fransknorge

Which is why other countries report by tests or per persons, not per samples. Again this prove the point Sweden is under testing massively.

bluesaturn

Do you think Sweden has even enough people to perform such jobs? I heard that NMR machines in hospitals are not used because of not enough staff available. Maybe it is also a financial question of hiring people.
In any case no tests are better for Sweden to keep people in the dark. It fits the Swedish strategy brilliantly.

GUWonder

I don't know enough about the registered unemployment pool in Sweden to know who all is in it, but I am pretty sure that staffing for testing too is in substantial part a financial question. Sort of like how in Sweden they stop routine mammogram screening at the age of 74 years: stopped not because it can't be done as a result of of labor force and equipment constraints, but stopped because they don't think it makes sense to invest the money in doing a more enduring job in protecting elderly (non-working) women from breast cancer.

CPH-Flyer

Wouldn't a far more accurate allegory be

Peter fell from the 154th floor window, George is standing at the open window, and while no one knows whether George is going to fall or not, it is pretty clear undisputed that Peter is goo on the sidewalk.

bluesaturn

Thank you for the insight. What amazes me is that in other countries Sweden is presented as a glorified country where everything is super, in particular in education and in health care. I fell into the same trap when I came to Sweden. I thought, now I am in a good health care system. Turned out that when I needed help, it was hard to get. I asked for an NMR as the doctor could not diagnose and it makes perfectly sense to apply physical methods. NMR? Not when you don't need surgery. Private payment? Sure. 2500SEK and a year of waiting time.
I asked for a lung test after COVID19. Doctor said, I understand where you are coming from, but no, the Swedish system does not foresee this. Skane is in particular stingy with its health care system.

GUWonder

I try to customize most of my responses based on what I think may be most relevant to the individual. So the mammogram cut-off example was Skane specific.

Many a medical lab in the US gets a fair amount of the lab work done during what are non-traditional hours of the day for most workers, and that means something for capacity and turn times. While I haven't sought out information on how medical lab operations in Sweden are run, I find Swedish lab results to generally come back way slower than what I'm used to in the US, UK, Denmark, and India, for example.

I used to see a lot of night shift medical lab workers take the train to, and then taxi from, some Long Island Railroad stations pretty near the border of Nassau and Suffolk county on Long Island in NY. Having talked to those workers in the shared taxis over the years, I would say they often seemed to be of the same kind of backgrounds as people that I find living in the poorer sections of Malmo and Stockholm who are dealing with the Swedish government employment agency offices. So I'm inclined to say there is some additional labor capacity that could be used in Sweden too for more medical testing, more so if the employers revised practices in ways that can be done to make sure the maximizing of test capacity utilization happens without cutting down on the quality of the work output.

But this is Sweden, and finding people able and willing to work the odd-hour shifts is much easier in the proverbial dog-eat-dog US than in a Sweden where people default to assuming the government will somehow save them at some basic-yet-acceptable level at least so they don't need to make the odd-hour shift work work if they don't want it. Also, Swedish managers and employees seem to have their own way of opposing changed workplace environments, whether it comes to changed processes or to taking in employees of a different background than was already the case for the work site. Change management is its own thing everywhere, but Sweden is its own special case in this regard.

bluesaturn

Thanks for the answer. I have used LIR to NYC as well a couple of times when visiting somebody on LI. ;-)

RedChili

What he means is probably that they won't have any lockdown. In March, many countries thought that a lockdown was the answer. When they opened up again, they saw the virus coming back in full force, and they realized that a lockdown doesn't solve the problem. It's only delaying the problem. As far as I know, no European country has returned to the same level of lockdown as they had in the spring, so in that sense they have adopted the Swedish way.

There have been many experts who have voiced similar opinions over the past couple of months. When New Zealand had their recent outbreak, there was a WHO expert who warned against a new lockdown and instead pointed to the Swedish model as an example to follow.

I got this analogy from Professor John Ioannidis's article back in March, where he wrote:

In this analogy, the whole world has decided to jump off the cliff, and they're still falling. We won't know the true answer until all countries have hit rock bottom, and we're far from there.

It's actually quite interesting that Umea University is now running the first (that I know of) mass scale testing in Sweden. They're testing 20,000 students and staff, twice each, to find out how many are infected druing the first week, and how the infection has spread during the second week. The military is helping them conducting these tests. Maybe they should have done this all over Sweden back in March and April. That's when the infection spread like wildfire, and there was very little testing going on.

Perhaps. The point that I was trying to make was that the percentage of positive tests depends on what groups you are testing. Sorted from highest to lowest percentage, the following is how I would sort various groups:

1. Patients that have already tested positive once.
2. Patients that are hospitalized with serious covid symptoms.
3. People that display mild covid symptoms.
4. Suspected positive people due to e.g. contact with a positive person.
5. Anybody who's afraid of covid.
6. Random population.
7. People that have already tested negative.

Between March-June, Sweden mostly tested those in group 2 and 4, which gives a high percentage of positive tests. But since mid-June, Sweden has tested all groups between 2-5, which means a smaller percentage of positive tests.

It appears to me that Fransknorge argues that they should also conduct more testing of group 6, the random population, but in my opinion, conducting that kind of testing would actually lead to an even lower percentage of positive tests compared to today, and it would lead to a higher proportion of false positive tests.

See above. The truth is that the whole world has jumped off the cliff, and we're still falling. I think that it will take 10 years until we know the answer.

GUWonder

The March and April spread of this virus in Sweden spread like wildfire? Given how few people in even the most urbanized parts of Skane seem to have antibodies for this even now, I tend to think that it's yet another indication of why Tegnell's insinuations about level of "herd immunity" in Sweden and what it means for Sweden have been repeatedly off, off substantially, and way too Stockholm-centric and presumptuously optimistic. I get it that a lot of people in and around Stockholm and even elsewhere in Sweden think that Stockholm is the center of the universe with approximately 20-25% of the country's population, but there's a whole lot of Sweden where the virus spread was far more limited than it was in and around Stockholm.

FlitBen

As with any disaster aftermath, the rates of increase in business recovery and household confidence are also key. Future excess death and quality-of-life impacts that lag the periods of intervention are still to be observed for complete analysis. Views that hold to early trends from partial data must adapt, just like anything else involving this fast-progressing contagion. Raw death tolls may allow for simplistic arguments, but such cannot help with full understanding of the final outcome.

As for care homes, resident populations have not changed much in risk profile, only in exposure. Improvements in prognosis and handling within constraints have reduced fatality incidence to below or that of its neighbors, although officials do admit their failure to recognize sooner the disproportionate burden on the elderly and thereby avert more deaths.

The bigger news is that Sweden's case rates are dropping massively against predictions, which trend is attributed mainly to voluntary self-distancing in the collective. Other than amenable mutations and preventive treatments, what other explanations are there, beyond superior practices and the resulting minimization/segregation benefits? Superior information shaping? Superior folk consciousness? Superior herd development?

On the last, no one knows more about its theoretical considerations than the top experts in the field.
Natural/treated population immunity was always going to be in our future, with cellular cross-protection likely playing its part as much as any vaccinations.

It seems this coronavirus is not so novel after all, so governments might as well curtail interventions that bring unprecedented collateral hits to civilization. Sweden's response shows how such baseline mitigation could be improved to protect those at high risk and with least total harm to the rest.

RedChili

Really? I tried to go south this summer, but only got as far as Kolmarden. It appeared to me that the road ended there, so I just assumed that there was nothing left of Sweden south of Kolmarden ...

GUWonder

Sweden's cases aren't dropping massively against all predictions. If anything it was expected with some that Swedish summer habits would mean a tremendous slowdown in spread and deliver its part until well after schools and public transport started getting packed to the brim again post-summer.

Sweden is a bad example of how to "protect" those at high risk of the worst harm from being hit by this virus, and it still is. And if Sweden is considered by some to be a good example of that, then note that it already came at and charged an awfully worse price at the worst time of this year for it than was the case for its Scandinavian neighbors -- when looking at the damage done in terms of the lives, physical health and economy. Of course if the point is to drive down the health care costs over the longer term that are attributable to the most expensive people in the health care and other parts of the welfare system during the final years of life, then letting more die sooner with this virus may turn out to be a money saver for the insuring parties. But any hypothetical money saved by the Swedish insuring parties (direct or otherwise) from expediting mortality by way of relative neglect (via care rationing) won't result in the more profitable insured parties getting a financial break from these excessive deaths with the virus anytime soon (if ever).

The idea that herd immunity for this novel coronavirus was inevitable means nothing, as a lot of things that are inevitable don't put a stop to adverse developments in the interim. And it's still not clear for how long or how strongly any "natural" or artificially-enabled "immunity" lasts.

All those zoo- and Bamse-lovers were afraid of a snapphane revival trying to protect the land before and where it gets flat and boring in the south and the Swedish sounds funny or maybe even like Danish to those from the boonies closer to Visingso.

bluesaturn

I disagree. No European country follows Sweden. In Sweden we don't wear masks. Germany, France - mask wearing on public transport, in schools, now even outside in some cities etc.
Sweden: 500 people in a gathering, UK is back to 30 imho etc.
Distance in Sweden: 1m, in other countries: > 1.5m- 2m.
Cannot see how EU countries follow the Swedish model.

RedChili

There's an article in SVD which is entitled, "Revenge: Today, everybody follow's Sweden's strategy." It's locked so I can only see the first few lines, but the Norwegian Dagbladet is quoting from the article under the headline "Everybody's doing like Sweden."

In the article, there are several international experts that claim that most European countries now follow the Swedish model. One of them is epidemiology professor Antoine Flauhalt from the University of Geneva: "Today, more or less all countries in Europe follow the method from the Swedish model, but nobody wants to admit it."

https://www.svd.se/revanschen--idag-...riges-strategi
https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/all...erige/72819297

RedChili

Sweden's infection rate is continuing its steep decline. Week 36 saw 126,000 people being tested, with only 1.2% positive tests.

Also, the number of people in intensive care in Sweden is now back to normal levels.

https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/i...te-tio-dagarna

Could you tell me where you got the information that Sweden reports per samples and not per person?

In the above article, Johan Carlson said, "Under vecka 36 hade vi närmare 126 000 testade, och av dem var ändå bara 1,2 procent positiva." "Testade" means people that were tested. If he would've been talking about samples, he would've used the word "tester."