Sweden’s Approach to COVID-19

For some time now I’ve been following the story of Sweden and their approach to Covid-19. As most people know, Sweden has a unique approach to the corona virus with little formal rules and regulations in place, other than relying on people’s discipline to maintain some physical distance, certain restrictions on numbers at public gatherings and keeping the elderly safe. In short, Sweden decided against a lockdown in order to promote herd immunity in the country. Many voices, worldwide and also in South Africa, are asking their governments to do the same in their countries, in order for people to return to work and children to return to school.

I am fully aware that the type of lockdown we have in South Africa is wreaking havoc on the economy. But the argument for the lockdown seems to be that an early lockdown (with the subsequent economic problems) may prevent a future lockdown when things are out of control with even greater economic consequences. What makes this difficult is that this is a situation that none of us have encountered ever before in our lives.

For some time now, it has been said that Sweden was definitely right in its decision, but I see an increasing number of people who are having their doubts. In an attempt to understand this better, I started studying the data of Sweden as well as three other of the Scandinavian countries, i.e., Norway, Finland and Denmark. The last three all implemented a lockdown: Norway (12 March), Finland (16 March) and Denmark (11 March). The last three countries are busy moving cautiously out of lockdown.

I listened to an interesting interview which Trevor Noah had with Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Dr. Anders Tegnell, which certainly helped me to understand more about the motivation for their fairly controversial decision. What I was glad to hear was that there never seemed to be a decision that a higher death toll would be acceptable in order to sustain the economy. But at the same time I was surprised to hear this, as all indications, from the start, were that there was a high death rate linked to Covid-19 and how could they possibly have thought that they would be able to prevent this? Here’s a link to the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypwoyVl5Dxk…

Another valid question of course is that herd immunity will probably only be reached when 70-80% of the population has had the virus and recovered. Sweden has a population of just over 10 million. Of these 23,918 have been tested positive, i.e., 0.24% of the population. How long will it take to reach herd immunity?In order to help myself, I put the data for the four countries (together with South Africa, merely because I wanted to see how we compare to these countries) into a spreadsheet and then looked for ways in which I could understand what is happening. I’m not going to display all the graphs I made with this data, but as of yesterday the infection rates in the four countries were as follows:

Finland: 1.84%
Denmark: 1.41%
Norway: 0.52%
Sweden: 2.3%

This is understandable as Sweden has no hard lockdown and actually seems to encourage infections in order to speed up herd immunity.

But the results in terms of the death rate is actually what I consider to be significant. Sweden presently has a death rate of 12.3% of all people who tested positive for the corona virus. Compared with the other Scandinavian countries, it looks like this:

Finland: 4.52%
Denmark: 5.09%
Norway: 2.7%
Sweden: 13.55%

(USA has 5.92%, Spain 10.19%, Italy 13.84% and the UK 14.96%)

Some people are saying that the infections rates as well as the deaths in those countries which are coming out of lockdown will increase significantly and thus prove that Sweden did indeed make the right decision. This might be true. But there are other indications that the curves are flattening and that the infection and death rates may not be increasing significantly. It’s still too early to say.

I include two graphs to try and indicate how things stand at the moment. The first one indicates the deaths per thousand of the population and the second one shows the daily deaths.

I will be keeping an eye on how things develop. This will be interesting to follow.