@RantingRooster It tells us how effective the public health measures have been at preventing the spread of the disease. Countries that took effective public health measures at the beginning of the pandemic have had few deaths and are able to live relatively normal lives now. Residents of these countries will be vaccinated before there are large numbers of deaths. Sweden unofficially backed off its herd immunity strategy some time ago and this has led to them dropping from the top 10 in deaths/million. They have officially declared that the herd immunity strategy was a failure. The dumbing-down of the United States along with the worship of neo-liberal capitalism has left the US unable to respond intelligently to the pandemic.

reporting the case number by per capita? What does that tell us?

@fire with fire @fire with fire @fire with fire @fire with fire
And yet, you will not stop talking about it. Why will you not? Why would anybody so determinedly chatter about things they do not understand? What is the motivation? I don't get it.

I'm not going to dwell on the misunderstanding of Swedish policy (e.g. they closed secondary schools and universities, banned large gatherings, and "asked" people to work from home if possible, which a very large fraction of Swedes have been doing ...). I'm just going to talk about the correct stats on cases and deaths.

In just the 3 weeks through Tuesday the 29th, 130,000 Swedes tested positive as new cases -- 1.3% of the population. There is no indication that this rate has slowed, or is slowing; to the contrary it has picked up a few percent versus the prior 3 week period.

At the moment the official mortality through Tuesday is given as 8700, but that will change, because many deaths take 7 to 10 days to get into the historical record. By January 11th, the official number through Tuesday 29th Dec will be revised to 8900+.

Unless there has been a demographic shift in the new-case population, 1,500 more Swedes -- .015% of the population -- will die of Covid-related causes over the next 3 weeks.

(EDITED to fix an off-by-10-days error.)
The eventual official record will thus show that as of January 19, 2021, approximately 10,400 Swedes will have died of Covid. This will bring their total Covid-19 mortality to over 0.1% of the population. Unless there is a sudden drop (between now and the 19th) of the case fatality rate or new infection rate (e.g., due to the introduction of new treatments, or to a change in Swedish social behavior), another 1,500 will die by February 10, bringing their mortality to 0.115%. (this is assuming things don't worsen, though of course they could, e.g. due to the more virulent strain that emerged recently, or to christmas socializing.)

By then, vaccination should be affecting the new infection rate, so we can hope that their eventual mortality from the onset of the pandemic through August 2021 will level out at no more than 0.15%.

After that, depending on the long-term clinical effectiveness of the vaccine, we can expect annual Covid mortality to be on a par with current seasonal flu mortality. (Which, BTW, has fallen through the floor this year, because most seasonal flus are not nearly as contagious as Covid-19, so that the social distancing regimes have dramatically reduced flu rates in the Northern Hemisphere.)

And if ivermectin or other treatments currently in trials pan out, then the combination of vaccine and treatment might reduce annual Covid-19 mortality to much less than that of flu.

Meanwhile, Norway and Finland, the most directly comparable nations to Sweden in demographics, geography and culture, have mortality rates to date of just under .01%, versus Sweden's 0.084%. The US, on the other hand, whose only significant demographic, geographic, or cultural resemblances to Sweden are in the large number of surnames ending in "son" (pennsylvania notwithstanding), and in the popularity of Lutheranism in the Midwest, will probably end up with a higher overall mortality, in the range of 0.2%, due to:
A. our overall poor health
B. the large fraction of our population who behave like toddlers
C. the large fraction of our population who respond eagerly to FUD that confirms their biases
D. the structural inadequacy of our socioeconomic institutions to handle this pandemic or any other.

This has been a FUD-free message from someone who isn't clueless. We now return you to your regularly scheduled cloud-of-buzzing-FUD program.

EDIT to add: These are relatively optimistic projections. New Swedish deaths might range as high as 2500 between 12/29 and 01/19.

The actual numbers from Sweden according to the World Health Organization:

.

As of July 28, there were a grand total of 42 "confirmed cases" in the entire country of more than 10 million population. From July through the next three months, the number of active cases fluctuated between around 100 and 400. The first spike of the current increase in Swedish virus cases and deaths took place on September 27, when it reached 631 -- six one thousands of one percent of the population was a confirmed case.

Since then, the surge has pushed the total of confirmed cases to more than 11,000 on December 25, a little more than one tenth of one percent of the Swedish population. However that number is somewhat misleading as it is obviously a reporting anomaly. On December 26, the total number of confirmed cases in Sweden dropped by 6300 -- a net decrease of 55% on the day, suggesting improbably that more than half the people who were sick on Saturday got well on Sunday.

Whatever it means to those who presume to know cause and effect with respect to the Asteroid Virus, and in spite of reporting problems that sometimes put several days worth of activity into a single day's report, the most recent peak certainly shows that something different started to happen as the summer ended, and a lot more people in that country got sick, and more than 2000 have died.

The most recent number available is for December 30 -- 7084 confirmed cases. Seven Swedes out of a thousand are now considered confirmed cases.

Finally, the WHO chart does suggest that this surge of new cases has peaked, with a clearer pattern showing for deaths, but there does appear to be the begining of a downturn in cases.

.

I reject the circular logic of Team Lockdown that reasons backward from effect to cause and claims that the only way the numbers can go up or down is the intensity of the lockdown. More sick people, obviously too many people not staying home. Fewer sick people, obviously, people are doing a good job of obeying their orders.

Beyond rejecting that facile interpretation of the strange ups and downs of the infection rate, I have no idea what the fuck is going on. But I am sick of the sophistry behind this one dimensional analysis of public health policy presented at though it were "Science."