Finally, we got some data!

We were all laughing at Sweden for not doing like the rest of the world…

Well… their little experiment turned out to be great! Here is their latest report (in swedish).

They have not seen the predicted exponential rise in Covid-19 cases. Oh surprise!

Despite not having imposed a stay-at-home order (also named house-arrest) on its citizen, Sweden is on the path to success… The curve is going down… without even having imposed Orwellian restrictions on its population! Maybe they got it right? See the graph below.

See also this news article from the Washington Post. They are achieving what we call “heard immunity”. Great. If you do understand Swedish, I recommend this short clip from the national TV. Some news outlet mentioned that the peak was over.

So far, 100 000 people have been tested in Sweden (according to their Health Ministry website, in Swedish). From their weekly report: “So far during the epidemic, the age group 90 years and older has had the highest incidence of laboratory-confirmed covid-19, followed by the age group 80-89 years. Among people reported to have died with covid-19, the mean age was 81 years. The age group 70 years and older accounted for 87 percent of the deceased until week 15. Among the deceased, the most common risk groups were, besides high age, chronic heart disease, diabetes, chronic lung disease and chronic kidney failure. Reporting is still lagging behind. From week 13 onwards, so-called mortality in the population is seen among people 65 years and older.”

The Swedish government has a fascinating ArcGIS web app where you can see for yourself the data.

So one can ask… was it worth it to destroy the economy? Did we over-react? Will a second wave occur? We don’t know,

So far, the reaction of the Canadian government has been great. But maybe things aren’t as bad as we thought they would?

I mean look at the data from Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland that has been out for already two weeks! It proves over and over again that the death rate is much closer to 1% than 2% (let’s not forget that the age-median is around 80 years old). Italy’s death had a 96.5% co-morbidity rate, but you’ll never hear that on CNN and CBC. I went over and over in the Trojan 2.0 article about how we over-reacted big time at this crisis. I mean, this is okay and probably better than the other way around for sure but now that we are obviously not dealing with the plague, maybe it is we can re-open the economy?

It will be interesting to see how the countries re-open. Sweden decided to make an experiment with its population and… they won. Big time. Here in the Americas, we are entering a sort of weird twilight zone where the medias are trying to make us believe that the virus is the end of the world… we avoided the worst it seems: hospitals are empty (In Quebec, there’s still 6000 beds available out of 7000 made available for the pandemic, as of today)… yet studies show constantly that the true death rate is between 0.1% and 1.6%… It will be hard for us to stay put for another month, with the pile of new data showing up everyday.

Which is good. Maybe it isn’t the end of the world after all. Maybe it isn’t the plague.

Cheers,

JP

UPDATE: Check this out! Fresh update from here. “According to data from the best-studied countries such as South Korea, Iceland, Germany and Denmark, the overall lethality of Covid19 is between 0.1% and 0.4% and thus up to twenty times lower than initially assumed by the WHO.”

Sweden: did they win their bet?

Finally, we got some data!