https://eeholmes.github.io/CoV19/Fo...

New assessments of regional situations as of May 17.

Perhaps you recall, or maybe you don't know, that I live in Tucson AZ. It is exciting to know that the whole epidemiological world is looking at Arizona as we make the first, first world, experiment in uncontrolled Covid-19 spread.

Our Governor won't shut down the state, so it is up to each of us to make our own decisions. We like being responsible for ourselves out here on the frontier.

I am sheltering in place. I have cancelled all medical and dental appointments. No one enters my home, except my daughter, and my wife and I don't leave. Essential supplies are ordered online, and after delivery are left outside for 48 hours. Do not reveal my address, because I don't want others to raid my from porch for goodies.

I am in a vulnerable group, age 75. I am hoping to see the death toll rise among the 15-30 age group since those are ones driving the spread of the virus.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb-...

I will make an exception for the following curve:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...

It pertains to the weekly death-tally in Sweden, from all causes, since Winter 2015-16. I find that it well illustrates the level of impact COVID-SARS2 has or can have.

The green lines represent the statistical model: the solid green line gives the mean number of weekly deaths while the two dashed lines give the plus-minus 1-sigma zone of statistical fluctuations. The purple line gives the empirical weekly death-count for the country of Sweden.

The horizontal axis gives years, starting with Winter 2015-16, the labels of the type 'v13' say that the datum pertains to the week 13. There is, of course, 52 weeks in the year.

The first thing to note is the large seasonal death-rate fluctuation between the Summer and Winter months. (It is nearly 3-sigma, if measured by the size of the 1-sigma band.)

The second thing to mention are the large seasonal flu death-rate flareups in the Winters 2016-17 and 2017-18.

The third thing to note is the obvious sudden spike in the weekly death-rate due to the arrival of Covid-SARS2 to Sweden in early 2020. It increased the Swedish death rate more than the previous 'bad' flu-seasons did, but it is on a comparable scale. Given that the initial spike came as the effect of the novel corona virus attacking unprepared Swedish population for the first time, it is reasonable to expect that, other things being roughly equal, the next flare-ups due to the virus should have much milder effects.

It is still true that an individual can only die once, so in a sense there can be no "excess deaths", just early deaths. Most of those, in the case of covid-19, were already aged, so the number of lost years are not so many.

I recall a somewhat similar situation in London in the 1950s and 1960s. There were frequent thick fogs, called "smog", caused mainly by the use of coal. Each time there was a bad smog, subsequent statistical analysis showed many excess deaths, mostly among the old. Totaling some hundred thousand I think.

London particular

The siblings Lady Peasoup and Lord Ffogg
(Londinium episode, 1967)
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/...

From the Great Stink to the Great Smog
https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/d...

Was curious as to your thoughts on the various Covid curves now, in general and perhaps Sweden in particular.

<Was curious as to your thoughts on the various Covid curves now, in general and perhaps Sweden in particular.>

(1) It is clear now that this COVID thing is a seasonal beast and that Winter is its prime time domain in the Northern hemisphere. Basically, in terms of seasonality, it will behave now as the common cold, from which it has been derived. (The reason underlying the seasonality of corona viruses is that at temperatures close to freezing the beast survives at large a much longer time. The moist, versus dry, environment also plays a role)

(2) COVID is becoming less lethal as time progresses. The underlying mechanism is that those strains of COVID that get people to hospital and even kills them outright, reduce their opportunity to spread. This is a common evolution for many viruses, but does not apply for instance to viruses that kill us only after they spread and infect new victims. (For cultural reasons we tend to fear mutations. But in this case mutations generally work out in our favor.)

(3) It seems that the chief way COVID is using to kill us is by taxing our immune systems already tired from old age, and/or by taxing our immune systems exhausted from fighting other diseases and stresses. (Among young and healthy, COVID seems actually somewhat less deadly than the common cold -- despite of the 'novelty' aspect COVID and the 'commonness' property of the common cold.)

(4) From the standpoint of making rational decisions under uncertainty -- or in the face of large unknown, as here in the case COVID -- the general coping strategies tend to fall into several general paradigms that differently balance the costs of combating the problem and the costs of learning about the nature of the problem.

In our case, most of the Western World went to lock-downs, which could have been the proper response had there been a realistic chance that COVID could have been eradicated by doing so. This strategy resembles an all out sprint and, as such, can not be sustained too long.

Sweden, in contrast, went to a strategy of using only milder restrictions, but such that could be economically sustained indefinitely. Instead of the all out dash, Sweden chose the pace of an ultra-marathoner.

Given that Sweden and Czech Republic, my original home, are both countries of approximately 10 million people, I contrast their respective curves a lot. Here are the respective histories of their approach to COVID thus far:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID...

To me, the most telling graph about the efficacy of the Swedish approach is, again, this one:

Alekhine vs Duras, 1910 (kibitz #1)

It's a long time ago, but can you recall what source you had for the game?

I also have a later Duras monograph written by Jan Kalendovsky, but I acquired that one later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID...

displays towards the bottom is one that breaks down the all-cause-death-rate by the three largest counties: Stockholm, Skane, and Vastra Gotaland.

The comparison between Stockholm and Skane is quite instructive. In particular, note that the second season of COVID in Stockholm is already much tamer than was the first COVID season there. In contrast, it looks like Skane lucked out during the first COVID season. But Skane is being hit hard now, in the second COVID season.