Would you rather be here or in Sweden?

[Forgetaboutme]

There's been a lot of talk about the way Sweden are handling the coronavirus situation. Schools still open, bars n clubs plus shops still open. The vulnerable being shielded and the rest social distancing or working from home where possible.

Would you rather be here on lockdown? Or in Sweden?

Do you feel safer on lockdown or if you lived somewhere like Sweden would you have been happy to live how they are at the moment?

Just bored here and wondering what people thought.

@Hazelnutlatteplease as far as I read, the majority of cases are coming from people who live in dormitories which are very crowded. Mostly people who have come back from their home countries and are spreading it in these cramped conditions.

I think it shows how much can be read into statistics depending on which one you read. That picture with % pretty population is interesting.

Nobody knows how this virus is passed on

Yes they do... Perhaps not with perfect precision, but there’s a very high level of confidence that it’s carried in minuscule droplets exhaled by an infected individual. It’s not carried by fleas, or in the water supply, or infected meat. Italy’s cases were rising exponetially. They are now falling... Lockdown is bringing down cases - it’s just not an overnight solution. No epidemiologist thought it would be.

What are Germany doing to keep theirs so low?

I’ve heard from people working in Nightingale and the new big Bristol hospital they’re basically empty and on standby so I’m not convinced a full lockdown was right - maybe we could have just done London, for example,

Bristol has 269 cases and 40? deaths (death count is from 5 days ago) and a big empty hospital.

Meanwhile, my local town in the West Midlands is half the size of Bristol City and has 436 cases and 73 deaths. Hospital under lots of pressure.

Birmingham has 1,524 cases and 365 deaths.

So it's not just London you'd need to have locked down. The Midlands is the major hotspot outside London, with 900 deaths confirmed in Birmingham and the Black Country as a whole.

What is seen in Bristol is not reflective of other parts of the rest of the country.

I think we’ll only know when we look back later. Will it be short term pain for Sweden but if their healthcare system can cope and not be overwhelmed and they protect the economy?

Aren’t we just prolonging the inevitable? I understand we need to buy time for the NHS but our economy will be in tatters.

I wish we’d quarantined and tested in the first place more. We didn’t so unless we have an exit strategy we are in for a long ride with maybe multiple lockdowns and still a high death rate.

We could ask this question again in 6 months and I wonder if anybody would switch and say Sweden? They’ll be through it with jobs protected and the economy strong. Only at the end of all this can we compare death rates.

@Deanetta, exactly (though the UK's is not much higher than Italy) that's why it's important not to take "total numbers" too much in consideration. % of population/deaths/infection rates are a reliable parameter. Although those figures are also skewed if numbers tested is factored in. Some countries are doing mass testing. The UK, for example, isn't. So numbers of people infected must be lower than the reality.

All countries are reporting differently and we'll never know true absolutes from any of them.

What seems crystal clear though is that the virus behaves in the same way everywhere. It's what govts do, or don't do, that will make the difference ultimately.

German investigations are showing that it is harder to pass on that they thought. They don't think it passes on by "smears" or some other term they used. I can't link an article because it was days ago and I have to read a lot of stuff and it probably wasn't in English anyway.

GADday - it is great to see Australia doing so well. There were lots of negative stories in the press about youngsters hanging around Bondi etc but it didn't matter.

So many people are saying we don't know what the death toll will be, which is right of course, but we DO know this is going to decimate the economy and change all our lives. And that is why right now I would be less scared in Sweden. Whether that's right or wrong remains to be seen, but I think the economic decisions we have made look far more frightening at this stage.

Sweden. For all the reasons given above- but also because it's a very equal country (not by accident, by design).

So the longer term impacts, if and when they come, should not hit any one group too hard- and I'd have reasonable confidence a Swedish government would actively put in policy to mitigate it as well (for example, we still don't have a formal response to an increase in domestic violence here- despite it being crashing obvious that's what would happen).

I reckon History may look back on this and see that regardless of differing strategies - all countries were affected to the same degree in the end.
This is what I think will happen. They will have a sharp curve whereas our deaths will be more spread out. However, who knows what would have happened if our health service had been overwhelmed by a sharp curve and then been unable to cope later on? Herd immunity I think is the only way to stop this but it's not pretty either way.

Depends on the capacity of the hospital system.

There is no vaccine and there will not be one for at least 12-18 months. If you shut down the economy for that length of time there will be no money to fund any kind of health care system or anything else for that matter.

So your only options is to

a. protect the groups which are most vulnerable and will put the greatest strain on the health care system ie the elderly and vulnerable. Do this by getting them to stay at home for the duration. This will have a huge social cost and many in this group may decide that life is not worth living in these circumstances. If you are in your 90s do you really want to spend your remaining months alone under house arrest?

b. In parallel, expose younger, fitter, economically productive members of society to the virus in a staged way which ensures the health care system can deal with the relatively small proportion who will need hospital care. Get them back to work.

Sweden’s health care system may have greater capacity than the UK’s because they have not massively underinvested in it for the past decades. So they may be able to do b more quickly than the UK.

There are temporary coronavirus hospitals all over the UK.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_COVID-19_critical_care_hospitals

Sweden will eventually have to lock down too, they are weeks behind us, but hopefully.they won't leave it too long. I hope they are able to set exceptionalism aside to admit a lockdown is necessary, or their people will pay the price.

My fear for New Zealand is that they cannot really afford one short lockdown - and with few cases and no vaccine for at least 12 - 18 mos (maybe longer), NZ's lockdown could be indefinite. I don't see a feasible exit strategy there and think they will eventually have to simply allow the virus to circulate in a country now even poorer and sicker (lack of exercise and Vit D as well as profuse drinking during lockdown) due to extended lockdown.

NZ has the same "exceptionalism" as Sweden, will less money to back it up. I'm quite worried.

This is a wake up call that we need to fund our core services much better.

We’ve gone for lockdown because our nhs cannot cope with the level of cases all at once. The global supply chain system of importing what you need instead of more local sourcing is also failing.

We need a long hard look at how we run our economies in order to serve everyone. The current system hurts so many and the lockdown exacerbates that while billionaires still continue to get richer.

Personally I think the activities of hedge funds should be banned.

At the moment can any of the death tolls be accurately compared to each other, given that the UK are only counting deaths in hospitals?

@iggly that’s the key. It’s the way the economy has been run to slash the nhs whilst enabling the rich to get richer on the back of a failing country. And now the poor and middle are paying for it again.

Today 08:00 tempestterra

No one knows. That's the problem. But realistically countries can't stay in lockdown until a vaccine has been developed. And those that have locked down, what happens if immunity is only three months? It means a massive rise again. There is no easy answer. Nor do I believe the figures coming out of certain countries. It's all a bit shit really.

My thoughts exactly

I love Sweden but I’d rather be here. Evidence from previous pandemics show lockdown/strict social distancing is the way to go:

qz.com/1816060/a-chart-of-the-1918-spanish-flu-shows-why-social-distancing-works/

“The extreme measures—now known as social distancing, which is being called for by global health agencies to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus—kept per capita flu-related deaths in St. Louis to less than half of those in Philadelphia, according to a 2007 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”

@PenfoldsFive This is the issue. All countries record deaths differently. All countries have different rates of testing. All countries have different population sizes and demographics.

Some of the figures coming out are pretty meaningless.

I don't know. I'm not a medical expert. When this whole started back in February my gut feeling was to shield the vulnerable and carry on as normal. The damage to the economy and the deaths that will follow is scary.

According to the WHO it was San Marino that had by far the deadliest outbreak the other day. Even countries like Spain and Italy had a couple of other smaller countries above them. San Marino just doesn't get noticed because it 'only' has 34 deaths. But that's huge for them. Might have changed though.

I'd rather be in Sweden personally but that's because I'm so miserable and lonely in lockdown (live alone) and I'm reasonably healthy. As a country wide policy, I think they're taking a very risky gamble. For example, I wouldn't want my mum (not old enough to shield but very obese, high blood pressure, 60s and sedentary) to be in Sweden right now!

I don't live in sweden now, but have done in the past. They have a very generous sickness payment. You are not judged for taking time off when sick unlike in the UK.

I wonder if this will make a difference - that people will be much more likely to stay at home for a longer period of time when they are showing symptoms.

But I worry about the fact that spring and summer is coming. Swedes are creatures of habit. They pretty much spend 6 months staying at home throughout the winter (not unlike the stay-at-home in other countries now, going out only for work and shopping). Then when spring and summer comes, they head out for the other 6 months of year. This is so ingrained in the national psyche that there are definite dates in the calendar on which the cafe/pub/restaurant tables are put outside (uteserveringar) and when they come in again. It am not surprised that transmission rates have rocketed the past couple of weeks as 1st april is when the uteserveringar came out, and that's when swedes start socialising more.

Sweden have it right. The longer term devastation from the economics will kill more than this virus. Shield the vulnerable until best treatment is known (if not a vaccine) and allow the young to catch the virus.

The problem with this country’s earlier approach is we didn’t insist on the elderly and vulnerable staying at home. So they all caught it and flooded / are flooding ICU.

I would feel safer in NZ

I don't feel safe in the UK and I sure as hell wouldn't feel safe in Sweden just letting it run rampant through the populace.

We’ve gone for lockdown because our nhs cannot cope with the level of cases all at once

No country can cope with CV without taking restrictive measures. Nowhere has literally hundreds of thousands of spare beds with ventilators with doctors and nurses on stand-by “just in case” there’s a worldwide pandemic. The NHS may be under-funded compared to some other countries, but it doesn’t follow that those countries are nicely set up to manage it in their stride.