112 should work everywhere from a GSM mobile phone. It's part of the GSM standard.

Not a good worst case as NYC is higher than that already. Worst case around 1.4% of population (see my other post above yours).

naive case fatality rate: at any point, divide cumulative deaths by cumulative infections that are detected - is low in the beginning and then increases to a level that depends on the amount of testing

case fatality rate of closed cases: at any point, divide cumulative deaths by cumulative recovered+dead - depends on how recovered are calculated but should be relatively constant if done correctly

lethality: number of deaths per infected (detected or undetected) - with a non-overwhelmed health system and an age structure of a developed country, this is probably somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5%

mortality: number of deaths of an epidemic divided by population - depends on whether you suppress or not; if not, you will end up infecting 70-95% of the population, so mortality will be just a little lower than lethality, i.e between 0.3% and 1.4%

Correct, but if the lockdown is effective, you should get R down to around 0.6 easily (Wuhan went to 0.2 even I think but the lockdown was extreme). With a generation time of 5 days, this means you can get from 3000 cases per day (like now in NYC) to 20 cases a day in seven weeks. Once there, your suppression strategy with testing and tracing will work again.

The problem is that you can't protect the elderly in nursing homes if you have a wild-running epidemic in the rest of the population. They can't be completely isolated. And if every nurse gets it eventually (and is infectious pre-symptoms), you will introduce the virus into every nursing home.

Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty still. But in the face of uncertainty, the correct response is to be extra careful and not hope for the best. I therefore question the Swedish approach even if in the end it kind of worked.

No, if you let everyone get infected, you are doing it wrong, and even if slow enough so that your health system will keep up, 0.5% to 1% of your population will die. Plus you need to have a semi serious lockdown for a long time as you cannot allow the number of new cases to grow. And as we can't be sure that the population will be immune for a long time (other coronaviruses: 6 months to 3 years typically), the strategy may fail anyway.

The correct strategy is to suppress and the contain it with massive tracing, isolating and testing. You may still need some additional measures like masks (and maybe no mass events with a high chance of infection such as indoor concerts), and there may be localised lockdowns occasionally but otherwise the economy could run as usual.

I'm not sure this prediction is correct for other countries. Here, we try to suppress the virus, and when cases are low enough, will try to contain it through, trace, isolate, test. When you have very few cases, the chance that the virus will make its way into a care home, is low. Seems like we need to keep the border to Sweden closed for a while though. Which is a pity, as I wanted to go on holiday there next.

In Stockholm (and the COVID-19 out break in Sweden is really a Stockholm outbreak) it was. Not quite as badly as in Italy, but there was a massive strain on ICUs. Whilst maybe there were just enough beds, the usual standard of care was simply not possible. As Sweden has become a little tougher on measures as well It looks like the peak may just have passed. But there is currently no leeway to reduce measures (after all, part of the schools are closed, restaurants can't use their full capacity, no large meetings, etc).

Other countries are going to suppress the virus with strict measures and when numbers are low enough, will try to use tracing and isolation (plus maybe local lockdowns) massively to keep the virus under control.

And even in Sweden it only "works". You should really look at the Stockholm data and then decide whether this is a model you want to follow.

There is research on Italy that indicates that on average, based on co-morbidities and age, the average COVID-19 dead would have lived for another 10 years without the disease.

And having lived in the country a long time ago, I would add that normal life in Sweden would already be called social distancing in Spain. This is maybe a litlle stereotypical, but I'm sure it has an effect. Loud speaking and singing seems to be especially bad, too - so Swedes have another advantage. Looking at the data, you can see that in the phase of the exponential increase, the Swedish increase was lower than in many other countries. So I think they can get away with less strict measures than other countries, and modelling other countries on Sweden may be a mistake.

Plus influenza is much worse than most people think as many call a bad cold a "flu". 10 times the lethality and probably 5-10 times more infected than in a bad flu season is a big difference.

MERS is not contained. It is endemic in dromedaries and jumps to humans regularly. Luckily, human-to-human it is less infectious than SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2.

SARS-CoV-1 is eradicated in humans. They don't call it like that because it may still live in some animals and could resurface.