Yes, but not catastrophic prevalence. The question was whether not locking down things like schools would result in much higher deaths than we currently see in for example England or New York. The answer is no, not necessarily.

In Sweden a lot of people were self-isolating and being cautious without the need of a formal lockdown. They still have the most deaths per capita in Europe.

Schools were open. A million kids went to crowded classrooms every day for the past two months and death rate is still not even close to England, Belgium, Italy or New York.

The number of deaths per capita is higher than England, Belgium, and Italy however the total number is lower (they have a smaller population). They also have a low population density, a lot of single households, and as a population have less issues with diabetes, obesity, and chronic heart conditions compared to other countries.

It is not black and white :)

Targeted lockdown was a good idea in the context (not that much different clusters).

Sweden was since the beginning at the place where France will be next week, but Sweden did not have the Mulhouse cluster that crippled multiple hospitals in eastern France.

Many thanks to Switzerland and Germany for helping us saving a dozen patients by the way.

If you compare Sweden to other countries with full and absolute total lockdowns like Belgium the UK and Spain and Italy....they actually have lower incidences of infections fatalities and higher incidences of recoveries.

Sweden is the control group in all of this for how effective lockdowns are and it's showing that they're potentially not as effective as we think they are.

You can't compare Sweden to those countries. Not the same density, not the same hubs, not hit at the same time, not the same social comportments.

Even compared to France they have advantages and they have pretty close numbers (+30% excess death vs + 33%).

Sweden has a higher density of day to day human interactions than any country with full quarantine lock down.

How do the other data points apply to a country that's been on quarantine for months and another that has never been on quarantine?

The exponential explosion of coronavirus cases hasn't happened in Sweden and it's not happening so far when people reopen their economies. there's not even a second wave in economies that have been reopened since early May like Florida.

The model was flawed.

Time to face facts quarantine was ineffective response.

The major flaw in your argument is focusing on an official quarantine order. In practice it seems many of the places you mention have an informal quarantine in place. In Florida Miami-Dade county did have a lockdown though the broader state didn’t. It’s also the densest, so most at risk. Nursing homes also took steps way beyond the government order and well before the order. There’s also tons of evidence that people did not adopt initially and are not returning to normal behavior. For example even in Sweden restaurant attendance was down massively even in the absence of an official ban.

You may be right that a more localized or targeted response has almost the same effect as a full lockdown. (Though things are still decidedly not great in Sweden concerning the death rate). But people are taking massive measures even in non-locked down areas, it’s improper to compare that to the status quo ante.

If there wasn't a lock down in Florida like you say and no hospitals were overwhelmed and no exponential explosion of cases happened.... Then that's all the evidence you need to know that flattening the curve was a myth and quarantine was an ineffective solution.

(the same effect happened in Sweden by the way)

I bet you based on these data points that every region that opens it's economy will have the same result. Steady state of cases, no second wave.

Quarantine was pointless. A lot of lives were ruined by the flat curve proponents...for nothing.

That’s actually not what I said. I’m saying there were lockdowns in the most important regions (Miami-Dade for example), that people behaved as though there were lockdowns in at risk areas (nursing homes), and that people are still behaving with lockdown-style precautions. All of these things produced a flatter curve, and have also to a certain extent done so in Sweden where people followed many (not all) lockdown precautions without official government decree.

Just because the government didn’t say things were locked down doesn’t mean they weren’t in practice. Look at Sweden’s GDP losses, restaurant attendance, movie attendance, you’ll find they haven’t avoided massive economic damage. In exchange they also have a pretty high death rate.

These things are complicated, but it’s pretty clear lockdown behavior cuts infection spread. It’s also pretty clear people are terrified of getting sick, so they’ll adopt the behavior to a certain degree regardless of decree. This means issuing a decree or not doesn’t make you avoid economic pain, but a decree might make it easier to guide the right actions and give pretext to minimize economic pain via external support.