Yes, I did mention sweden before but perhaps you didnt read what I said, so here it is again. Sweden has cases going up...but deaths still going down. Result!
People seem to need reminding so here is the FT page which shows a graph of deaths or cases for every country in the world. You can pick 6 countries to highlight to compare, while all the others are shown in gray in the background but the cursor will pick up any of them to compare. I have set up US UK, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden.
Coronavirus chart: see how your country compares | Free to read | Financial Times
You will see deaths in Sweden have fallen pretty much steadily since their peak in April, which is about the same time everyone elses peaked. The US deaths rose to a peak and have never really come down. That seems to be pretty much because states have caught it one by one, and there is a whole separate graph which shows them individually. But deaths for UK italy France Germany have all been on the rise again in recent months.
The plot shows Sweden doing a lot better than the others I mentioned.
There is an option button you can click to switch the display to cases instead of deaths. If you do that you will see cases in Sweden have risen for the last two months or so, while all the time deaths have fallen. That is a big win!
As i said above, in many countries it looks as though cases have risen lately, but much of that rise is fake because they are increasing the number of tests done. Test more people and you find more cases, so we have found more of the real total of cases as time has gone on. The real peaks of cases in the spring will have been much much bigger than they are shown here. .
Sweden has followed a policy of not having lockdowns and it looks as though it has resulted in constantly falling death rate. Click the graph to cumulative deaths and you see Sweden has done rather better than UK or US despite no lockdown. With no indication of rising deaths now despite rising cases for two months, it just might have reached the total of all who are going to die. France is currently on a lower deaths total than Sweden, but its deaths are rising now while Sweden's are not.
It looks to be they are moving to an end game scenario where they try to mop up any lingering areas and are thinking about eradication and an end to the epidemic while other nations are wondering how to manage a second peak.
You also need to remind yourselves that reducing cases is not a goal. It is reducing deaths which matters. There is no point in special measures to prevent catching something no worse than a cold for a couple of weeks. General consensus is that covid will never now be eradicated and there will be new cases every year, but the death rate will fall back to something like seasonal flu or the colds which we get from other coronaviruses in common circulation. We have tamed these virus with human immunity and that is how covid will be controlled. Getting to that situation is the endpoint goal, where we have enough immunity in the community, not that it is eradictaed but that an irreducible few die. Sweden looks like it may be near.