UK population density - 275 people per km
Sweden population density - 25 people per km
Finland population density - 18 people per km
Stockholm population - 1.5m
Gotenburg population - 0.6m
Malmo population - 0.3m
First confirmed COVID-19 case in Europe - 27 December 2019 in a hospital in the Paris metropolitan area (originally misdiagnosed as a case of pneumonia.)
The number of French people living in London is similar to the entire population of Malmo.
It's almost certain a number of French people going home to see friends and family last Christmas carried the COVID-19 virus back to London, without even realising it existed (as well as other people going on Christmas skiing breaks to France and Northern Italy.) We originally thought the first COVID-19 case in the UK was 31st January 2020 when two Chinese nationals tested positive in York but it's now believed a death in London reported on 1st Feb 2020 was due to COVID-19 and again it was misdiagnosed as pneumonia.
Given COVID-19 was spreading around in a UK city with a population of 9m without us even realising it, it's not surprising it spread a lot more rapidly than in less densely populated countries and cities like Sweden and Stockholm. Maybe Stockholm can be compared with Manchester and Malmo can be compared with Newcastle but there's a lot more unpopulated land between the cities in Sweden.
Anyway, my point wasn't Finland's measures are right for the UK or any other country in Europe, my point was they are working well enough for Finland, even if they are much less strict than measures in other countries. The success of the measures in a particular country relate to how well they work for that country, not whether they would work well in another country. New Zealand's measures stopped the spread but wouldn't work for the UK as we are less self-sufficient and one of the 4 UK countries has a land border with another country.
== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: ==
Not got time to search for the reports now but it's understood two very different variants of COVID arrived in the US, the one which arrived in New York came via Europe and was a mutated version of the original, with the original arriving on the Pacific side of the US, which is why New York had it so much worse than Seattle. There's also now reports of a further mutation from Spain spreading around Europe. Some European countries haven't accepted arrivals from Spain since the mutation has been discovered, which might be part of the reason why they are in less severe phase 2. France obviously has a land border with Spain and while we have a 14 day self-isolation period for arrivals from Spain, we have an open border with Gibraltar, which has a land border with Spain, which many Spanish people cross daily for work.
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