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Does Sweden have herd immunity? They didn't lock down, but they did implement social distancing recommendations.

Does Belarus have herd immunity? No lockdown, no social distancing to speak of, basically nobody wears a mask, er, anywhere. I see people in the centre of Minsk having face-to-face conversations all day long. And now there are tens of thousands of people protesting/yelling/hugging each other without masks.

I very much hope the answer is yes and these countries do have something close to herd immunity. But that feels like wishful thinking.

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This is what the MIT Tech has to say about Sweden (and I agree): "Lessons from Sweden Outside the US, researchers are also closely tracking the role of population immunity in national responses. Sweden, for example, did not impose a strict lockdown, and saw a large number of deaths starting in April. Since then, however, the number of new infections has declined. The nation’s leaders said last week that children would go back to school unmasked. “I would say in Sweden there is no doubt that immunity plays an important role, more than in other countries,” says Britton. “Now this epidemic is slowly stopping.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/11/1006366/immunity...

I don't think you realize the quoting of MIT Technology Review isn't helping you. It's hurting.

? care to explain?

MIT Technology Review says X is an appeal to authority. They aren't one. Hence it doesn't work. It also makes you seem naive.

"helping you" ?

Did you see the COVID death graph of Sweden? It is laughable and is heavily manipulated. It does not in anyway resemble the daily infection graph and doctored to look like the peak happened in April, and as if it had long been past by the time Tegnell made his daily briefings in July. God knows when we'll see the deaths that happened in July on that graph.

Do you have any evidence besides that the graph doesn't match your intuition?

As another comment said there is some implication that prior exposure to other coronaviruses (which would usually be identified as the common cold) can enable an effective immune response.

If that works I wonder if such exposure is evenly distributed around the world or if it's clustered in certain populations?

FWIW here in Australia Melbourne has had a fairly significant outbreak but Sydney hasn't, from what I can tell it's basically dumb luck it didn't happen the other way around.

The situation with Belarus (as it is in almost every dictatorship), that both death statistics and infection are highly unreliable. Belarus might have actually acquired herd immunity, but then the death rate must be much, much higher than claimed by their government. Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan also seem to be in a stable equilibrium, but they still have restriction measures.

Sweden is a master manipulator with their stats. Look at their daily death graph, which does not in any way resemble the daily infection graph. They seem to have small second wave right now BTW.

They may have herd immunity, and there is nothing embarrassing about this term. What is more interesting though, is how Finland in Norway have actually almost zero deaths these days, yet nowhere near the seroprevalence of Sweden.

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