patrick.net

Unlike most countries, Sweden has taken a very liberal approach to flattening it's coronavirus curve. Rather than shuttering schools and non-essential businesses, Sweden stands alone, instead opting to only give guidance to citizens to be careful: keep distance from people who are ill, isolate if you have symptoms, wash hands, etc. More recently as of April 1st Sweden tightened it's guidelines further with restrictions on gatherings, and is drawing up new legislation to allow it to take “extraordinary steps”.



Sweden doesn't report all deaths on weekends and holidays. This often makes it look like the curve may be flattening, often prompting some outlets to declare that they've reached a top, when in fact the numbers keep increasing every week.

What we can tell is that Sweden's measures slowed down the rate of spread considerably, but not to a level that would halt the exponential spread. Under it's first guidelines, the "doubling rate" in Sweden was around 10 days. After tighter guidelines on April 1st, the "doubling rate" improved to around 14 days.

14 days is a very large improvement over the baseline of rate 3 days we have seen almost everywhere. To illustrate, the unmitigated disease has around a 1000x increase in cases in 1 month. Sweden's spread is only around 4x increase in the same period.