In the efforts to dampen the COVID-19 pandemic, governments are compelled to outweigh disease control efforts to the possible negative consequences of closing large parts of society. Although Denmark and Sweden are alike in political organization and health care, national responses to the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic differed noticeably. Denmark initiated a hard lock down followed by an outbreak control strategy (the so-called “hammer and dance” strategy), while Sweden’s strategy was based on advising on social distancing, while keeping society open (a so-called mitigative strategy). The objective of this study is to describe national epidemic control strategies in Denmark and Sweden in 2020, and compare the epidemic dynamics in the two countries, with respect to number of COVID-19 cases, admissions to intensive care and mortality. Data on epidemic control efforts and COVID-associated morbidity/mortality were downloaded from official government and epidemic surveillance webpages and comparatively described using basic statistics. Overall, we found “the hammer” resulted in better epidemic control during 2020 with less COVID-19-associated admissions to intensive care and lower mortality.

中文翻译：

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锤子与缓解——瑞典和丹麦国家对 2020 年 COVID-19 大流行的反应的比较回顾性登记研究

在遏制 COVID-19 大流行的努力中，政府不得不在疾病控制方面的努力超过关闭大部分社会可能产生的负面后果。尽管丹麦和瑞典在政治组织和医疗保健方面相似，但各国对 2020 年 COVID-19 流行病的反应明显不同。丹麦发起了硬封锁，随后采取了疫情控制策略（所谓的“锤子跳舞”策略），而瑞典的策略是基于建议保持社交距离，同时保持社会开放（所谓的缓解策略）。本研究的目的是描述丹麦和瑞典 2020 年的国家流行病控制策略，并比较两国的流行动态，包括 COVID-19 病例数、重症监护和死亡率。有关流行病控制工作和 COVID 相关发病率/死亡率的数据是从官方政府和流行病监测网页下载的，并使用基本统计数据进行了比较描述。总体而言，我们发现“锤子”在 2020 年导致更好的流行病控制，减少了与 COVID-19 相关的重症监护入院率和更低的死亡率。