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You have to be on a different planet to define Sweden's mortality numbers to be "great". They are 5-10x worse than the other Nordics, have one of the highest de

You have to be on a different planet to define Sweden's mortality numbers to be "great". They are 5-10x worse than the other Nordics, have one of the highest death rates in the world, and it's not obvious that they will have a long-run advantage despite all the propagandizing for it. Their approach is highly experimental, which makes it all the more bizarre that they aren't testing very much. They have a "developing world" or "overwhelmed country" cases:deaths ratio (about 1:8) which suggests that they have a huge number of cases they don't know about. It's not clear why a country taking a radically experimental approach to COVID-19 would also test so lightly - it suggests that they don't want to know what's going on. It's possible that they don't want to have embarrassingly high case numbers, but it's just as possible that their numbers are embarrassing in the other direction - i.e. while they've killed a huge bunch of oldies, they also haven't got nearly enough cases to have herd immunity. We will also get to see, long term, what the morbidity effects of taking this approach are. They will not look super-intelligent if there is any kind of effective treatment or vaccine developed in the next 6-12 months. They only look good when you compare them with hard-hit countries. The difference is that Belgians and Spaniards aren't patrolling every goddamn social media site announcing how well they've done with the virus. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-million-7-day-average?time=2020-03-12..&country=NOR+FIN+DNK+SWE+FRA+ESP+ITA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...

iso947 6y ago
You can infer cases from deaths, as a whole you’re going to get the same death rate. Getting the death rate is tricky, what you need to look at is the increase in mortality over the 5 year average.
- glangdale 6y ago
  I think they are doing a decent job of getting a death rate (compared to some other countries, e.g. the UK). But the implied case rate from the death rate implies that they are nowhere near herd immunity, which is awkward for them - if you've got 400K people infected (1:200?) you're still nowhere near herd immunity, yet you've killed tons of your citizens.
  - iso947 6y ago
    UK publishes weekly statistics of total deaths, including those mentioning covid on the death certificate and the number of excess deaths above the 5 year average for that week. The figures are a few weeks behind though. This gives a number of covid deaths at 40-80k, and thus an infection of 3-15 million depending on the actual fatality rate. That means letting it run free, assuming immunity once you have it, and a 65% herd immunity level, would mean at least another 100k deaths and possibly as high as 1 million. Most likely 250k more. There is no appetite in the UK currently for that.

iso947 6y ago

You can infer cases from deaths, as a whole you’re going to get the same death rate. Getting the death rate is tricky, what you need to look at is the increase in mortality over the 5 year average.

glangdale 6y ago
I think they are doing a decent job of getting a death rate (compared to some other countries, e.g. the UK). But the implied case rate from the death rate implies that they are nowhere near herd immunity, which is awkward for them - if you've got 400K people infected (1:200?) you're still nowhere near herd immunity, yet you've killed tons of your citizens.
- iso947 6y ago
  UK publishes weekly statistics of total deaths, including those mentioning covid on the death certificate and the number of excess deaths above the 5 year average for that week. The figures are a few weeks behind though. This gives a number of covid deaths at 40-80k, and thus an infection of 3-15 million depending on the actual fatality rate. That means letting it run free, assuming immunity once you have it, and a 65% herd immunity level, would mean at least another 100k deaths and possibly as high as 1 million. Most likely 250k more. There is no appetite in the UK currently for that.