Taylor Lightman talks to Sam about the Swedish response to COVID. Taylor is from Lewisburg, lives in Sweden, and specializes in Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation. Taylor explains the mitigation measures he’s seeing from his home in rural Sweden. And he clarifies what the strategy really is: like, are they really not masking and just going for herd immunity? Is it business as usual, or have things changed a lot over there?

Please note that this conversation took place in October 2020. Since then, both Sweden and Central PA have had significant increases in both cases and deaths. 

The images show subsequent growth in cases and deaths and some increase in mitigation measures to curtail both -- though restrictions continue to be less extensive than they might be.

SHOW NOTES:

The elephant in the room:  Herd immunity

Assessing Sweden's early experience in 2020

• Theories for high Swedish death rate early on 
• Economic impact of COVID-19 on Sweden and in comparison to neighbor Norway
• Level of serological testing in Sweden -- no sign of herd immunity
• Disaster response in retrospect -- the difficulty of decision-making in conditions of uncertainty (paper is in Swedish, but google translate works quite well)

Sweden's new COVID-19 situation (which unrolled in the weeks following our conversation):

• Swedish COVID-19 stats
• Recognizing the pain --early losses did not help achieve herd immunity
• Shifting strategy

Other, better responses:  Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore…

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