Does the closing down matter?

When looking at the death rate today April 3rd 2020 for the top 28 countries and the cruising ship Diamond Princess which is reported separately by Worldometer, it has been quite stable in terms of order the past week.

The order of magnitude for the two front runners are slowly changing, but for all others the numbers are increasing fast day by day and soon Italy, Spain, France and Belgium will pass China, the root cause to the pandemic.

In a desperate attempt to stop the spreading of Corona Italy, Spain, France and Belgium have closed down more or less entirely. The same goes for Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Portugal, UK and Germany.

But is it worth it?

We can all see it is devastating to their economies.

Sweden has yet not put the entire country in quarantine and that seems to be outrageous to the countries that have, possibly because it gives us a benchmark for another way of handling a pandemic.

Let us look at the outcome up until today, knowing the figures will change and we don't know what the result will be two, six or twenty weeks from now.

Sweden hasn't closed all schools yet, only Universities and Colleges which instead are run via Internet. The Netherlands have closed schools but otherwise they seem to have a similar approach as Sweden with less orders and laws to keep the inhabitants indoors.

When we look at Italy, Spain and France they had their first death in Corona around one month earlier than the rest in the graph above.

And as you can see Italy closed March 12th and UK together with Germany March 20th. The others in between.

The outcome so far is very different.

Belgium and Sweden are very similar in terms of date for first case and first death but the closing down has so far not been better for Belgium than Sweden's approach. The same goes for UK and Switzerland when compared with Sweden.

But there is actually a difference when comparing Sweden with Denmark, Norway and Germany.

One could argue Norway and Denmark are almost a month behind Sweden with their first case of Corona, February 25th, February 26th and January 30th respectively, but when it comes to the first death they are within three days range, and it is unclear what reference point one should use for comparison.

Even the Netherlands are doing worse than Sweden despite them closing schools and acting similarly to Sweden in all other aspects.

So far it is fair to say the close down shows no clear sign of supremacy, not even being better instead with worse outcome for some.

It is of course far too early to state something about the future based on this, but it shows that all other countries shutting down their economies shouldn't be so sure about their action being the preferable.

As it look today the best would be to kick-start the economies again and accept a death rate around 0,07% which is plausible based on the figures we have so far.

The only country that gains from Europe's self injuring is China. The root cause to Corona and every previous virus occasion, most probably because of how they treat animals, wildlife and nature.