in their second wave than others.

The charts I'm looking at show a dozen nations with greater numbers of deaths per million than Sweden.
Are we singling them out because they seemed to follow a different strategy?


.

The few sources of information I have seen on Sweden has them faring much worse during the second wave than their Nordic neighbours based on trend.

We wont know until we know for sure but data is coming out to show that herd immunity is impossible to achieve and they did take some lockdown measures but think of us in June and that was closer to what they did.  Businesses and schools open.