10 ms·

It's notable as well when evaluating Sweden's number is that they are far more trustworthy than most countries. One interesting metric is excess mortality. Some

It's notable as well when evaluating Sweden's number is that they are far more trustworthy than most countries. One interesting metric is excess mortality. Some places have wild unexplained excess mortality from the statistical expectation, that isn't fully explained by reported Covid-19 deaths. This suggests that Sweden is reporting deaths far more accurately than other countries, so when we evaluate the relative success of their strategy, we should keep that in mind. A chart published by the NYT: Location | % extra | excess death# | official C19 d# | unexplained difference Spain | 66% | 19,700 | 12,401 | ~ 7,300 England | 33% | 16,700 | 10,335 | ~ 6,300 NYC | 298% | 17,200 | 13,240 | ~ 4,000 France | 21% | 10,500 | 8,059 | ~ 2,500 Holland | 33% | 4,000 | 2,116 | ~ 1,900 Istambul | 29% | 2,100 | 1,006 | ~ 1,100 Jakarta | 36% | 1,000 | 84 | ~ 900 Belgium | 25% | 2,300 | 1,632 | ~ 700 Switzer. | 21% | 1,000 | 712 | ~ 300 Sweden | 12% | 1,100 | 1,160 | ~ -50

K0nserv 6y ago
This table is missing Norway, Denmark, and Finland which would be the most interesting to compare Sweden to.
- goalieca 6y ago
  Sweden has a higher rate. The theory is that the bulge in death rate is bigger up front vs a prolonged one that continues for months. It will be interesting to see long term results. Sweden also seems to have the same problem with long term care homes that many other nations (France, Canada, etc) are having.
  - Ma8ee 6y ago
    I don’t think the up front deaths are in any way intentional. It’s very hard to compare strategies since there’s many other factors that control the outcome. Like Sweden had school holidays ending with a lot of people coming home from skiing in Italy just when the situation there exploded. And as you mentioned, the virus got into a lot of the nursing homes.
    - marvin 6y ago
      Just for reference, Norway's epidemic also started with a large influx of cases from Italy and Austria. But the countries have used different strategies from that point on.
  - marvin 6y ago
    Sad to say, I'm completely unsurprised that countries with rampant Covid19 spread have a lot of deaths in their retirement homes. It's practically deterministic. People are contagious in the pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic case. So all that's needed is that one employee of the retirement home gets sick and goes to work before they know, and the game is up. Dead patients everywhere. I'm sure this is discussed and considered on the highest levels of policy in the jurisdictions that have been the most proactive in getting a handle on the epidemic early, and missed in most others. I'm sure a strict face mask policy could have helped slow things down, but that's sadly been a hotly contested topic.
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      Many retirement homes here in Czech Republic have had the care takers voluntarily locking themselves up together with the people living there. Some have been there like this for many weeks, only taking in supplies in a safe way & communicating electronically. Thats some serious dedication & very prudent one, give all the tragic cases elsewhere.
  - atourgates 6y ago
    This is one of the things I wondered when I saw the "flatten the curve" charts and simulations a few weeks ago. Is there a valid statistical model for letting COVID-19 spread quickly, and "getting it over with", compared to flattening the curve and letting it create fewer mortalities over a longer time? I suppose even if the total number of mortalities is projected over time, there's real hope that we could find more effective treatments over time.
    - Spellman 6y ago
      The problem is that depending on your medical capacity, "getting it over with" overloads your medical system causing even MORE deaths. So the total number of deaths goes way, way up. Because in addition to the deaths from COVID-19, you get extra deaths from hospitals not having beds or able to handle other common injuries/sickness/accidents that are still happening every day but wouldn't normally lead to death because they could get full attention and care. Now, if we had infinite medical capacity, then actually "getting it over with" could, from a number of deaths perspective, be advantageous. No lockdowns! No economic distress! However, you also overshoot a little. You would have deaths due to more of the population being exposed than required for herd immunity. Of course, if you're a no lives lost at any cost, you'd still want to reduce deaths by slowing the spread until something like herd immunity or a vaccine. But most don't seem to have that sort of political or economic calculus.
      - dijit 6y ago
        There will be an economic crisis if 2-3% of people lose their lives in a span of a few weeks.
        atourgates 6y ago
        Absolutely there would be. On the other hand, the results from the recent antibody testing in California[1] (if they're accurate) would suggest a much lower death rate - around 0.1% - 0.2%. I fully agree that social distancing is the right move with the current data, but I wonder if that will continue to be the case as we come to understand the virus and its actual infection-fatality-rate more. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0
- marvin 6y ago
  Sweden: 1,937 deaths. 50 fewer seasonal deaths than expected. Norway: 187 deaths. No increase in seasonal deaths. Denmark: 384 deaths. Seasonal deaths unknown to me. Finand: 149 deaths. Seasonal deaths unknown to me. Sweden has approximately twice the population of the other Nordic countries, so per capita they have between ~2.5x and ~6x the Covid19 mortality of their neighbors, who have stricter preventive measures. Honestly, I can't see how Anders Tegnell and his colleagues can sleep at night with the uncertainties they are powering through. By rights they should be terrified that they've gotten one of their assumptions wrong.
  - henrikschroder 6y ago
    Denmark has ~2.5x the per-capita covid-19 mortality of Finland, should Danish authorities be terrified that they've gotten their assumptions wrong? The UK has ~2x the per-capita covid-19 mortality of Sweden, should English authorities be terrified that they've gotten their assumptions wrong? You are cherry-picking like crazy! There is clearly no evidence that stricter measures have any effect. If that was true, then there should at least be a linear correlation between strictness of measures vs. excess deaths, and that's simply not the case. You're extrapolating a linear correlation using a couple of data-points that happen to support your theory, i.e. Sweden vs other Nordic countries. Sweden vs. all of Europe paints a completely different picture, so you're not looking at that, because you're cherry-picking. There are so many uncertainties around this whole situation, and I think the only thing we can say with certainty is that if a country has no or a low rate of excess deaths, that country is doing "ok". Not doing great, not doing shit, just doing ok.
    - EdwardDiego 6y ago
      > There is clearly no evidence that stricter measures have any effect Working for us in NZ, although I think the timing of our national lockdown is strongly significant to our success, we managed to do so before it was widespread in the community. Our new case rate is literally bottom of the FT Covid graph: https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest And we have 50% the population of Sweden, and 0.72% the deaths. If we were to be per-capita equivalent with Sweden, we'd need about another 964 people to die.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  And Germany is another outlier
  - raphaelj 6y ago
    It looks like Germany put lockdown measures in place about a week earlier than France, Belgium or the Netherlands, if you compare the number of deaths at the time the mesures were enforced. Getting a lockdown in place a week earlier mathematically translates in a 4x reduction in deaths a few weeks later, which is more or less what we see when comparing France and Germany. Likewise the UK enforced the lockdown a few days later than France (proportionally to the state of the pendemic at the time of the measures), more or less like Spain. Looks like they are both heading towards 30k or 40k deaths until the pendemic gets under control. A few days really matter when you're fighting a pendemic that double in size every 3 days.
    - jobigoud 6y ago
      Even before the lockdons went into effect the difference between Germany and France was puzzling.
whycombagator 6y ago
> A chart published by the NYT: Do you have a link to the source?
- hjnilsson 6y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
hcknwscommenter 6y ago
That chart is really hard to read. Am I supposed to take away that Sweden only has about 50 or 60 more COVID deaths than the official count? This seems hard to believe. These types of numbers don't tend to have that level of quality at this stage of a disaster. I guess time will tell.
- gok 6y ago
  No it's even weirder; the gap implies that there are 50-60 fewer non-COVID deaths in Sweden than there would be otherwise since the pandemic began.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
    I would chalk that up to people acting a little more conservatively because of COVID-19, even if there isn't a lockdown.
  - michael-ax 6y ago
    Which isn't weird at all - if you trust that people avoiding crowds also lead to fewer having the accidents which would otherwise have gotten them dead.
    - ajross 6y ago
      Or prevents them from contracting any other disease that would have otherwise killed them. In fact even these numbers are undercounts of the "true" death total due to the pandemic, as we'd obviously expect baseline deaths to have dropped significantly over the short term. How much is for the next generation of epidemiologists to argue about. But FWIW: Sweden is absolutely an outlier here, and given the choice between "Swedish reporting is fundamentally better" and "Swedish death counts are wrong in some banal way", I'll choose the latter. Say it with me everyone: we don't make risk analysis decisions on the basis of outlier data.
      - henrikschroder 6y ago
        Mortality data and excess mortality data goes back decades, it's not like we suddenly started counting these things yesterday because of the coronavirus. For Sweden's death count to be wrong now, they would also have to have been wrong going back decades, without anyone noticing. Or, the total all-cause death count would have to start being wrong about now because of unspecified reasons. That doesn't make sense.
ajross 6y ago
The excess mortality problem isn't about trust. No one has alleged that existing studied covid death numbers in Lombardy or New York or wherever are due to people lying. It's just that some people, in every health care system, end up dying without a test being done. It's certainly plausible that Sweden has been far more conscientious about testing unknown deaths (or testing at-risk people before symptoms, etc...). That doesn't say anything about their trustworthyness. FWIW, my money is on a bunch of these cases being discovered in Sweden too, they just didn't show up in the check the Times did. Epidemiology is just hard, and there are no magic tricks to play with the science.
- kenneth 6y ago
  Pretty hard to hide excess death. That's precisely the point of this chart. You can miscount Covid deaths, but it's pretty hard to miscount deaths overall unless there's a fraudulent cover-up. Deaths are all recorded and tracked. Bodies don't just disappear.
SilasX 6y ago
It would probably help to state the unexplained difference as a percentage of official C19 death count (and narrow the columns). I took the liberty: | % | excess | official| unexplained Location | extra | death# | C19 d# | difference% -------------------------------------------------- Spain | 66% | 19,700 | 12,401 | 59 England | 33% | 16,700 | 10,335 | 61 NYC | 298% | 17,200 | 13,240 | 30 France | 21% | 10,500 | 8,059 | 31 Holland | 33% | 4,000 | 2,116 | 90 Istambul | 29% | 2,100 | 1,006 | 109 Jakarta | 36% | 1,000 | 84 | 1071 Belgium | 25% | 2,300 | 1,632 | 43 Switzer. | 21% | 1,000 | 712 | 42 Sweden | 12% | 1,100 | 1,160 | -4
arel 6y ago
Couldn't you in fact make the opposite case? Sweden as the outlier is not reporting accurately and others are? The UK has seen huge excess mortality above the average which is being attributed to large numbers of undiagnosed deaths in care homes and in the community. Its far too early to make any claims as to superior accuracy when almost every country is struggling with accurate testing across their entire population. In which case you'd expect Swedens numbers to get revised strongly upwards. Sweden also has no conclusive sign of flattening yet.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  The total number of people that have died on a certain date is not going to be revised, why would it be? The excess is that number minus a historical average which will also not be revised.
  - arel 6y ago
    Because of the huge amount of excess deaths that get assigned as probable covid cases. This is happening right now in the UK.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  > Sweden as the outlier is not reporting accurately and others are? Huh? If a country is in lockdown, and still experiences excess mortality, but the official covid-19 deaths aren't enough to cover that excess, then.... what the hell did people die of? The expectation is that because of lockdown, the excess mortality from non-covid-19 causes should be lower than previous years, and therefore all the actual excess, and probably more, is attributable to covid-19. Which means that countries where the official covid-19 number is lower than excess mortality, like the UK, are underreporting, while countries where the excess mortality matches the official covid-19 number, like Sweden, are not underreporting.
  - mhandley 6y ago
    I don't think you can assume that non-covid-19 causes should be lower than previous years. For example, the main cause of deaths in normal years is cardiac problems. If Covid-19 is discouraging people from seeking help, and especially from going to the emergency room when they they think something might just possibly be wrong, then you can get a big increase in cardiac deaths.
below43 6y ago
The excess UK deaths linked to coronavirus are likely to be currently around 43,100. For an explanation see: https://www.ft.com/content/67e6a4ee-3d05-43bc-ba03-e239799fa6ab https://www.ft.com/content/67e6a4ee-3d05-43bc-ba03-e239799fa... For today's latest numbers see: https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1252983884284821505 https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1252983884284821505
pvaldes 6y ago
The spanish case is interesting. Must be noticed that the virus hit particularly hard in the retirement homes that contribute to 12.000 of the 20.000 deaths. Some elder in retirement homes weren't hospitalised. Some people say that their parents were "rejected" by hospitals (non belonging to a prioritary group). We breath a dense fake news atmosphere in any case, so this part can be wrong. Not all people that died in retirement homes this weeks died by coronavirus necessarily. Retirement homes can not and are not designed to provide real medical care. This part has failed clearly. Some of this people could have been saved in normal circumstances. Specially if the retirement homes were more transparent about numbers and the people would had a clear protocol to follow. Another special circumstance of Spain is that we are one of the countries with more life expectancy. We have lots of elder people, therefore much more people by million falling in a high-risk category. I don't see anybody explaining that in the news, but surely must have some statistical effect. Maybe we should start adding to the charts a category of people killed by million of people over 65yo. This mean also than some countries in Africa (or Brazil) could go through this problem "relatively unscathed", just because they have lots of children and young adults. Same with poor US states that could behave different than rich states in this sense. Only time will tell us.
DavidVoid 6y ago
Reddit user /u/Anaemix made a nice graph of the Swedish stats [1]. Döda per dag translates to deaths per day. [1] https://i.imgur.com/oXyrncm.png https://i.imgur.com/oXyrncm.png
abacadaba 6y ago
Could reduced deaths from driving etc. also be significant in this analysis?
robhunter 6y ago
Do you have a link to this?
misun78 6y ago
Super interesting, thanks. Do you know if anyone has graphed the excess mortality on a month by month basis? That data would be invaluable in understand the timelines of actual spikes in excess mortality, irrespective of covid-19 testing and diagnosis. For example, did it spike up in March in NYC compared to Jan or Feb?
- viceroyalbean 6y ago
  The New York Times article mentioned has more complete data, including the graphs you want. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

K0nserv 6y ago

This table is missing Norway, Denmark, and Finland which would be the most interesting to compare Sweden to.

goalieca 6y ago
Sweden has a higher rate. The theory is that the bulge in death rate is bigger up front vs a prolonged one that continues for months. It will be interesting to see long term results. Sweden also seems to have the same problem with long term care homes that many other nations (France, Canada, etc) are having.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  I don’t think the up front deaths are in any way intentional. It’s very hard to compare strategies since there’s many other factors that control the outcome. Like Sweden had school holidays ending with a lot of people coming home from skiing in Italy just when the situation there exploded. And as you mentioned, the virus got into a lot of the nursing homes.
  - marvin 6y ago
    Just for reference, Norway's epidemic also started with a large influx of cases from Italy and Austria. But the countries have used different strategies from that point on.
- marvin 6y ago
  Sad to say, I'm completely unsurprised that countries with rampant Covid19 spread have a lot of deaths in their retirement homes. It's practically deterministic. People are contagious in the pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic case. So all that's needed is that one employee of the retirement home gets sick and goes to work before they know, and the game is up. Dead patients everywhere. I'm sure this is discussed and considered on the highest levels of policy in the jurisdictions that have been the most proactive in getting a handle on the epidemic early, and missed in most others. I'm sure a strict face mask policy could have helped slow things down, but that's sadly been a hotly contested topic.
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Many retirement homes here in Czech Republic have had the care takers voluntarily locking themselves up together with the people living there. Some have been there like this for many weeks, only taking in supplies in a safe way & communicating electronically. Thats some serious dedication & very prudent one, give all the tragic cases elsewhere.
- atourgates 6y ago
  This is one of the things I wondered when I saw the "flatten the curve" charts and simulations a few weeks ago. Is there a valid statistical model for letting COVID-19 spread quickly, and "getting it over with", compared to flattening the curve and letting it create fewer mortalities over a longer time? I suppose even if the total number of mortalities is projected over time, there's real hope that we could find more effective treatments over time.
  - Spellman 6y ago
    The problem is that depending on your medical capacity, "getting it over with" overloads your medical system causing even MORE deaths. So the total number of deaths goes way, way up. Because in addition to the deaths from COVID-19, you get extra deaths from hospitals not having beds or able to handle other common injuries/sickness/accidents that are still happening every day but wouldn't normally lead to death because they could get full attention and care. Now, if we had infinite medical capacity, then actually "getting it over with" could, from a number of deaths perspective, be advantageous. No lockdowns! No economic distress! However, you also overshoot a little. You would have deaths due to more of the population being exposed than required for herd immunity. Of course, if you're a no lives lost at any cost, you'd still want to reduce deaths by slowing the spread until something like herd immunity or a vaccine. But most don't seem to have that sort of political or economic calculus.
    - dijit 6y ago
      There will be an economic crisis if 2-3% of people lose their lives in a span of a few weeks.
      - atourgates 6y ago
        Absolutely there would be. On the other hand, the results from the recent antibody testing in California[1] (if they're accurate) would suggest a much lower death rate - around 0.1% - 0.2%. I fully agree that social distancing is the right move with the current data, but I wonder if that will continue to be the case as we come to understand the virus and its actual infection-fatality-rate more. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0
marvin 6y ago
Sweden: 1,937 deaths. 50 fewer seasonal deaths than expected. Norway: 187 deaths. No increase in seasonal deaths. Denmark: 384 deaths. Seasonal deaths unknown to me. Finand: 149 deaths. Seasonal deaths unknown to me. Sweden has approximately twice the population of the other Nordic countries, so per capita they have between ~2.5x and ~6x the Covid19 mortality of their neighbors, who have stricter preventive measures. Honestly, I can't see how Anders Tegnell and his colleagues can sleep at night with the uncertainties they are powering through. By rights they should be terrified that they've gotten one of their assumptions wrong.
- henrikschroder 6y ago
  Denmark has ~2.5x the per-capita covid-19 mortality of Finland, should Danish authorities be terrified that they've gotten their assumptions wrong? The UK has ~2x the per-capita covid-19 mortality of Sweden, should English authorities be terrified that they've gotten their assumptions wrong? You are cherry-picking like crazy! There is clearly no evidence that stricter measures have any effect. If that was true, then there should at least be a linear correlation between strictness of measures vs. excess deaths, and that's simply not the case. You're extrapolating a linear correlation using a couple of data-points that happen to support your theory, i.e. Sweden vs other Nordic countries. Sweden vs. all of Europe paints a completely different picture, so you're not looking at that, because you're cherry-picking. There are so many uncertainties around this whole situation, and I think the only thing we can say with certainty is that if a country has no or a low rate of excess deaths, that country is doing "ok". Not doing great, not doing shit, just doing ok.
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    > There is clearly no evidence that stricter measures have any effect Working for us in NZ, although I think the timing of our national lockdown is strongly significant to our success, we managed to do so before it was widespread in the community. Our new case rate is literally bottom of the FT Covid graph: https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest And we have 50% the population of Sweden, and 0.72% the deaths. If we were to be per-capita equivalent with Sweden, we'd need about another 964 people to die.
pvaldes 6y ago
And Germany is another outlier
- raphaelj 6y ago
  It looks like Germany put lockdown measures in place about a week earlier than France, Belgium or the Netherlands, if you compare the number of deaths at the time the mesures were enforced. Getting a lockdown in place a week earlier mathematically translates in a 4x reduction in deaths a few weeks later, which is more or less what we see when comparing France and Germany. Likewise the UK enforced the lockdown a few days later than France (proportionally to the state of the pendemic at the time of the measures), more or less like Spain. Looks like they are both heading towards 30k or 40k deaths until the pendemic gets under control. A few days really matter when you're fighting a pendemic that double in size every 3 days.
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    Even before the lockdons went into effect the difference between Germany and France was puzzling.

whycombagator 6y ago

> A chart published by the NYT: Do you have a link to the source?

hjnilsson 6y ago
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...

hcknwscommenter 6y ago

That chart is really hard to read. Am I supposed to take away that Sweden only has about 50 or 60 more COVID deaths than the official count? This seems hard to believe. These types of numbers don't tend to have that level of quality at this stage of a disaster. I guess time will tell.

gok 6y ago
No it's even weirder; the gap implies that there are 50-60 fewer non-COVID deaths in Sweden than there would be otherwise since the pandemic began.
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  I would chalk that up to people acting a little more conservatively because of COVID-19, even if there isn't a lockdown.
- michael-ax 6y ago
  Which isn't weird at all - if you trust that people avoiding crowds also lead to fewer having the accidents which would otherwise have gotten them dead.
  - ajross 6y ago
    Or prevents them from contracting any other disease that would have otherwise killed them. In fact even these numbers are undercounts of the "true" death total due to the pandemic, as we'd obviously expect baseline deaths to have dropped significantly over the short term. How much is for the next generation of epidemiologists to argue about. But FWIW: Sweden is absolutely an outlier here, and given the choice between "Swedish reporting is fundamentally better" and "Swedish death counts are wrong in some banal way", I'll choose the latter. Say it with me everyone: we don't make risk analysis decisions on the basis of outlier data.
    - henrikschroder 6y ago
      Mortality data and excess mortality data goes back decades, it's not like we suddenly started counting these things yesterday because of the coronavirus. For Sweden's death count to be wrong now, they would also have to have been wrong going back decades, without anyone noticing. Or, the total all-cause death count would have to start being wrong about now because of unspecified reasons. That doesn't make sense.

ajross 6y ago

The excess mortality problem isn't about trust. No one has alleged that existing studied covid death numbers in Lombardy or New York or wherever are due to people lying. It's just that some people, in every health care system, end up dying without a test being done. It's certainly plausible that Sweden has been far more conscientious about testing unknown deaths (or testing at-risk people before symptoms, etc...). That doesn't say anything about their trustworthyness. FWIW, my money is on a bunch of these cases being discovered in Sweden too, they just didn't show up in the check the Times did. Epidemiology is just hard, and there are no magic tricks to play with the science.

kenneth 6y ago
Pretty hard to hide excess death. That's precisely the point of this chart. You can miscount Covid deaths, but it's pretty hard to miscount deaths overall unless there's a fraudulent cover-up. Deaths are all recorded and tracked. Bodies don't just disappear.

SilasX 6y ago

It would probably help to state the unexplained difference as a percentage of official C19 death count (and narrow the columns). I took the liberty: | % | excess | official| unexplained Location | extra | death# | C19 d# | difference% -------------------------------------------------- Spain | 66% | 19,700 | 12,401 | 59 England | 33% | 16,700 | 10,335 | 61 NYC | 298% | 17,200 | 13,240 | 30 France | 21% | 10,500 | 8,059 | 31 Holland | 33% | 4,000 | 2,116 | 90 Istambul | 29% | 2,100 | 1,006 | 109 Jakarta | 36% | 1,000 | 84 | 1071 Belgium | 25% | 2,300 | 1,632 | 43 Switzer. | 21% | 1,000 | 712 | 42 Sweden | 12% | 1,100 | 1,160 | -4

arel 6y ago

Couldn't you in fact make the opposite case? Sweden as the outlier is not reporting accurately and others are? The UK has seen huge excess mortality above the average which is being attributed to large numbers of undiagnosed deaths in care homes and in the community. Its far too early to make any claims as to superior accuracy when almost every country is struggling with accurate testing across their entire population. In which case you'd expect Swedens numbers to get revised strongly upwards. Sweden also has no conclusive sign of flattening yet.

tinus_hn 6y ago
The total number of people that have died on a certain date is not going to be revised, why would it be? The excess is that number minus a historical average which will also not be revised.
- arel 6y ago
  Because of the huge amount of excess deaths that get assigned as probable covid cases. This is happening right now in the UK.
henrikschroder 6y ago
> Sweden as the outlier is not reporting accurately and others are? Huh? If a country is in lockdown, and still experiences excess mortality, but the official covid-19 deaths aren't enough to cover that excess, then.... what the hell did people die of? The expectation is that because of lockdown, the excess mortality from non-covid-19 causes should be lower than previous years, and therefore all the actual excess, and probably more, is attributable to covid-19. Which means that countries where the official covid-19 number is lower than excess mortality, like the UK, are underreporting, while countries where the excess mortality matches the official covid-19 number, like Sweden, are not underreporting.
- mhandley 6y ago
  I don't think you can assume that non-covid-19 causes should be lower than previous years. For example, the main cause of deaths in normal years is cardiac problems. If Covid-19 is discouraging people from seeking help, and especially from going to the emergency room when they they think something might just possibly be wrong, then you can get a big increase in cardiac deaths.

below43 6y ago

The excess UK deaths linked to coronavirus are likely to be currently around 43,100. For an explanation see: https://www.ft.com/content/67e6a4ee-3d05-43bc-ba03-e239799fa6ab https://www.ft.com/content/67e6a4ee-3d05-43bc-ba03-e239799fa... For today's latest numbers see: https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1252983884284821505 https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1252983884284821505

pvaldes 6y ago

The spanish case is interesting. Must be noticed that the virus hit particularly hard in the retirement homes that contribute to 12.000 of the 20.000 deaths. Some elder in retirement homes weren't hospitalised. Some people say that their parents were "rejected" by hospitals (non belonging to a prioritary group). We breath a dense fake news atmosphere in any case, so this part can be wrong. Not all people that died in retirement homes this weeks died by coronavirus necessarily. Retirement homes can not and are not designed to provide real medical care. This part has failed clearly. Some of this people could have been saved in normal circumstances. Specially if the retirement homes were more transparent about numbers and the people would had a clear protocol to follow. Another special circumstance of Spain is that we are one of the countries with more life expectancy. We have lots of elder people, therefore much more people by million falling in a high-risk category. I don't see anybody explaining that in the news, but surely must have some statistical effect. Maybe we should start adding to the charts a category of people killed by million of people over 65yo. This mean also than some countries in Africa (or Brazil) could go through this problem "relatively unscathed", just because they have lots of children and young adults. Same with poor US states that could behave different than rich states in this sense. Only time will tell us.

DavidVoid 6y ago

Reddit user /u/Anaemix made a nice graph of the Swedish stats [1]. Döda per dag translates to deaths per day. [1] https://i.imgur.com/oXyrncm.png https://i.imgur.com/oXyrncm.png

abacadaba 6y ago

Could reduced deaths from driving etc. also be significant in this analysis?

robhunter 6y ago

Do you have a link to this?

misun78 6y ago

Super interesting, thanks. Do you know if anyone has graphed the excess mortality on a month by month basis? That data would be invaluable in understand the timelines of actual spikes in excess mortality, irrespective of covid-19 testing and diagnosis. For example, did it spike up in March in NYC compared to Jan or Feb?

viceroyalbean 6y ago
The New York Times article mentioned has more complete data, including the graphs you want. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...