Why isn’t Sweden exploding?

By Tyler Cowen.

"…Swedish state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell remains calm: he is not seeing the kind of rapid increase that might threaten to overwhelm the Swedish health service, and unlike policymakers in the UK, he has been entirely consistent that that is his main objective.

That is from a new piece by Freddie Sayers, asserting that “the jury is still out” when it comes to Sweden.  I cannot reproduce all of the graphs in that piece, but scroll through and please note that in terms of per capita deaths Sweden seems to be doing better than Belgium, France, or the United Kingdom, all of which have serious lockdowns (Sweden does not).  If you measure extant trends, Sweden is in the middle of the pack for Europe.  And here is data on new hospital admissions:



Now I understand that ideally one should compare similar “time cohorts” across countries, not absolute numbers or percentages.  That point is logically impeccable, but still as the clock ticks it seems less likely to account for the Swedish anomaly.

Of course we still need more days and weeks of data.

To be clear, I am not saying the United States can or should copy Sweden.  Sweden has an especially large percentage of people living alone, the Swedes are probably much better at complying with informal norms for social distancing, and obesity is much less of a problem in Sweden than America, probably hypertension too.

But I’d like to ask a simple question: who predicted this and who did not?  And which of our priors should this cause us to update?

I fully recognize it is possible and maybe even likely that Sweden ends up being like Japan, in the sense of having a period when things seem (relatively) fine and then discovering they are not.  (Even in Singapore the second wave has arrived, from in-migration, and may well be worse than the first.)  But surely the chance of that scenario has gone down just a little?

And here is a new study on Lombardy by Daniil Gorbatenko:

The data clearly suggest that the spread had been trending down significantly even before the initial lockdown. They invalidate the fundamental assumption of the Covid-19 epidemiological models and with it, probably also the rationale for the harshest measures of suppression.

One possibility (and I stress that word possibility) is that these Lombardy data, shown at the link, are reflecting the importance of potent “early spreaders,” often family members, who give Covid-19 to their families fairly quickly, but after which the average rate of spread falls rapidly.

I’ll stand by my claim that the pieces on this one show an increasing probability of not really adding up.  In the meantime, I am very happy to pull out and signal boost the best criticisms of these results."