We thought Australia would be much worse hit. Emails went out to medical people with 8,000 possibly to die in NSW and 10,000 in QLD. Glad we didn't go down the herd immunity path.
At the beginning if herd immunity followed in Australia the Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly calculated between 50,000 deaths to 150,000 deaths from Covid19.
A 20% infection rate: 50,000 people out of 5 million infected with COVID-19 would die.
If 40% of the population: 10 million infections would mean 100,000 dead.
If 15 million people got the coronavirus then approximately 150,000 would die.
As the government considers advice on restricting visits to pubs, cinemas and aged care homes.
www.smh.com.au
Certainly the Swedish don't seem to think their initial approach was such a resounding success since their public health policies (like recommending face masks, introducing contact tracing, and a hugely expanded testing regime) have taken a u-turn, particularly since about September.
As a third wave settles in on Europe, hopefully the (massively) changed public policies in Sweden will prevent a recurrence of the tragically high number of lives lost amongst the elderly and vulnerable in the second wave.
These changes are interesting. Sweden is intriguing
@Sideways. A lot of people did follow the recommendations and socially distance. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the population followed what recommendations and suggested guidelines. Not enough for them to continue with them obviously.
Sweden didn't have enough testing kits available, so their infection rates and their case fatality rates may not be so accurate. The excess mortality rate may be much higher.
On this page we provide an overview of excess mortality along with charts to explore the data. You can learn in more depth about different measures of excess mortality, their strengths and limitations, and their comparability across countries in our work with John Muellbauer and Janine Aron.
ourworldindata.org
This is of course true of many countries we won't know for some time what accurate fatality rates are, and for poorer countries that don't have those records we won't ever really know.
This is an interesting look at it. It looks at how Sweden didn't have enough testing, and how migrant and elderly communities were/were not protected. ABC's Foreign Correspondent called "
The Swedish Model".
Sweden's economy has suffered and last I read the surrounding countries are closed to them so SARS-CoV-2 doesn't spread to them. So those deaths didn't stop the economic impact. Sweden had 752 new COVID-19 cases in early October and have allowed bigger sporting groups to meet. A comparison of concern is the same day Victoria recorded 723 cases back in July, the UK recorded 763. Yesterday, Victoria recorded 1 case and 0 deaths, and the UK records 15,650 and 136 deaths. So it will be very interesting to see how Sweden goes. I hope it doesn't go badly.
I have been thinking about the other factors that come into play.
The Swedes are 97 in the list of countries by obesity rate, the US is 12, the UK is 36, so it would be interesting to know if that has an impact on death rates from Covid19. There's a Lancet study that says it does.
Sweden has smaller house holds with much more space, they have a lower population density, so that might be a factor as well? United Kingdom comes in 49 in population density, and the US comes in at 174 overall. Sweden comes in at 193 for population density.
How much it takes off will be something to watch. I thought it was one million cases in 10 days, and not three days as reported here.
The global pandemic is far from over with a whopping one million cases recorded in just three days.
www.news.com.au
but we're back to the family lottery system again, so it may take awhile. And you do have to quarantine for 2 weeks when you get here... sorry.
I'll sponsor you as my Aunt Freida 
