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Sweden has 342 COVID deaths per million. The US has 254 deaths per million. Germany is doing better, but the rest of Western Europe has much higher rates of dea
by dtwest 6y ago
Sweden has 342 COVID deaths per million. The US has 254 deaths per million. Germany is doing better, but the rest of Western Europe has much higher rates of death than the US.
There seems to be a myth going around that Europe is handling this better than the US and the statistics don't really support that claim. If you have to bash Golden Corral to make your claim, you're probably a bit biased against Americans.
That being said, none of these countries are handling this well, it's just annoying to see the double standard.
- 2rsf 6y agoWhy do you compare almost an entire continent to one country ? why not compare Sweden to NYC ? Sweden is handling it, not great but not terrible and so is the US and many other countries. On top of that there is a lot that we don't understand, for example why do many Mediterranean countries has low death rate even though the sick count is not low ?
- dtwest 6y agoHow about we compare Wisconsin to Sweden? The article is about Wisconsin. Wisconsin (pop 5.8 mil, 10.6k cases, 418 deaths). Sweden (pop 10.2 mil, 27.9k cases, 3460 deaths).
- 2rsf 6y agoHow about Oman ? pop 4.829 million, 4,019 cases with only 17 deaths. Or Belgium that does have quarantine rules but still have more cases of deaths. It's not a game, and we don't fully understand how this works so maybe we should stop comparing.
- HideousKojima 6y agoIf we're talking about efficacy of government lockdown policies, universal healthcare, etc., then we absolutely should compare. And a cursory glance at the data suggests that government lockdown policies have minimal effect on the spread of the virus, there seems to be little to no correlation between severity of lockdown and cases/deaths
- 2rsf 6y agoI saw someone else saying that today, do you have a source for that ?
- HideousKojima 6y agoThe cases/deaths per million stats by country (and by state in the US) are everywhere. The US is doing decent compared to most of Western Europe, especially Italy and Spain. Though Germany is doing far better than the US. Sweden isn't taking any significant measures to restrict their populace and while they're doing worse than their neighbors like Norway, they're still better than a lot of Europe.
- sulam 6y agoThat’s a really weird conclusion to draw looking at what’s happened globally and in local pockets. Look at Singapore and South Korea — full lockdown and great control, and then outbreaks in places where the lockdown put people in close quarters (immigrant labor in Singapore) orwhen restrictions were lifted (bars in South Korea). Look at Wuhan itself, where it took time to establish a lockdown and contact tracing, then they got control of the situation and had better outcomes, then a secondary wave once they lifted restrictions. Look at Italy, where the lockdown means Northern Italy has had a very different experience from the rest of the country. Sweden has had a mostly voluntary lockdown and high death rates compared to the rest of Europe and other very similar countries (Norway, Denmark, Finland) have had stricter lockdowns and better numbers. Also let’s look at the fundamentals. This virus is spread through contact with viral laden particles, either in an aerosol or on a surface. It is obvious that to get the disease you need to come into contact with the virus. Limit contacts and you limit exposure, this is so basic I hesitate to call it science. You have a tough row to hoe if you’re going to try and prove no correlation between lockdowns and cases.
- 2rsf 6y agoThe data is here [1], that's [2] Europe's correlation between death rate and restriction and that's [3] worldwide (I didn't collect the data nor did the analysis) [1] https://github.com/ronigold/Covid19-Analysis https://github.com/ronigold/Covid19-Analysis [2] https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd03177682d9061.jpg https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd03177682d9061.jpg [3] https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd019c5e89dca42.jpg https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd019c5e89dca42.jpg
- bluGill 6y agoWisconsin has a large Swedish immigrant population (immigrants 5 generations ago, not first generation), so that rules out genetic factors to a small extent.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoYeah that was my first thought too -- lots of Scandinavians in the Wisconsin-Minnesota area, lots of snow, etc.
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago> There seems to be a myth going around that Europe is handling this better than the US and the statistics don't really support that claim. Do you mind showing your work? What do the statistics say about Europe vs. US? I see you mentioned Sweden and Germany but Europe has many more countries than those two.
- dtwest 6y agoIf you add together UK, Spain, and Italy they have more deaths than the US as a whole. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago[Removed due to lack of civility]
- dtwest 6y agoThe lack of civility is pretty disappointing. I linked a bunch of data for you, ignore it if you wish.
- CathedralBorrow 6y agoYou picked a handful of countries that fit your argument and called them Europe. Italy, Spain and UK aren't "Europe" just like California, NY and Florida aren't "The United States of America".
- ric2b 6y agoYou just went and cherry-picked 3 of the most impacted countries in Europe, not very convincing. I can just as easily pick 3 of the least and tell you a completely different story.
- dtwest 6y agoI am simply stating there are more deaths in Europe than in the US. I can prove that with only 3 countries. Please don't interpret my statement as a comment on each individual country. There seems to be miscommunication here.
- 101404 6y agoYep. But Sweden is run by an ultra leftist government, so if course it is not criticised. But the same lies about "the US is doing worse" are told here in Europe as well. Just need to look to the stats, do the sum, and suddenly the US and EU are about the same. Oh well, modern journalism is about clicks, not facts, unfortunately.
- ginko 6y agoHow is Sweden ultra leftist? The ruling party are Social Democrats.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 101404 6y agoHave a look at their program.
- ginko 6y agoCare to be any more specific? Last I checked Sweden has been ruled by the the Social Democrats for most of the 20th century, yet Sweden still has a working capitalist economy and more billionaires per capita than the United States.
- 101404 6y agoJust like here in Germany, it is the ideology of the party that changed (a lot). I've been a Social Democrat for over 30 years, that's why I left the social democratic party here.
- ginko 6y agoBut if anything the problem with German Social Democrats (and European left-wing parties in general) is that they've moved too far away from left-wing politics and more towards a neo-liberal financial policy. I don't see how you can call that ultra leftist. For me that would be introducing a planned economy.
- magicalhippo 6y ago> the rest of Western Europe has much higher rates of death than the US Or not, depending on country. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-per-million?country=NOR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-per-million?country=SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-per-million?country=USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-... Norway and Sweden are in other measures very similar countries. We lie right next to each other, we have quite similar political environment etc. Our societies are in general quite similar. We had a very different response to the corona virus though.
- dtwest 6y agoI agree Norway has been a bright spot. If Norway was a US state, it would be ranked 14th in deaths per capita. So better than average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi... I'm completely aware that there are different countries in Europe that have different strategies for containing this thing. But so do the states in the US.
- gwd 6y agoBut New York has over 1400 COVID deaths per million [1]. New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachussets are all more than double of Sweden's deaths per million, and still climbing steadily. The US only looks good next to Sweden because there are big areas of the country that are way more spread out. [1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states-normalized&highlight=New%20York&show=all&trendline=default&y=fixed&scale=linear&data=deaths#states-normalized https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states...
- leetcrew 6y agofair point, but doesn't this imply that the spread out areas don't need such severe lockdowns?
- gwd 6y agoI think each area can and should take the local situation into account. My understanding (as an American living in the UK) was that they are doing so, to a large extent. From what I can tell from friends and relatives on FB, restrictions in Michigan came on hard and strong after being probably one of the worst hit early on; restrictions in Ohio started earlier and never got as tough. The anti-lockdown side of my FB feed seems to think that South Dakota never had much of a lockdown to speak of at all. I don't claim to know better than local governments what the best decision is -- we're all just making this up as we go along, and I'm glad I don't personally have to make the decision between massive death or economic damage for millions of people.
- pjc50 6y agoAs I keep saying, comparing to "Europe" is almost meaningless because of the diversity of governments and cultures. It may also be unreasonable to talk of the US as a whole in this case. Infections are inherently locally clustered. There seem to be all sorts of factors affecting spread, and there's no clear picture of what they are. Eastern Europe isn't very heavily affected and nobody seems to know why. Belgium is a disaster; why? The UK made a number of big mistakes; the first cases were appearing at the end of February, but the Cheltenham Festival still went ahead in mid-March putting 250,000 people close to each other. We're now relaxing the lockdown and putting people back on packed public transport despite still having thousands of new cases per day. In a month's time, the best handling countries will be almost entirely out of lockdown with weekly COVID deaths below 10. The worst handling countries will still have lockdown and weekly deaths in the hundreds. It looks like that will include the UK and New York state.
- bhb916 6y agoGenuine question: how will these countries keep deaths below 10 a week while being completely out of lockdown? Doesn't that rely on a treatment or vaccine?
- pjc50 6y agoNew Zealand is at 21 total. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/new-zealand-coronavirus-elimination https://www.wired.co.uk/article/new-zealand-coronavirus-elim... 1) Stop infected people from entering the country. If you have enough testing capacity, you can allow in those who are clear. Otherwise they have to be quarantined. 2) Track every infection within the country. 3) Test all their contacts. Of course, those are very hard to do in an airtight fashion. But the smaller the absolute numbers the easier they are to do. Countries not working towards building this capability are just going to keep struggling. Even NZ has not fully lifted the restrictions yet. They've not even sent kids back to school. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-new-zealand-eases-lockdown-restrictions-and-moves-into-level-two-11987987 https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-new-zealand-eases-loc...