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> Sweden might have taken a better or a worse approach than, say, France but it is clearly not catastrophic The only countries worse off than Sweden are signif

> Sweden might have taken a better or a worse approach than, say, France but it is clearly not catastrophic The only countries worse off than Sweden are significantly poorer - besides Belgium, which seems to be the only country counting correctly (e.g. untested excess deaths in Covid proximity are included). The most similar countries to Sweden, regarding political structure and wealth, are Denmark and Norway, which have 20% and less than 10% of Swedens death rate, respectively. I'd say it's safe to assume that at least 80% of Swedish deaths could have been avoided with a conventional approach.

guygurari 6y ago
If Sweden has a significantly higher percentage of the population infected (as they claim) then it doesn’t make sense to compare death rates at this point, because it may be that these other countries will reach the same numbers (infection rate and death rate) later. This is a likely outcome because Sweden’s healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, so it’s not obvious that their policies will lead to excess deaths in the long run. The thing to compare is the final death toll (as well as economic damage), and we don’t know that yet.
- randomsearch 6y ago
  This is a general observation: you shouldn’t judge pandemic policy over the short term.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Yes, ignore the bodies piling up in morgues. Rational people know that in ten years time it won't really matter.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > infection rate and death rate later. The most successful countries have already managed to reduce their infection rate to almost zero.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  You can still compare it to countries like Vietnam, that, at 10 times the population, with a direct border to China and being the first country in they world to have the virus spread outside China, has managed to keep the infection to only ~400 of their citizens, with no deaths at all.
- bildung 6y ago
  Why do you think Norway will eventually approach the same number of infections as Sweden? Norway only has a few hundred active cases left, and is testing 2 times as much than Sweden. They are on their way to normal life in a few weeks. If new outbreaks occur, they are well prepared to isolate them.
  - marvin 6y ago
    Just got a snap from a friend of mine. First pub beer of the season yesterday. 15 days with no new cases in my hometown. City of 300,000, West Norway. Testing capacity of >1000 per week locally. No way it can sneak up on us without a large external influx. Tourism is dead, music festivals are off and the oil industry is in a shambles, but otherwise things are close to normal. Plenty of routines to limit contagion, lots of care and social distancing, but life goes on with no disease for now.
p1esk 6y ago
The death rates can be off by an order of magnitude. Or not. We have no clue. This is the only thing “safe to assume” about this pandemic.
alkonaut 6y ago
Don't compare countries, compare cities/regions. The Stockholm area is hard hit but e.g. the Malmö area fared much better. This isn't because of a difference in strategt but because the initial outbreak was smaller and later, so they had time to take action sooner. When Stockholm realized the problems in elderly homes, many of them already had the disease. > I'd say it's safe to assume that at least 80% of Swedish deaths could have been avoided with a conventional approach. What do you build that assumption on? Comparison to other countries, thinking "they have 1/4 the deaths and strategy X so if Sweden had strategy X they would have 1/4 the deaths"? Half of the deaths were in elderly homes, and they could perhaps have been avoided with a different approach. That's the big failure. Old people who don't have care in their homes or live in elderly homes (e.g. retired healthy people) have been in full "lockdown" just like in most other countries.
- bildung 6y ago
  The cases per capita in Stockholm are about the same as in most other counties with more than a handful of inhabitants, there are so many cases in Stockholm because many people live there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#Additional_charts_and_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#Ad... The same is true for Norway, with Oslo leading the list and also having the most inhabitants. So there is no difference here between the countries.
tsimionescu 6y ago
Also, why compare Sweden to France, and not Greece or Bulgaria? Sure, the French and the Spanish and Italians and the UK all had disastrous outbreaks as well, but as Eastern Europe and other places have shown, it didn't need to be that way.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  > ... the French and the Spanish and Italians and the UK all had disastrous outbreaks as well, but as Eastern Europe and other places have shown, it didn't need to be that way. The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already). Some cities and countries had lots of travel in Week 9 (Week of feb 24) because of holidays. This is e.g. All of Belgium, and the Stockholm region in Sweden. In Sweden its striking how much better regions that had the holiday just one week later fared (e.g. Sweden's second and third largest cities). Obviously an initial/seed outbreak of 5000 infected people in a city, compared to an initial outbreak of 50 people will be very different. It's like commentators on this particular subject assume this diseases was distributed evenly across all countries and the outcomes after that depends on the mitigations applied... It's also peculiar how some routes didn't incur a lot of spread but others did. E.g. compare the travel from the Italian alps to Scandinavia - tons of people infected. But packed high speed trains between Lombardy and Rome left several times per day during the time when lots were infected but no lockdowns were in place, yet Rome managed with a lot less disease. No one can really explain that yet. Is it something about how the virus spreads that makes planes worse than trains? Is it something about the particular population in Rome having had a Coronavirus cold last season that Lombardy didn't? Who knows.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    > The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already). But that was absolutely a part of government response. In Romania, isolation of travelers from Italy and China began on February 21st, before any confirmed cases. Travel and meeting restrictions started when we hit 10 total cases. The lockdown measures increased significantly when we hit 100 total cases. This was in the same time that France was holding general elections with a few thousand cases.
Ma8ee 6y ago
In addition to Belgium (833 dead per million), United Kingdom (597), Spain (580) and Italy (556) have higher death rates than Sweden (446). France is close behind (432). And we don't know exactly why Sweden are hit the way it is. The exact week (February 24th to Mars 1st) where the schools in Stockholm had a winter break was the worse possible time for getting the virus back from Italy and the Alps. E.g. Gothenburg which winter break was two weeks earlier wasn't nearly as badly hit. There are just too many variables to assign any clear causes and effects yet.
- marvin 6y ago
  Norway and Denmark had the same factors you’re pointing to, with a large influx of cases from Italy and Switzerland. But they shut down immediately to stop further spread. In Norway, things were spurred on even faster because a royal testing screwup in one of the biggest hospitals sent 30 people in quarantine. I think that event spooked everyone to take it seriously right away, along with some video conferences with doctors in Lombardy. Textbook case of reducing the exponent of an exponential function early for massive benefits, if you ask me. That’s a very simple explanation. I don’t think the truth is more fancy than that. Even a week or two is an eternity when the doubling time is 3 days, everyone being unprepared and all.
- bildung 6y ago
  Yes, but all these countries, as said, are significantly poorer than Sweden per capita (e.g. Spain has about 50% of GDP per capita than Sweden). OTOH, Sweden has pretty similar politics and cultural values compared to Denmark and Norway, which means people would react similar to measures like lockdowns etc. Additionally, health care professionals have a similar social standing (as opposed to Spain, where healthcare workers are often poor, which significantly worsened Spains problems). I fully agree that we cannot have a complete understanding of the situation until everything is over, BTW! But Norway and Sweden are similar enough that a factor 10 difference in outcome cannot be ignored.
fergie 6y ago
You can compare the nordic countries here -> https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/norden/ https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/norden/
thu2111 6y ago
which seems to be the only country counting correctly (e.g. untested excess deaths in Covid proximity are included). That's not a correct way to count and is one of the reasons why comparing "COVID deaths" between countries is meaningless. It's not valid because: 1. It assumes COVID is the default cause of death even though it's known to be a very mild disease for virtually everyone (0.2% IFR and estimates keep falling, not 100%). 2. It assumes lockdowns don't kill anyone, but that's known to not be true for all kinds of reasons. The problem with this kind of reasoning is it looks motivated. It's what leads to fiascos like the New York Times publishing a list of 1000 COVID deaths and the 5th person on the list turned out to be a homicide victim. It's how you get reports of a 19 year old dying of COVID and then it turns out he had leukemia. It's how you end up with COVID death counts going down by large amounts in various parts of the world, as we're seeing now, because cases get re-evaluated and discovered to be incorrectly attributed. And all that ignores the problem of severe co-morbidities in the elderly, who often are claimed to have died of COVID even when they had major pre-existing problems and were about to die anyway. These things destroy public confidence in disease statistics. The message that COVID death counts don't mean anything hasn't really got out yet but in time it will.
efraim 6y ago
Denmark has had 100 deaths per million and neighboring Swedish region Scania has had 139 deaths per million (1.4 million population). The death rate of just the regions of Zealand and Copenhagen is 170 per million (2.6 million population). The same strategy has been in place in Stockholm and Scania, so why is the death rate not higher everywhere in Sweden? Maybe leaving schools, stores and restaurants open is not what's behind the high number of deaths in predominantly Stockholm, but something else, like how the elder care homes are managed. It doesn't seem fair to point to Sweden's high death numbers when Stockholm is a big outlier that skews the average. In most other parts of Sweden the people are doing fine, without lockdown.

guygurari 6y ago

If Sweden has a significantly higher percentage of the population infected (as they claim) then it doesn’t make sense to compare death rates at this point, because it may be that these other countries will reach the same numbers (infection rate and death rate) later. This is a likely outcome because Sweden’s healthcare system has not been overwhelmed, so it’s not obvious that their policies will lead to excess deaths in the long run. The thing to compare is the final death toll (as well as economic damage), and we don’t know that yet.

randomsearch 6y ago
This is a general observation: you shouldn’t judge pandemic policy over the short term.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Yes, ignore the bodies piling up in morgues. Rational people know that in ten years time it won't really matter.
pjc50 6y ago
> infection rate and death rate later. The most successful countries have already managed to reduce their infection rate to almost zero.
tsimionescu 6y ago
You can still compare it to countries like Vietnam, that, at 10 times the population, with a direct border to China and being the first country in they world to have the virus spread outside China, has managed to keep the infection to only ~400 of their citizens, with no deaths at all.
bildung 6y ago
Why do you think Norway will eventually approach the same number of infections as Sweden? Norway only has a few hundred active cases left, and is testing 2 times as much than Sweden. They are on their way to normal life in a few weeks. If new outbreaks occur, they are well prepared to isolate them.
- marvin 6y ago
  Just got a snap from a friend of mine. First pub beer of the season yesterday. 15 days with no new cases in my hometown. City of 300,000, West Norway. Testing capacity of >1000 per week locally. No way it can sneak up on us without a large external influx. Tourism is dead, music festivals are off and the oil industry is in a shambles, but otherwise things are close to normal. Plenty of routines to limit contagion, lots of care and social distancing, but life goes on with no disease for now.

p1esk 6y ago

The death rates can be off by an order of magnitude. Or not. We have no clue. This is the only thing “safe to assume” about this pandemic.

alkonaut 6y ago

Don't compare countries, compare cities/regions. The Stockholm area is hard hit but e.g. the Malmö area fared much better. This isn't because of a difference in strategt but because the initial outbreak was smaller and later, so they had time to take action sooner. When Stockholm realized the problems in elderly homes, many of them already had the disease. > I'd say it's safe to assume that at least 80% of Swedish deaths could have been avoided with a conventional approach. What do you build that assumption on? Comparison to other countries, thinking "they have 1/4 the deaths and strategy X so if Sweden had strategy X they would have 1/4 the deaths"? Half of the deaths were in elderly homes, and they could perhaps have been avoided with a different approach. That's the big failure. Old people who don't have care in their homes or live in elderly homes (e.g. retired healthy people) have been in full "lockdown" just like in most other countries.

bildung 6y ago
The cases per capita in Stockholm are about the same as in most other counties with more than a handful of inhabitants, there are so many cases in Stockholm because many people live there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#Additional_charts_and_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden#Ad... The same is true for Norway, with Oslo leading the list and also having the most inhabitants. So there is no difference here between the countries.

tsimionescu 6y ago

Also, why compare Sweden to France, and not Greece or Bulgaria? Sure, the French and the Spanish and Italians and the UK all had disastrous outbreaks as well, but as Eastern Europe and other places have shown, it didn't need to be that way.

alkonaut 6y ago
> ... the French and the Spanish and Italians and the UK all had disastrous outbreaks as well, but as Eastern Europe and other places have shown, it didn't need to be that way. The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already). Some cities and countries had lots of travel in Week 9 (Week of feb 24) because of holidays. This is e.g. All of Belgium, and the Stockholm region in Sweden. In Sweden its striking how much better regions that had the holiday just one week later fared (e.g. Sweden's second and third largest cities). Obviously an initial/seed outbreak of 5000 infected people in a city, compared to an initial outbreak of 50 people will be very different. It's like commentators on this particular subject assume this diseases was distributed evenly across all countries and the outcomes after that depends on the mitigations applied... It's also peculiar how some routes didn't incur a lot of spread but others did. E.g. compare the travel from the Italian alps to Scandinavia - tons of people infected. But packed high speed trains between Lombardy and Rome left several times per day during the time when lots were infected but no lockdowns were in place, yet Rome managed with a lot less disease. No one can really explain that yet. Is it something about how the virus spreads that makes planes worse than trains? Is it something about the particular population in Rome having had a Coronavirus cold last season that Lombardy didn't? Who knows.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  > The outbreak is likely most defined by how large the initial/seed outbreak is, which depends on how early it happened (how ready people was and how much they had changed behavior already). But that was absolutely a part of government response. In Romania, isolation of travelers from Italy and China began on February 21st, before any confirmed cases. Travel and meeting restrictions started when we hit 10 total cases. The lockdown measures increased significantly when we hit 100 total cases. This was in the same time that France was holding general elections with a few thousand cases.

Ma8ee 6y ago

In addition to Belgium (833 dead per million), United Kingdom (597), Spain (580) and Italy (556) have higher death rates than Sweden (446). France is close behind (432). And we don't know exactly why Sweden are hit the way it is. The exact week (February 24th to Mars 1st) where the schools in Stockholm had a winter break was the worse possible time for getting the virus back from Italy and the Alps. E.g. Gothenburg which winter break was two weeks earlier wasn't nearly as badly hit. There are just too many variables to assign any clear causes and effects yet.

marvin 6y ago
Norway and Denmark had the same factors you’re pointing to, with a large influx of cases from Italy and Switzerland. But they shut down immediately to stop further spread. In Norway, things were spurred on even faster because a royal testing screwup in one of the biggest hospitals sent 30 people in quarantine. I think that event spooked everyone to take it seriously right away, along with some video conferences with doctors in Lombardy. Textbook case of reducing the exponent of an exponential function early for massive benefits, if you ask me. That’s a very simple explanation. I don’t think the truth is more fancy than that. Even a week or two is an eternity when the doubling time is 3 days, everyone being unprepared and all.
bildung 6y ago
Yes, but all these countries, as said, are significantly poorer than Sweden per capita (e.g. Spain has about 50% of GDP per capita than Sweden). OTOH, Sweden has pretty similar politics and cultural values compared to Denmark and Norway, which means people would react similar to measures like lockdowns etc. Additionally, health care professionals have a similar social standing (as opposed to Spain, where healthcare workers are often poor, which significantly worsened Spains problems). I fully agree that we cannot have a complete understanding of the situation until everything is over, BTW! But Norway and Sweden are similar enough that a factor 10 difference in outcome cannot be ignored.

fergie 6y ago

You can compare the nordic countries here -> https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/norden/ https://www.vg.no/spesial/2020/corona/norden/

thu2111 6y ago

which seems to be the only country counting correctly (e.g. untested excess deaths in Covid proximity are included). That's not a correct way to count and is one of the reasons why comparing "COVID deaths" between countries is meaningless. It's not valid because: 1. It assumes COVID is the default cause of death even though it's known to be a very mild disease for virtually everyone (0.2% IFR and estimates keep falling, not 100%). 2. It assumes lockdowns don't kill anyone, but that's known to not be true for all kinds of reasons. The problem with this kind of reasoning is it looks motivated. It's what leads to fiascos like the New York Times publishing a list of 1000 COVID deaths and the 5th person on the list turned out to be a homicide victim. It's how you get reports of a 19 year old dying of COVID and then it turns out he had leukemia. It's how you end up with COVID death counts going down by large amounts in various parts of the world, as we're seeing now, because cases get re-evaluated and discovered to be incorrectly attributed. And all that ignores the problem of severe co-morbidities in the elderly, who often are claimed to have died of COVID even when they had major pre-existing problems and were about to die anyway. These things destroy public confidence in disease statistics. The message that COVID death counts don't mean anything hasn't really got out yet but in time it will.

efraim 6y ago

Denmark has had 100 deaths per million and neighboring Swedish region Scania has had 139 deaths per million (1.4 million population). The death rate of just the regions of Zealand and Copenhagen is 170 per million (2.6 million population). The same strategy has been in place in Stockholm and Scania, so why is the death rate not higher everywhere in Sweden? Maybe leaving schools, stores and restaurants open is not what's behind the high number of deaths in predominantly Stockholm, but something else, like how the elder care homes are managed. It doesn't seem fair to point to Sweden's high death numbers when Stockholm is a big outlier that skews the average. In most other parts of Sweden the people are doing fine, without lockdown.