Hi everyone, I have now updated the Swedish and European Infection and mortality estimate and done a few more estimates. Things are still bad in Sweden... I will continue with updates at least once per month and hope the Swedish COVID-19 performance will improve!

Attachments:

Sweden(2).nb

Update June 14. IHME (https://covid19.healthdata.org/sweden) forecasts 8534 fatalities by August 4th. In contrast, our model forecasts 6012. It will be a good model check. I will post updated picture just before I go on a break in July along with additional comments. The end result will depend on whether the distancing in Sweden is breaking (and producing more cases) or not (in which case all the extra new cases are due to increased testing)

Update June 11. I have updated the pictures, and added a fatalities curve and forecast which has proven to be the most stable of all the models I have worked with so far. It is obtained my fitting the R curve of a SIR model to the fatality cumulatives, as in the picture of the fatalities per million (I owe you all an explanation of why this works), and taking the derivative of that curve to obtain the forecast in the new picture. According to the state epidemiologist, the increased number of cases is due to increased testing, although not entirely. This does not affect the model for fatalities. But a new model needs to be derived for the infection cases when more data is available and the trend stops rising and stabilizes. The forecasts are made originally on 4 May.

Dear Daniel,

Four things:

1) Serological tests indicate that the levels of infection are comparable to that of other countries (7%), so no, they do not seem to be gaining in terms of acquiring herd immunity.

2) Sweden's economic crunch is just as bad as that of its neighboring countries. I am based in Finland. From the point of view of unemployment, it is actually worse.

3) Fatality per million rate. Sweden is fifth worst in the world, and various models (including mine) forecast that it will end up being second or third worst by the autumn.

4) The state epidemiologist now accepts fault to some degree. Not so the government. There is a huge debate in Sweden. Nevertheless, it is unlikely they will change their strategy at this point, that is, unless things get much worse. This week, the number of cases reported has increased dramatically. I have the pictures of a very neat true SIR model posted elsewhere in community which illustrate this. I attach them here along with the fatality PM forecasts. The pictures show in alpha order (

Attachments:

FatalitiesPM.png

SESIRmodel6April...png

seFatalityForecast.png

seForecastDailyTrends.png

Sweden opted to take on more cases, and this may have lead to a greater percentage of infections in the most vulnerable populations, hence perhaps a high mortality. It is not clear (to me) that the Swedish health care system failed to hold up, although certainly if vulnerable populations were hard-hit that would indicate some policy failures.

It is also not entirely clear that the mortality is as high as claimed, as we do not really know what percentage of the Swedish population has been infected. I expect this will clarify in the next several weeks, as more antibody testing is performed.

As to whether the greater exposure leads to an improved herd immunity effect (as compared to other countries), we likely will not know until the end of 2020 (unless we learn sooner than that that immunity simply does not last very long, but this seems unlikely based on evidence thus far). Similarly, we will not have a clear indication of overall relative mortalities before that time.

There is the obvious counter-balance that Sweden's economy has almost certainly taken less of a hit than the economies of most other countries. But so far as the virus impact goes, I really would not draw any hard conclusions until more data is in. It might turn out to be a disasterous strategy, or it might turn out well, or it might be somewhere in between, as is often the case, when all options carry serious drawbacks.

It will be interesting to see results of large-scale antibody tests. Sweden might actually be well ahead of the curve, going forward.