[hedgew]

All the Nordic countries underestimated the pandemic. Norway switched their goal from mitigation to suppression a few days ago, Finland is still teetering somewhere in between, and Sweden is solidly in the mitigation camp. Government officials in these countries seemed incapable of accepting just how horrible the situation is, so they only created optimistic models of the pandemic. Finland and Norway have released more and more pessimistic models each week, while Sweden has kept theirs secret for some reason.

I fear Sweden is still basing their approach on those optimistic models, that likely don't apply to this particular pandemic. They seem to be making the same mistake UK did, except they haven't changed paths yet. They say they are only doing what is "scientifically proven", without realizing that peer review and randomized controlled trials alone are not enough for situations where decisions need to be made in short time with imperfect information.

[Hokusai]

> All the Nordic countries underestimated the pandemic.

All countries underestimated the pandemic. From China to the United Kingdom, USA or Italy, every country underestimated it. The main difference is the attitude once lock downs are needed.

Maybe South Korea was the exception. But, South Korea is a high-income country in a permanent war with its north brother. The country is probably prepared for a biological attack similar to a pandemic. And, even South Korea seems to have lowered its standards and cases are growing up.

> I fear Sweden is still basing their approach on those optimistic models

Yes. It is surprising how everybody is blinded by exponential growth. "It is just 10 cases, it is just 50 cases, it is just 125 cases, it is just ... oh shit!"

[gurkendoktor]

There is at least one country that didn't underestimate the virus - Taiwan, which was way ahead of the WHO at every step: warned about human-to-human transmission at the end of 2019(!), quickly ramped up travel restrictions, immediately mobilized to mass-produce masks.

The vast majority of new cases in Taiwan are imported now, and everyone coming back has to self-quarantine for 14 days.

[tooltalk]

how about Vietnam (174 cases and no death so far)? It shares physical border with China and the country's health system, much less response to the pandemic, threadbare; yet they have fewer cases than Taiwan.

IMO, I think it's very difficult to draw any important lessons from countries that are warmer climate like Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, or Thailand.

[gurkendoktor]

The grandparent was talking about taking the risk seriously - you can say that about Taiwan no matter its climate.

My gut feeling is that the culture of wearing masks, not shaking hands etc. is just as important of a factor as the climate. I guess we'll find out by observing cooler Japan.

[bostik]

Looking at the log-graphs of confirmed cases, Sweden is a freaky outlier. Other countries with reliable (ish) numbers show a nearly continuous smooth slope, where as Sweden's graph has a rather curious inflection point.

In the official data, Day 1 is 2020-01-22. If you plot the confirmed cases for Italy, Spain, S.Korea, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, UK, US and Switzerland in the same graph, you can see how Sweden's rate follows the general trend until about day 50. From that point onwards, the growth rate of confirmed cases drops.

Knowing how badly Finland has handled this mess, I have serious doubts about the Swedish numbers. Such a sudden and rapid deviation feels more like a change in reporting (and testing) policy than anything else.

[Gwypaas]

From march 13th they stopped testing everyone suspected of corona and instead only test people seeking care with serious symptoms. [0] The metric the government agencies publicly communicate now is the number of people admitted to ICU per day, which lags the infection rate a bit more than simply testing for symptoms but is a hard fact since everyone being that sick will end up requiring the care and therefore reducing the unknowns.

[0]: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/samhalle/a/70GQRV/nya-str...

[Jommi]

How exactly did Finland handle this badly? It's looking pretty good I think.

[bostik]

Let me count the ways.

1. Long state of indecision. For a very long time, as the news from around the world brought images of falling skies, the Finnish government actively avoided making any decisions. G: "we defer to THL". THL: "we defer to government".

2. President had to intervene to get the government off of their asses. How messed up is that?

3. Artificially limiting the supply of ICUs. Of the 300 units in the country, half are earmarked for "not to be used for COVID-19 cases".

4. Completely ignoring the effect of people returning from their holidays. That's 200k potential transmission vectors, not taken into account at all. Until it was too late.

So the people who were supposed to be in charge have shown nothing but incompetence and avoidance of responsibility. The measures that are in place now seem good (quarantining an entire province!), but the handling of the pandemic until very recently was nothing short of disgraceful.

[_y5hn]

Norway's death and infected numbers have almost linear growth. Norway is comparably testing alot so that's why infected numbers are high. The underlying model is still exponential. Current measures from the point in time they were installed seems to work as intended, for now.

Measures might be eased up after Easter, based on interim scientific findings and recommendations from several ministries.

Communication, timing, updates have been timely, though people and businesses worry about how to deal with the new economic reality.

[pimeys]

In Finland the whole capital area has been isolated from last Friday. People over 60 are not allowed to go out. People are expected to stay home and from the pictures the busier central Helsinki has been dead quiet for over a week now.

Nine dead until now, but we'll see...

[sampo]

> In Finland the whole capital area has been isolated from last Friday.

People can still cross the province border for a variety of reasons, for example for their daily commute.

> People over 60 are not allowed to go out.

The government told vulnerable people to stay home, but nobody is monitoring or enforcing this. If a certain 60 year old wants to go out and hang out at the mall for the whole day, they can without anyone stopping them.

[pimeys]

People in Finland seem in general follow the rules quite nicely. I heard there was a rumor of free buckets in Herttoniemi shopping mall that caused quite a rush of people, but what my mom and friends say it's super quiet now.

Comparing to Spain where I've been the past month. At least Murcia is still quite quiet, but I'm afraid the horrors of Madrid might come down here sooner than later... :(

[vimslayer]

They were supposed to give out free buckets in the opening of a new shopping mall, but that was canceled due to the virus situation. According to Iltalehti, the opening had about as much people coming in as any other store that day.

[listsfrin]

Everybody is creating "models". How about asking the doctors? Don't they have some trustworthy studies in the three months that have passed?

Let's skip Facebook and Twitter and analyse the data that we have. What does it tell us?

[ma2rten]

You need to create models to predict what will happen in the future, which is what epidemiologist do.

[listsfrin]

While I agree that some people need to create models, it is very important to understand that not everyone is able to create them. For example journalists should not be able to create such models, they lack the knowledge.

[conformist]

Agreed. That is an important point. Let epidemiologist do the modelling, and use some back-of-the-envelope calculations to convince yourself of the orders of magnitude. It's super annoying that everyone who knows what a jupyter notebook is now starts blogging about their own modelling efforts.

[sampo]

Well, has there been any epidemiologists that have at least somewhat successfully predicted things, so far?

[conformist]

Atm it only takes a straight line through a couple of points to predict things for most countries, so I'd say yes.

The interesting question is whether they could help to implement useful political interventions based on which parameters matter. The answer seems to be yes in many cases.