Title : The effectiveness of the Swedish approach to combating the first wave of COVID 19
Abstract:
In combating the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Swedish approach was far more relaxed than the approach commonly adopted by its neighboring countries. There has been ongoing controversy about the effectiveness of the Swedish approach relative to the common approach. Here, we present an analysis of the effectiveness of these approaches on public health outcomes -- COVID-19 mortality, total mortality and COVID-19 transmission -- during the first wave of COVD-19.
The key to the analysis was to adjust for ever-changing public health outcomes in addition to stationary confounding covariates such as gender, age and social economic status. During the first wave of COVID-19, the pandemic progressed quickly. The government adopted different interventions to reflect ever-changing pandemic situations during different periods in the first wave of the pandemic. As a consequence, the intervention during a period had influence from previous public health outcomes as well as on subsequent public health outcomes. In other words, public health outcomes were not only the outcomes of earlier interventions but also the confounding covariates of the subsequent inventions. In this analysis, we used methods in sequential causal inference to carry out the adjustment for the ever-changing public health outcomes.
From this analysis, we have the following findings. First, the Swedish approach performed far worse than the common approach for the public health outcomes. The Swedish measures in the later period of the pandemic presented considerable improvement and performed even better than the common measures in terms of total mortality.
