Nobody knows the best strategy but Sweden’s strategy was obviously one of the worst possible and it was clear from the beginning.
That is the interesting question - since Covid-19 is quite different than an influence virus there might be a realistic possibility that even with a vaccine (which might help only for short periods of time) this disease might have significantly deeper impact in the future compared to influenza etc.
But this is only Covid-19 specific - other pandemics will have other age distributions, e.g. Spanish flu had the least impact on the elderly
Whether Sweden’s strategy was worse will probably be impossible to say until there are ample supplies of a safe, effective vaccine.
Denmark’s recent random antibody test found 2%.
Is that how you read this?
Q: It’s obvious that everything hasn’t gone as well as it could have. What would have made the situation better?
A: It is obvious that it could have been better. And that comes down to social distancing. If you close society and don’t let people our for six, eight, ten weeks you will have a more obvious social distancing than otherwise.
But I think the fundamental strategy has worked well. I can’t see how we could have acted in a totally different way. Of course there are details which you can think about, and we do that continuously. We have also made small changes all the time, and will certainly continue to do so.
Q: Will what you are saying now affect the future strategy?
A: No, we still have very good grounds for the social distancing efforts that have been taken, and that have had effect. We have stayed on a level which has made it possible to have a good health service and so on. Now we and others are working on improving the situation for the care for the elderly.
Q: So the decisions taken by you and the Public Health Agency at the start of the pandemic, you still stand by them?
A: Based on the knowledge we had then we are still in agreement that the decisions that were taken were adequate. Based on the knowledge we had then.
The low percentage of people presenting covid antibodies in tests is really surprising, given the total number of clinically identified cases.
Best Case Scenario: It turns out by September 2020 that 80% of our population has already had the covid without even knowing it! Which would mean we have “herd immunity” to it, at least as good as with colds, and we can return to the living. Additionally, a vaccine that’s tantamount to curing the common cold becomes available in January 2021, and then every single person in the US (all 330,000,000 of us) get the shot right away. While waiting in line 6 ft apart.
That whole paragraph was intended to be both facetious and sarcastic. Which I would think would seem obvious.
Less than 10% of the US population have been infected so far, and it’s ludicrous to think that we’ll reach 80% in two more months. Also, there’s no way that all of the additional 70% would would be asymptomatic. And the people suggesting that we’ll have a vaccine ready to go by January are the ones smoking something or drinking too much, IMO. Even if that miraculously happened and we had all the doses needed, the logistics of getting everyone in the country inoculated would take months, at least – and not everyone will even want to get the shot. But in fantasy-land, all of the above represent the best case scenario.
I was mainly responding to the curiously low percentage of people with antibodies in Denmark. I’d think it would be more like 8-10%, at least.
Sorry but you wrote some stuff before which was highly questionable that it wasn’t clear if this comment was serious or not.
It’s highly unlikely that on average 10% of the population in the US have already antibodies (beside in a few hotspots). Somewhere between 2-5% sounds reasonable from the currently available data (in addition there is also some (early) data emerging that for some people antibody titer could be quite short lived)
I read today that the federal government is considering “pool testing”, a mode that I hadn’t heard of before. It sounds interesting, but I still think that randomized testing is a better way to go.
Pool testing will be necessary to cover a large number of people. You put multiple samples (often 8-10) in the same testing well and you only deconvolute if there is a positive readout. If the overall well is negative you know that all 8-10 samples were negative and you saved 7-9 wells (and time).
Current best estimate is 5-8% of the population have antibodies. To get to herd immunity through infection by the end of the year would mean a million or so extra deaths, which even Republican politicians are starting to decide is a bad plan.
My concern right now is that there are a lot of people that actually think things will be just fine by the end of this year or early next year, and are letting down their guard. I’m also concerned that excess hospital capacity, spare PPE and ventilator inventory, aren’t being built up. If we fail to have adequate hospital capacity and capabilities we may once again have to “flatten the curve” by slamming the doors shut.
Covid-19 is a coronavirus in the same general category as the common cold. If we do find a “cure” or vaccine for covid-19, one for the common cold should not be too far off. I think that covid-19 is going to be with us indefinitely, but will become less common and less severe, maybe joining the ranks of a “chest cold”…
In the meantime, the issue is how to deal with having lifeblood in our personal lives and in society, while containing the infection rate, because it’s going to go on for a long time. That’s what the experts and the governments are wrestling with. I’m glad I’m not one of them to have to make decisions that affect so many of us.
Second, you keep editing your comments over long periods of time. I totally edit my comments after the fact for clarity but expecting people to go back and then read an entire paragraph addendum that didn’t exist previously and that can change the entire meaning of the original comment is confusing at best.
OK, I thought it was obvious; you & Honkman (and probably others) didn’t. Fair enough. And yes, I do tend to edit my posts, sometimes many times.
I tacked on the “best case scenario” paragraph in the first place because as I was writing the reply to Robert’s Denmark comment, I started thinking about all of the ridiculously optimistic blather that’s floating around in the news. It’s been frustrating, and I wanted to speak out on that, tongue-in-cheek, without a new post.
“Consider that about 6.5% — or 8.4 million — American households don’t have a checking or a savings account with a bank, according to a survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The vast majority of them are Black or Latino — the same people who are getting COVID-19 at disproportionate rates, are losing their jobs at disproportionate rates and, in California, are so poor that they are becoming homeless at disproportionate rates.”
Financial exclusion is a problem for lots of reasons. Requiring stores to accept cash will have a negligible effect and creates an unnecessary expense for businesses whose customers rarely use cash anyway.