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by SpicyLemonZest 2250 days ago
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.
1 comments

Right, but in planning for a hospital overrun you can't see it coming if you have no idea how many sick you have, if you don't test.

Are you suggesting that as long as your hospitals aren't overrun, inflection rates aren't worth knowing ?

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.