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Sweden is trapped in an interminable deadly half-lockdown

The Swedish soft lockdown will cost a lot more in the long run

Despite the relaxed approach, Sweden still had major changes in behaviour and movement patterns. The “half lockdown” may have stopped the exponential growth, but it wasn’t enough to reduce the spread. So Sweden is now trapped into maintaining some kind of isolation measures for months while other countries open up around them, and possibly, fly right over.

Norway’s sharp hard action and closed borders cost more in the short run, but they are now tracking towards zero cases and recovery beckons. Sweden has twice as many cases per capita as Norway, and ten times as many deaths, and there’s little sign the new infections are declining, nor that herd immunity is close. Antibody tests show that by late April only 7% of Stockholm may have been exposed to the virus, much less than the 20+ percent that the Swedish Chief Epidemiologist was expecting.

In the graph below the number of cases are on the same scale, though Sweden has twice the population. Given that viruses grow and decline on exponential scales, the Swedish curve could have still shrunk almost as fast as it rose — like Norway’s did.

Sweden compared to the UK, Covid-19, graph.

Sweden (grey) population 10 million, compared to Norway (red) population 5 million. Click to enlarge.

Norway: 12 days after major quarantine measures the curve gets crushed

In Norway, major lockdowns were announced on March 15, with headlines like: “Norway takes most far-reaching measures ever experienced in peacetime over coronavirus”.… and new daily cases peaked 12 days later on March 27th.

Norway is planning to reopen flights with Denmark and Finland on June 15. But the three Scandinavian countries will exclude Sweden for the moment because there are too many infections.

As other countries have reduced their cases and their deaths Sweden has risen to the top of the daily death rate chart in Europe.

Sweden’s coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed

Amit Katwala, Wired

The way the Swedish response has been structured has made the country more resistant to changing tack during the epidemic. Sweden’s expert agencies are kept quite separate from the government, which is generally a good thing, because it means that scientific issues don’t become politicised. “But if the expert agency is making bad decisions there is nothing to counter it,” [Lena Einhorn, a virologist and author] points out.

Swedes are generally more trusting of authority and science than those in other countries, he adds. Despite recent murmurings of disquiet, the agency remains broadly popular among the public – and Tegnell has become something of a cult figure in Sweden, with toasts on his birthday and people getting tattoos of his face. But that’s been part of the problem. “The biggest problem in Sweden is there is really only one voice – that voice is the public health agency, and in particular Anders Tegnell,” Einhorn says.

h/t Travis T Jones.

Mobility in Sweden was reduced by about half compared to reductions in Norway and London

Apple iPhone data suggests that requests for directions on public transport may have been reduced by nearly half in Stockholm. This compares to a 70% reduction in Oslo, Norway and the 85% fall in London, UK. See the graphs below.  These are requests for directions. They aren’t passenger records, and people doing regular trips probably don’t use them. But we can see that whatever the change in behaviour was in London, it was less severe in Norway, and about half in Stockholm.

Oslo Apple Traffic, graph, coronavirus, lockdown, data.

Oslo Apple traffic data

Pandemics cause economic pain regardless of what governments do

Even if the government doesn’t mandate restrictions, apparently many people choose to stay home anyway. This is what we see in Sweden.

Oslo Apple Traffic, graph, coronavirus, lockdown, data.

Stockholm Apple traffic data

Oslo Apple Traffic, graph, coronavirus, lockdown, data.

London Apple traffic data

Mobility Aps are an imperfect proxy for the economy. But there are at least some reports that suggest there is an economic pain in Sweden and claim a lot of people are out of work. By some estimates 17% of the workforce in Sweden is either unemployed or counted in the government furlough program.

 

The UK compared to Sweden

Even the UK, which was caught unprepared and with a high density population, is managing to reduce the spread. The late start meant the UK ended up with a dreadful tally, and had to do some of the most severe restrictions of the three. But even so, and even with the sabotage of open borders bringing in 10,000 people a day, the UK has gradually cut their 5,000 new cases a day down to one third of that.

Beware — there are two different scales on the graph below. (!) The UK population is six times larger than Sweden, it had ten times as many cases at the peak, but putting them on the same scale makes it hard to compare the shape of the curves.

The effects of the harder lockdown in the UK show in May. Daily new cases in the UK are now a third of what they were at the peak.

 

Sweden compared to the UK, Coronavirus, Graph.

Sweden (grey) compared to the UK (blue). Note the diffent scales, the UK daily cases are 10 times higher than Sweden. | Worldometer: UK peak daily infections

 

The UK decline in cases would have been faster if the borders in the UK were not open. Plane traffic into the UK was hugely reduced, but there were still 10,000 arrivals a day, bringing in something like 300 new infections a day which would go on to infect another 600 people before that line of infection died out. (This is assuming an Ro of 0.7 for the UK as estimated by Imperial College). So the UK tally was effectively inflated by 900 new cases a day, which made the severe lockdown much less effective, and not surprisingly draining enthusiasm.

I remain baffled that any government would demand 60 million people stay strictly at home while allowing foreigners to fly in without mandatory quarantine.The UK Swamp-Expert advisor were clearly thinking of ‘herd immunity” when they modeled some excuses not to close the borders.  It is almost a form of sabotage. The economic advantage of letting sick people fly in without putting them in mandatory hotel isolation must be a tiny fraction of the lockdown cost. It makes no sense and would burn through the patience and social capital of the UK people.

Sweden also kept borders open which presumably must work against the 50% lockdown. It would be good to have flight data in Sweden.

Citimapper Ap Data

Many media outlets have used the Citymapper Ap data, so I’ve included that here.

The Citimapper Ap was a project that started in London. suggests even larger restrictions, with a 70% reduction in Stockholm in late March, compared with 90% in London.

Citimapper Stockholm and London mobility, graph, Coronavirus

Citimapper Stockholm and London mobility, graph, Coronavirus

Sweden obviously hasn’t done enough. Sweden could easily have crushed the curve like Norway, and be set to reopen domestically. Instead the infection drags on. Most other nations will not accept Swedish passengers without a mandatory two week quarantine.

About CityMapper data:

The Citymapper Mobility Index is calculated by comparing trips planned in the Citymapper app to a recent typical usage period. Trips planned (‘Get Me Somewhere’ and related) are correlated to trips taken (GO mode). Typical usage period is defined as 4 weeks between Jan 6th and Feb 2nd, 2020. To better capture typical usage in certain cities we are using different periods in Paris (Feb 3rd to March 1st) and Hong Kong and Singapore (both Dec 2nd to Dec 22nd). A day is defined as midnight to midnight UTC, thus for certain cities may not correspond with calendar days. We update the data every day at 7am UTC.

Our users are public transport users and also use us for walking, cycling, and some micromobility and cabs. We are not used for driving. We do not track the demographics of our users. We have enough data in our published cities to be confident that it represents a real change in behaviour. However, it is a sample set of general mobility and may not represent the real world exactly.

REFERENCES

Worldometer

Apple Mobility Data

Data: https://citymapper.com/cmi/compare

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