If you're not testing a sizeable enough sample of the population, then whatever number of cases you give has to be taken with a rather large helping of salt.
For example, my country's CDC has the official number of confirmed cases in the low hundreds with a dozen deaths, but anyone wise enough knows that between the ridiculously low number of samples tested (less than ten thousand in a population of a couple hundred million), the poor public health infrastructure, the anaemic government response and general public health illiteracy, the real number of cases is easily an order of magnitude or two higher.
Completely agreed. Sweden is worth observing in terms of number of deaths and how overloaded their hospitals get. But their number of cases, like in a lot of countries, is essentially garbage data that can't possibly help our understanding of the situation to consume.
If your hospitals aren't overrun, and you don't expect them to become overrun in the future, improving your estimate of infection rates doesn't seem like a high-leverage activity. The argument for doing a lot of testing is that it enables good contact tracing, which Sweden doesn't seem to be planning to do anymore.
Every developed country did testing and contact tracing, even the ones popularly seen as doing nothing. That was why leaders were saying it wouldn't be a problem in February; they didn't expect a magic cure, they expected their testing and contact tracing to handle it.
I definitely want to know. But it seems like Swedish public policy is that the current measures are the strictest sustainable ones, so they're going to maintain them until strict measures are no longer needed. It's not clear that early visibility of a spike would change that.
Given that mortality rate is closely tied to the availability of ventilators, it would be catastrophically short sighted to not react to a spike with strong, short term measures.
This turns out not to be the case. Ventilators don't actually help much with COVID-19. If you end up severe enough to not be able to breathe on your own you're likely to die, and the ventilator only prolongs it. So running out of ventilators won't actually cause many more deaths.
The way to prevent a lot of deaths is simply to prevent people from catching it at all.
Most recent numbers I've seen are that if you go on a vent, you've got a 70% (San Fransisco) to 90% (New Orleans) chance of dying. Not great.
Anecdotal word from family members working in ERs is that none of them have been on a shift with a successful code run on a covid patient. CPR is low single digits 30-day survival based on Chinese numbers released this week. It was something like (1) patient survived out of 37 attempts.
The question of if the 10-30% of vent survivors would have survived without a vent is fair, but that's a maximum efficacy at this point.
Vents are definitely not the answer everyone thought they would be.
I guess I'm not sure what to say in response to that. Swedish officials simply don't agree that strong short term measures are required to ensure a sufficient number of ventilators.
Every strategy is dependent on testing, because every strategy requires an accurate assessment of sickness rates. If you don't know the extent of the problem, how can you even formulate a plan to fight it?
If by "strategy" you mean herd immunity, Sweden isn't doing that. No one is publicly claiming to be trying that anymore.
You can call it herd immunity or not, and Sweden has indeed picked "not". But their plan is to keep doing what they're currently doing. The Swedish government has no phase 2 where they expect to contain the coronavirus more strongly.