How is Sweden doing with coronaplague?

by philg

I like to check in on forecasts versus reality at three-week intervals. Maybe prophets are getting better!

Previous posts:

From the first of those…

What’s the latest from the prophets at IHME? As of a May 20 update to the forecast, Sweden will have a gradually declining daily number of deaths, in more or less the same shape as still-shut-down Massachusetts. A total of 5,129 Swedes will die from/with Covid-19 (roughly one third the previous forecast). The virus will simply burn itself out, apparently, despite Sweden’s lack of shutdown. (But in other countries, the same shape decline will be attributed to a multi-month shutdown?)

That forecast for Swedish death was down from the 13,529 number in the early April forecast. As of June 5, 2020, the IHME model forecast 8,534 deaths for Sweden and the deaths will come in a Bactrian camel shape:

The forecast from June 5 predicts 60-70 deaths per day right around now. What are we seeing? Europeans refuse to work on weekends, so the reported deaths are zero for Saturday and Sunday. Even today’s report shows 0 deaths (so maybe tomorrow’s report will actually reflect three days of deaths?). The Friday report shows 12 new deaths reported in Sweden.

[Update: The Tuesday report included 69 new deaths. So that’s 81 new deaths spread over 5 days of reports (12+0+0+0+69) or 16 deaths per day compared to the forecast 60-70. In other words, the forecast was wrong by 4X.]

(Also from the Tuesday reports: Sweden has suffered 5,122 deaths from its population of 10 million. Massachusetts has lost 7,890 from its population of 7 million. In Month 4 of Shutdown, the Massachusetts rate is 2.2X Sweden’s.)

What about the former chief scientist of the European CDC who, when put on the spot, tossed out that coronaplague wouldn’t be worse than a bad flu season in terms of death? (note that assumptions regarding population fatality rate were not important for the Swedish plan; assumptions regarding the practicality of a non-Chinese country significantly changing the trajectory of infections were)

A bad season indeed was 1957-8, in which up to 116,000 Americans died out of a population of 172 million (compare to 330 million today). Applying that rate to Sweden’s 10 million people, 6,744 Swedes would succumb to Covid-19.

I don’t think economic arguments are highly relevant in a world where people seemingly care only about clinging to life. Nonetheless, since poverty often determines health outcomes: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-06-16/one-economy-stands-out-as-crisis-reveals-striking-differences? (see “Most gunshot wounds are self-inflicted, coronaconomy edition”)

Readers: What’s your best guess on Sweden? How will the death rate from/with Covid-19 compare to the U.S. rate by early 2021? (right now the U.S. has roughly 71 percent of the death rate compared to Sweden, so the U.S. is better if we measure only by this one number)

[Update 6/24: the IHME prophets have released a new projection.

Instead of the Bactrian camel, Sweden is now on the dromedary shape. There is a new “what if?” capability in this model. For example, if only 10 million Swedes would put on masks, 2 lives would be saved on September 1. (but how many would be killed in car-pedestrian accidents due to fogged-up eyeglasses from the masks?). 5,754 Swedes will meet their end due to Covid-19 through October 1, 2020, a population fatality rate of nearly 0.06 percent.]

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11 thoughts on “How is Sweden doing with coronaplague?”

  1. My guess is that Sweden will do somewhat better than the US once the dust settles. On the one had the median US age is lower. On the other hand the average Swede is probably more healthy and more sensible than the average American. My guess is that the lock down will from a health point of view be seen as accomplishing nothing once the dust settles. It will likely take longer than early 2021 to know the full ramifications of the lock down.

  2. My guess is they will lie and claim the shutdown worked and saved us all, or memory hole the whole thing.

  4. Youyang Gu’s model has been pretty accurate and it projects 4 deaths per day in Sweden on October 1. https://covid19-projections.com/sweden

    United States will have 524 per day at that time. https://covid19-projections.com/us

    Total Deaths U.S.: 180,604 out of 331,814,684 total population or 0.000544, a little more than 1/20th of 1% of the population dead by October 1.

    Total Deaths Sweden: 6,287 out of 10,230,185 total population or 0.000614, about 1/16th of 1% of the population dead by October 1.

    So his model says that we’ll continue to do a little better, total-deaths-per-population-wise, than Sweden through September, but we’re going to keep dying a lot longer than they will.

    IHME is predicting the US will get much, much worse from September – October and clock in more than 1400 DPD by then.

    And then look at Brazil! IHME predicts more than 4,600 DPD on August 1, versus 779 for Youyang Gu. From the shape of the IHME curves, it looks like everyone in Brazil might be dead from COVID on October 1. That’s a pretty bad outcome, I guess Bolsonaro won’t be running the country because he’ll be dead, too.

    https://covid19.healthdata.org/brazil
    https://covid19-projections.com/brazil

    It seems that one’s view of the world is radically shaped by the model one believes.

  6. GB
    June 22, 2020 at 2:27 pm
    This is interesting: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/news/lessons-from-the-lockdown-why-are-so-many-fewer-children-dying/
    Less babies vaccinated during shutdown and SIDS

    wow, smart! Everyone should stop vaccinations. Actually they tried that in Samoa, estimates are that the measles vaccination rate in Samoa fell from 74% in 2017 to 34% in 2018

    In the outbreak in 2019 at least 20% of babies aged six to 11 months contracted measles and one in 150 babies died. Extrapolated to the US population that would be more than 30k deaths per year from Measles alone, not to mention Polio, Mumps, etc, and not to mention permanent side effects from those who don’t die like blindness, sterility, brain damage, birth defects, etc.

    The anti-vaccine proponents somehow always neglect ever to mention the small fact that the diseases being vaccinated for are more deadly by orders of magnitude than any anecdotal evidence of harm from vaccines. I believe they would be hard pressed to describe the actual effects of Hep B, Pertussis, Measles, Mumps, Polio, Diptheria, Rubella because for some inexplicable reason they have never seen a single case of these diseases any of these in their lives.
    Stupidity, ignorance, malice, or pure evil? I’m not sure which one applies to these people, perhaps its a combination of all four.

    https://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010978.html

  7. Dear all,

    did you purposefully leave the northern Sweden epidemic center away from this story and calculations?
    The numbers are only increasing, not “burning away”. Unfortunately enough, herd immunity does not exist, according to several, repeated studies.

    • Dr. J: Sweden is 87 percent urban, right, but the cities are fairly well separated geographically. So, while statistics are reported to WHO on a nationwide basis, wouldn’t we expect essentially a set of independent epidemics, one for each Swedish city? Stockholm had the first one, which I hope is past peak by now. But Malmo, Gothenburg, and Uppsala could be on different curves more or less unrelated to Stockholm and to each other. The same thing happened in the U.S. There was a dramatic plague in New York City, but other cities and states didn’t even start to have a plague until May or June. So it looks like the U.S. is on some kind of plateau when really it might simply be that you have standard epidemic curves, each starting on a different date, added up to look like a plateau.

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