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Sweden is Rolling the Dice with it’s Approach to the Pandemic
In truth, it is conducting a real time social experiment and no one knows now how it will end
After seeing several Facebook posts, emails, and now NBC news specials about how Sweden is approaching the Covid-19 pandemic, I am left scratching my head. First let’s look at some numbers. As of my writing this today, April 28, 2020, and using The Covid-19 dashboard by Johns Hopkins University, there have been 19,621 cases there with 2355 deaths. That is a mortality of ~12%. Compare that with the USA where we have 989,357 and 56,386 deaths for a mortality of just under 6%. So Sweden’s mortality rate is about twice that of the USA. And that is in the context of their highly touted healthcare system. But lets’ dig a little bit deeper. The USA is number one in virus cases but is the third most populous country in the world. Sweden is number 23 on the list of most cases in the world but is 91st in the world population. Based on cases per capita however the percent of the population with positive cases is about the same, 0.2–0.3%. They are a bit behind in people tested per capita as the below graph shows.
