5 ms·

How is 4.500 dead, beeing worldwide #1 in deaths pr capita 2 weeks running, allround #7 in deaths and climbing, not qualify as catastrophic? And this nonsense

How is 4.500 dead, beeing worldwide #1 in deaths pr capita 2 weeks running, allround #7 in deaths and climbing, not qualify as catastrophic? And this nonsense of how Sweden will be better of in a second wave.. why? Because people are already dead?? They are not even done with the first wave, they are litterally #1 in deaths pr capita.

svrtknst 6y ago
Depends on how you measure deaths from Covid-19, for one. There have been a multitude of reports from other countries on how they fail to account for all deaths, let alone all deaths from the disease, for instance. The death toll is severe though, no two ways about it, but therea are also a lot of factors to weigh in, such as: - What could have been done instead? There are several countries with radically different measures that still face high numbers of reported deaths - Would more severe restrictions have mitigated the most damaging vectors? A lot of the deaths come from elderly homes, for instance, and further lockdowns wouldn't naturally have prevented that (as much as, say, more personnel in elderly care) - What will the secondary effects be? The effects of Covid-19 go beyond the deaths from the disease itself. How many will die from the economical impact of lesser, or more severe restrictions? For instance. These are all difficult considerations and near-impossible to answer.
- martin_bech 6y ago
  The Swedes are actually poor at counting deaths, as they lag in their reporting, and often report 0 deaths in the weekend and hollidays. According to NYT Sweden has an excess of deaths totally of about 30%, about the same as France, but climbing. And no its not difficult to compare to say Denmark or Norway.
  - DanBC 6y ago
    > The Swedes are actually poor at counting deaths, as they lag in their reporting, and often report 0 deaths in the weekend and hollidays. That doesn't make them poor at counting death, so long as those deaths do eventually get counted. Everyone knows there are lags in reporting and counting, and everyone should take those lags into account when using the data. Compare that to Spain, which has recently changed their count method and ended up with a confusing and misleading set of data. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?...
  - oxymoron 6y ago
    It’s because it takes time to coordinate the collection of deaths from nursing hones and so forth. A large number of countries are not even collecting these statistics, so I think it’s unfair to say that Sweden is poor at it. According to the latest report, 79% of excess deaths were accounted for in official statistics. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-uppfoljning/smittsamma-sjukdomar/veckorapporter-covid-19/2020/covid-19-veckorapport-vecka-21-final.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-u...
- null_object 6y ago
  "There have been a multitude of reports from other countries on how they fail to account for all deaths, let alone all deaths from the disease, for instance." Look here[1] to see that Sweden is the only Nordic country with under-estimated deaths for this period. Living in Sweden I must say I'm really tired of constantly hearing that other countries are just "cheating" by under-estimating their covid death-rates. The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition. When the supposed herd-immunity rate was re-calculated by the Swedish-resident statistician Tom Britton to possibly be around 40%[2] the news was widely discussed as though Swedes had won some sort of 'race' - one of my colleagues actually punched the air and said "I knew we'd be first!" (the actual rate of antibodies is around 7-10% in the worst-affected Stockholm area) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav... [2] https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/hoppfulla-teorin-sa-nar-vi-flockimmunitet-redan-i-juni/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/hoppfulla-teo...
  - microtherion 6y ago
    > The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition. Yes, it's somewhat ugly, but I feel that some confirmation bias is unavoidable. At this point, pretty much everybody has experienced substantial downsides of the epidemic (either restricted public life, or increased deaths around them), so it seems only natural to look for data implying that it was all worth it.
Entalpi 6y ago
To be honest every single death in Sweden is probably counted so the stats are rocksolid. Other countries might have a lower quality of stats (unaccounted death, paperless/undocumented people, missdiagnosed, etc)..
- andybak 6y ago
  I keep seeing people saying things along the lines of "but the official statistics massively (under/over) estimate the true count" depending on which particular point they want to make.
- martin_bech 6y ago
  They may be counted eventually, but as of writing, the numbers are lagging, with delays from various areas in Sweden. There is no evidence that the quality of data from Sweden, should be better then anywhere else. Sweden actually has a testing problem, so by design, missdiagnosed could be higher in Sweden. There are very very vey few undocumented people in Scandinavia.
rscho 6y ago
Wait a year for 75% of people having spent 3 weeks on mechanical ventilation in other countries to die from complications, and only then will we be able to really evaluate deaths and costs...
alkonaut 6y ago
> And this nonsense of how Sweden will be better of in a second wave.. why? The assumption then is that the difference between 1% immunity, 10% immunity or 20% immunity is massive when it comes to how strict any tracing regime, temporary lockdowns and so on need to be during the next outbreak. If that's the case remains to be seen. But if it is, then that's the answer to the "why?".
w0utert 6y ago
>> How is 4.500 dead, beeing worldwide #1 in deaths pr capita 2 weeks running, allround #7 in deaths and climbing, not qualify as catastrophic? Looking at graphs of excess deaths compared to previous years the graph for Sweden is pretty much identical to most Europen mainlaind countries. It spikes at the same time, and it goes down at about the same rate at the same moment, which is when the governments of some countries went into lockdown, while Sweden just advised social distancing etc. But the effect was pretty much the same as e.g. here in the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Germany, France, Switzerland, etc. I get this feeling some people really want to rake Sweden over the coals because their policy is supposedly 'killing more people', but the numbers only show this when you compare against direct neighbors, and not at all when you compare to EU mainland countries. Coincidentally, Sweden was one of the first countries that had its first confirmed cases, way before other countries, and way before everyone realised this was going to get bad. So it's very likely that the high number of early infections that went undetected lead to a later spike similar to countries in mainland EU, and, as a result of that, similar statistics in terms of excess deaths. Other nordic countries may have dodged the bullet simply by virtue of a having a little more time before the exponential increase in infections started to get out of hand. Also (and this seems to be an unpopular opinion around here), maybe we should accept the fact that a certain number of deaths/capita will be inevitable, even for those countries like Norway/Denmark etc, at least in their more densely populated areas. Countries like Netherlands and Sweden had a big spike where many people died in a short time, the vast majority being old (80+ year old) people and people with one or more comorbidities. In the past three weeks, the excess deaths here have been negative compared to other years, and if you look at the area under the graph for total excess deaths for this year so far, it's not that much higher than for the 2018 flu season, which was a much lower spike but it lasted for much longer. It's very likely that over the next months, barring a vaccine, excess deaths in countries that have very few corona fatalities so far will go up and linger higher for a long time. There was a study posted here recently that showed a very high correlation between the chance of dying from corona now and the 'normal' (ie: before-corona) chance of dying in the next year, through different age groups, health risk factors and some other variables. I think it's fair to say we have to wait for at least one or two years before we can draw any conclusions at all about which countries handled this right and which didn't, or if it even mattered at all. One data point that indicates that maybe there wasn't really a way to prevent all these deaths, is that when you compare countries where the number of hospitalized corona patients spiked similarly before any measures were taken, it seems there is next to no difference in the progression of infections and deaths between countries with ultra-strict lockdown measures and countries that were a little less strict. Things like face masks, closing schools or banning outside activities appear to have had no effect whatsoever.
kalleboo 6y ago
The initial projections (ones that guided the responses of other countries like the UK) predicted that Sweden would have 40,000 dead by a month ago without a strict lockdown. That would have been catastrophic.

svrtknst 6y ago

Depends on how you measure deaths from Covid-19, for one. There have been a multitude of reports from other countries on how they fail to account for all deaths, let alone all deaths from the disease, for instance. The death toll is severe though, no two ways about it, but therea are also a lot of factors to weigh in, such as: - What could have been done instead? There are several countries with radically different measures that still face high numbers of reported deaths - Would more severe restrictions have mitigated the most damaging vectors? A lot of the deaths come from elderly homes, for instance, and further lockdowns wouldn't naturally have prevented that (as much as, say, more personnel in elderly care) - What will the secondary effects be? The effects of Covid-19 go beyond the deaths from the disease itself. How many will die from the economical impact of lesser, or more severe restrictions? For instance. These are all difficult considerations and near-impossible to answer.

martin_bech 6y ago
The Swedes are actually poor at counting deaths, as they lag in their reporting, and often report 0 deaths in the weekend and hollidays. According to NYT Sweden has an excess of deaths totally of about 30%, about the same as France, but climbing. And no its not difficult to compare to say Denmark or Norway.
- DanBC 6y ago
  > The Swedes are actually poor at counting deaths, as they lag in their reporting, and often report 0 deaths in the weekend and hollidays. That doesn't make them poor at counting death, so long as those deaths do eventually get counted. Everyone knows there are lags in reporting and counting, and everyone should take those lags into account when using the data. Compare that to Spain, which has recently changed their count method and ended up with a confusing and misleading set of data. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?s=20 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?...
- oxymoron 6y ago
  It’s because it takes time to coordinate the collection of deaths from nursing hones and so forth. A large number of countries are not even collecting these statistics, so I think it’s unfair to say that Sweden is poor at it. According to the latest report, 79% of excess deaths were accounted for in official statistics. https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-uppfoljning/smittsamma-sjukdomar/veckorapporter-covid-19/2020/covid-19-veckorapport-vecka-21-final.pdf https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-u...
null_object 6y ago
"There have been a multitude of reports from other countries on how they fail to account for all deaths, let alone all deaths from the disease, for instance." Look here[1] to see that Sweden is the only Nordic country with under-estimated deaths for this period. Living in Sweden I must say I'm really tired of constantly hearing that other countries are just "cheating" by under-estimating their covid death-rates. The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition. When the supposed herd-immunity rate was re-calculated by the Swedish-resident statistician Tom Britton to possibly be around 40%[2] the news was widely discussed as though Swedes had won some sort of 'race' - one of my colleagues actually punched the air and said "I knew we'd be first!" (the actual rate of antibodies is around 7-10% in the worst-affected Stockholm area) [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav... [2] https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/hoppfulla-teorin-sa-nar-vi-flockimmunitet-redan-i-juni/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/hoppfulla-teo...
- microtherion 6y ago
  > The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition. Yes, it's somewhat ugly, but I feel that some confirmation bias is unavoidable. At this point, pretty much everybody has experienced substantial downsides of the epidemic (either restricted public life, or increased deaths around them), so it seems only natural to look for data implying that it was all worth it.

Entalpi 6y ago

To be honest every single death in Sweden is probably counted so the stats are rocksolid. Other countries might have a lower quality of stats (unaccounted death, paperless/undocumented people, missdiagnosed, etc)..

andybak 6y ago
I keep seeing people saying things along the lines of "but the official statistics massively (under/over) estimate the true count" depending on which particular point they want to make.
martin_bech 6y ago
They may be counted eventually, but as of writing, the numbers are lagging, with delays from various areas in Sweden. There is no evidence that the quality of data from Sweden, should be better then anywhere else. Sweden actually has a testing problem, so by design, missdiagnosed could be higher in Sweden. There are very very vey few undocumented people in Scandinavia.

rscho 6y ago

Wait a year for 75% of people having spent 3 weeks on mechanical ventilation in other countries to die from complications, and only then will we be able to really evaluate deaths and costs...

alkonaut 6y ago

> And this nonsense of how Sweden will be better of in a second wave.. why? The assumption then is that the difference between 1% immunity, 10% immunity or 20% immunity is massive when it comes to how strict any tracing regime, temporary lockdowns and so on need to be during the next outbreak. If that's the case remains to be seen. But if it is, then that's the answer to the "why?".

w0utert 6y ago

>> How is 4.500 dead, beeing worldwide #1 in deaths pr capita 2 weeks running, allround #7 in deaths and climbing, not qualify as catastrophic? Looking at graphs of excess deaths compared to previous years the graph for Sweden is pretty much identical to most Europen mainlaind countries. It spikes at the same time, and it goes down at about the same rate at the same moment, which is when the governments of some countries went into lockdown, while Sweden just advised social distancing etc. But the effect was pretty much the same as e.g. here in the Netherlands, Belgium, parts of Germany, France, Switzerland, etc. I get this feeling some people really want to rake Sweden over the coals because their policy is supposedly 'killing more people', but the numbers only show this when you compare against direct neighbors, and not at all when you compare to EU mainland countries. Coincidentally, Sweden was one of the first countries that had its first confirmed cases, way before other countries, and way before everyone realised this was going to get bad. So it's very likely that the high number of early infections that went undetected lead to a later spike similar to countries in mainland EU, and, as a result of that, similar statistics in terms of excess deaths. Other nordic countries may have dodged the bullet simply by virtue of a having a little more time before the exponential increase in infections started to get out of hand. Also (and this seems to be an unpopular opinion around here), maybe we should accept the fact that a certain number of deaths/capita will be inevitable, even for those countries like Norway/Denmark etc, at least in their more densely populated areas. Countries like Netherlands and Sweden had a big spike where many people died in a short time, the vast majority being old (80+ year old) people and people with one or more comorbidities. In the past three weeks, the excess deaths here have been negative compared to other years, and if you look at the area under the graph for total excess deaths for this year so far, it's not that much higher than for the 2018 flu season, which was a much lower spike but it lasted for much longer. It's very likely that over the next months, barring a vaccine, excess deaths in countries that have very few corona fatalities so far will go up and linger higher for a long time. There was a study posted here recently that showed a very high correlation between the chance of dying from corona now and the 'normal' (ie: before-corona) chance of dying in the next year, through different age groups, health risk factors and some other variables. I think it's fair to say we have to wait for at least one or two years before we can draw any conclusions at all about which countries handled this right and which didn't, or if it even mattered at all. One data point that indicates that maybe there wasn't really a way to prevent all these deaths, is that when you compare countries where the number of hospitalized corona patients spiked similarly before any measures were taken, it seems there is next to no difference in the progression of infections and deaths between countries with ultra-strict lockdown measures and countries that were a little less strict. Things like face masks, closing schools or banning outside activities appear to have had no effect whatsoever.

kalleboo 6y ago

The initial projections (ones that guided the responses of other countries like the UK) predicted that Sweden would have 40,000 dead by a month ago without a strict lockdown. That would have been catastrophic.