7 ms·

Which countries have protected both health and the economy in the pandemic?

39 points by _Microft 6y ago

slaw 6y ago
Sweden and Belarus
- mcrae 6y ago
  Did you read the article? Or are you just regurgitating to Fox News talking points? Sweden - on both health and economic measures - has fared nearly as worse as the United States (read: not great).
  - slaw 6y ago
    I have no idea what Fox News says, I used Wikipedia. Sweden did very good. Take a look at 'All-cause daily deaths 2015–2020' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
    - IvyMike 6y ago
      Please read the article; it covers this. And as for your link--Sweden doesn't fare that well in contrast to some of its neighbors, and isn't really a standout case.
      - nickthemagicman 6y ago
        Sweden is doong better than almost all places now . It has single digit death rates. It's basically done with Covid. Which neighbors are you referring too?
        IvyMike 6y ago
        Let's say Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway. If ONLY THERE WAS AN ARTICLE SOMEWHERE THAT COVERED THIS. > Notice too that countries with similar falls in GDP have witnessed very different death rates. For instance, compare the US and Sweden with Denmark and Poland. All four countries saw economic contractions of around 8 to 9 percent, but the death rates are markedly different: the US and Sweden have recorded 5 to 10 times more deaths per million. I'm not trying to "demonize" Sweden, but the poster above is trying to imply that Sweden is some kind of exceptionally good case. By the metrics I can see, it's not that either.
    - panpanna 6y ago
      Off topic: that was one of the most ambitious Wikipedia pages I've ever read. How do people find time for these stuff?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - qwerty765654 6y ago
    WHO Special Envoy Heaps Praise on Sweden’s Covid Strategy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-31/who-special-envoy-heaps-praise-on-sweden-s-covid-strategy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-31/who-speci...
- _Microft 6y ago
  There is no data for Belarus but here is a link comparing Sweden with countries that have either comparable casualty rates (Spain, Italy, UK, USA) or comparable or even less economic contraction (Denmark, Lithuania, South Korea, Taiwan). Sweden is the small blue circle to the right side of the large USA circle. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirmed-deaths-due-to-covid-19-per-million-people?country=DNK~SWE~GBR~ESP~ITA~USA~KOR~TWN~LTU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  Isn't Sweden one of the worst countries in terms of protecting health? Last I checked they were around around #7 in the world for highest death rate
  - nickthemagicman 6y ago
    They have had single digit death rates for months. Your statement may have been accurate 3 months ago but have you looked lately? They're done with Covid just like Tegnell predicted meanwhile a good amount of the world that locked down is still fighting it.
    - _Microft 6y ago
      Are you referring to the case fatality rate? It's indeed single-digit for Sweden, albeit twice as high as other nordic countries or Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&country=SWE~DEU~FIN~NOR~DNK&cfrMetric=true&interval=smoothed&aligned=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
      - nickthemagicman 6y ago
        Nice Cherry Picking. France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, all have worse CFR's than Sweden. Also, all of Europe in aggregate is pretty close to Sweden. It's fascinating to see how people are so devoted to demonizing Sweden. Also, CFR is a weird measure to use. 1 infection and 1 death is a 100% CFR even if the rest of the population is fine!!!! ref: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&country=SWE~Europe&cfrMetric=true&interval=smoothed&aligned=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
        IvyMike 6y ago
        > France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, all have worse CFR's than Sweden. I mean if we're gonna talk about cherry-picking, did you notice that more than half of the countries you picked were the earliest hot-spots of the outbreak in Europe? In any case, although the comment you are referring to mentions CFR, the article itself does not use CFR, it uses "Confirmed deaths per million people" as its metric. Still hard to see Sweden as a particularly standout good case in that data.
panpanna 6y ago
Two important notes on Sweden: 1. Its economy relies heavily on export. When the rest of the world do bad, Swedish economy does bad too. 2. It has been argued that Sweden has a very odd definition of covid deaths: if you had it when you died, you died of covid. Two recent studies showed that only 15% of those who "died of covid" actually died because of covid. This might explain their very high death rate at care homes... Edit: haven't read the studies and can't find them right now so don't quote me on that.
- shultays 6y ago
  How do you die of covid? It makes you weak or shut downs an important system and you die. If you cant breathe because your lungs are not working due to covid, do you die because of suffacation or covid? Should that go to 15% or 85%? I am sure can use this reasoning for quite a chunk of that 85%. When your body does not work as expected you will be more suspectible
  - panpanna 6y ago
    What you mention goes into the 15%, the remaining 85% is basically "we also found traces of covid during autopsy" Mind you, this whole argument could off course be nonsense and made up to make the authorities look good. But the statics over all deaths (someone posted a link in this thread) seems to partially confirm this.
- teclordphrack2 6y ago
  "2. It has been argued that Sweden has a very odd definition of covid deaths: if you had it when you died, you died of covid. Two recent studies showed that only 15% of those who "died of covid" actually died because of covid." You are wrong. You are making the same lie that those in the usa are making when they try to claim that of 180,000 dead only 6% actually died of covid and the rest died with covid. You die of covid when you die with fluid in your lungs of pneumonia. You die of covid when you get in a wreck and they have to take you to the next county over skipping the two hospitals that are overcrowded with covid patients. You die of covid when your heart gives out or you have respiratory failure. One thing causes the others and leads to the death. Quit being ignorant or blatantly lying. A source would help to make me fill like an idiot. Please make me feel like an idiot and have a source.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the source article's characterization of its data. There have to be confounding factors, given how widely the GDP impact varies among countries with similar death rates. So a negative correlation across countries doesn't demonstrate that individual countries don't face tradeoffs.
bartelby 6y ago
I don’t think I’d agree with the author’s characterization of the data. The graphs don’t seem to show any obvious trends, really. If anything, the graphs show how wildly variable the virus’ impact can be even among countries with similar economic and demographic profiles.
rehman 6y ago
Quite fascinating, no India our there. India is worst affected, both Covid wise and economy wise. Worst mismanagement of all time.
- jbergens 6y ago
  Agree India should have been included. But they measured deaths per capita and I think India is still very low on that scale. Could be more interesting to include both deaths and hospitalized or do another comparison but then include all void-19 cases in each country.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 6y ago
I am reminded of Switzerland before WWII. They read the German newspapers and listened to German radio and were well attuned to the Nazi threat. By making Switzerland too tough a nut to crack, they prevented invasion: something no other bordering state accomplished. Taiwan is in a similar situation with the colossus next door. The disease threat from China is well understood in Taiwan and they took effective measures with the first rumblings from Wuhan. Masks and partitions were mandated and supplied. Suspected contacts were put up in hotels to prevent familial transmission. The quarantined people were supplied with food and a stipend and visited frequently to ensure their needs were taken care of. The CDC had attachés stationed in the US embassy in Beijing until Trump cut their budget. Canada had a respected emergent disease monitoring service that got neutered by being put under the thumb of bureaucrats.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  > By making Switzerland too tough a nut to crack I remember reading that most "oligarchs" in Germany and other parts of Europe had their interests there, and for that reason Hitler didn't want to mess with it. I'm not sure Switzerland would have been "too tough" for the German army otherwise.
  - gumby 6y ago
    This was part of their defense (and there is no sarcasm intended in this comment). It was a true defense in depth, from mining the tunnels and arming the citizenry to diplomatic efforts to make themselves not worth invading (or conversely, worth leaving alone). Similar strategies are adopted in nature, both by animals and plants.
dwd 6y ago
Australia's not shown but it's been mostly business as usual apart from the tourism industry and brick&mortar retail which have been basket cases for years. Peak contraction was something like 16% in April during the main lockdown and had rebounded back to year-on-year growth by June. Some industries like home renovation have been booming. Queensland in particular with an equivalent population to New Zealand still only has 6 fatalities.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  Australia spent $200bn within the space of a few months on direct welfare handouts alone, retailers selling imported junk are now giving out special dividends to investors like it's the peak of an economic boom. It's yet to be shown they've handled the economic side well and I doubt history will judge the fiscal response positively. That's a lot of wasted opportunity with regards to infrastructure spending. The National Broadband Network in comparison cost $40bn and estimates for an East coast high speed rail network from Brisbane to Melbourne came out at just over $100bn by infrastructure Australia and was deemed much too expensive to proceed by both sides of politics despite having a valid ROI business case drawn up.
  - dwd 6y ago
    More like $101 billion to date (over 6 months). They announced 130bn initially, then revised that down by 60 due to an accounting error. I think there was need for an additional 15bn with Victoria going back into lockdown and some other extensions. Probably well spent as any money you give directly to workers quickly circulates back into the economy. There's no trickle down, but it definitely floats to the top.
  - blm 6y ago
    Wouldnt spending money on infrastructure create need for people to be in the same physical location to do at least the manual work part of building infrastructure? Recent maintenance of electricity infrastructure in this street created a congregation of at least 8 people. Also building infrastructure seems like a win win but after the infrastructure is built there is also a commitment to maintain the infrastructure. Isnt this like signing up for a recurring expense? Too often I think politicians and others think of it like a one off purchase to garner votes. See this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-massive-infrastructure-liabilities-so-do-99-of-the-cities-in-america https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-ma...
ergl 6y ago
Like other commenters pointed out, I think it's important to look at the economy of each country. Spain's GDP, for example, heavily relies on tourism (12%, according to official sources [1]), with most of that happening during the summer. Almost no one is traveling to Spain right now, so you could expect almost a 12% drop in GDP. That's a big chunk of the 22% drop you see in the chart. [1]: https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=estadistica_C&cid=1254736169169&menu=ultiDatos&idp=1254735576863 https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=estadist...
anoncake 6y ago
Is the pandemic over? Because if it isn't, there is no way to tell yet.

39 points by _Microft 6y ago

slaw 6y ago

Sweden and Belarus

mcrae 6y ago
Did you read the article? Or are you just regurgitating to Fox News talking points? Sweden - on both health and economic measures - has fared nearly as worse as the United States (read: not great).
- slaw 6y ago
  I have no idea what Fox News says, I used Wikipedia. Sweden did very good. Take a look at 'All-cause daily deaths 2015–2020' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden
  - IvyMike 6y ago
    Please read the article; it covers this. And as for your link--Sweden doesn't fare that well in contrast to some of its neighbors, and isn't really a standout case.
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      Sweden is doong better than almost all places now . It has single digit death rates. It's basically done with Covid. Which neighbors are you referring too?
      - IvyMike 6y ago
        Let's say Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway. If ONLY THERE WAS AN ARTICLE SOMEWHERE THAT COVERED THIS. > Notice too that countries with similar falls in GDP have witnessed very different death rates. For instance, compare the US and Sweden with Denmark and Poland. All four countries saw economic contractions of around 8 to 9 percent, but the death rates are markedly different: the US and Sweden have recorded 5 to 10 times more deaths per million. I'm not trying to "demonize" Sweden, but the poster above is trying to imply that Sweden is some kind of exceptionally good case. By the metrics I can see, it's not that either.
  - panpanna 6y ago
    Off topic: that was one of the most ambitious Wikipedia pages I've ever read. How do people find time for these stuff?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- qwerty765654 6y ago
  WHO Special Envoy Heaps Praise on Sweden’s Covid Strategy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-31/who-special-envoy-heaps-praise-on-sweden-s-covid-strategy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-31/who-speci...
_Microft 6y ago
There is no data for Belarus but here is a link comparing Sweden with countries that have either comparable casualty rates (Spain, Italy, UK, USA) or comparable or even less economic contraction (Denmark, Lithuania, South Korea, Taiwan). Sweden is the small blue circle to the right side of the large USA circle. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirmed-deaths-due-to-covid-19-per-million-people?country=DNK~SWE~GBR~ESP~ITA~USA~KOR~TWN~LTU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...
Rebelgecko 6y ago
Isn't Sweden one of the worst countries in terms of protecting health? Last I checked they were around around #7 in the world for highest death rate
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  They have had single digit death rates for months. Your statement may have been accurate 3 months ago but have you looked lately? They're done with Covid just like Tegnell predicted meanwhile a good amount of the world that locked down is still fighting it.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    Are you referring to the case fatality rate? It's indeed single-digit for Sweden, albeit twice as high as other nordic countries or Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&country=SWE~DEU~FIN~NOR~DNK&cfrMetric=true&interval=smoothed&aligned=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
    - nickthemagicman 6y ago
      Nice Cherry Picking. France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, all have worse CFR's than Sweden. Also, all of Europe in aggregate is pretty close to Sweden. It's fascinating to see how people are so devoted to demonizing Sweden. Also, CFR is a weird measure to use. 1 infection and 1 death is a 100% CFR even if the rest of the population is fine!!!! ref: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&country=SWE~Europe&cfrMetric=true&interval=smoothed&aligned=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&pickerMetric=location&pickerSort=asc https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
      - IvyMike 6y ago
        > France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, all have worse CFR's than Sweden. I mean if we're gonna talk about cherry-picking, did you notice that more than half of the countries you picked were the earliest hot-spots of the outbreak in Europe? In any case, although the comment you are referring to mentions CFR, the article itself does not use CFR, it uses "Confirmed deaths per million people" as its metric. Still hard to see Sweden as a particularly standout good case in that data.

panpanna 6y ago

Two important notes on Sweden: 1. Its economy relies heavily on export. When the rest of the world do bad, Swedish economy does bad too. 2. It has been argued that Sweden has a very odd definition of covid deaths: if you had it when you died, you died of covid. Two recent studies showed that only 15% of those who "died of covid" actually died because of covid. This might explain their very high death rate at care homes... Edit: haven't read the studies and can't find them right now so don't quote me on that.

shultays 6y ago
How do you die of covid? It makes you weak or shut downs an important system and you die. If you cant breathe because your lungs are not working due to covid, do you die because of suffacation or covid? Should that go to 15% or 85%? I am sure can use this reasoning for quite a chunk of that 85%. When your body does not work as expected you will be more suspectible
- panpanna 6y ago
  What you mention goes into the 15%, the remaining 85% is basically "we also found traces of covid during autopsy" Mind you, this whole argument could off course be nonsense and made up to make the authorities look good. But the statics over all deaths (someone posted a link in this thread) seems to partially confirm this.
teclordphrack2 6y ago
"2. It has been argued that Sweden has a very odd definition of covid deaths: if you had it when you died, you died of covid. Two recent studies showed that only 15% of those who "died of covid" actually died because of covid." You are wrong. You are making the same lie that those in the usa are making when they try to claim that of 180,000 dead only 6% actually died of covid and the rest died with covid. You die of covid when you die with fluid in your lungs of pneumonia. You die of covid when you get in a wreck and they have to take you to the next county over skipping the two hospitals that are overcrowded with covid patients. You die of covid when your heart gives out or you have respiratory failure. One thing causes the others and leads to the death. Quit being ignorant or blatantly lying. A source would help to make me fill like an idiot. Please make me feel like an idiot and have a source.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I'm not sure I agree with the source article's characterization of its data. There have to be confounding factors, given how widely the GDP impact varies among countries with similar death rates. So a negative correlation across countries doesn't demonstrate that individual countries don't face tradeoffs.

bartelby 6y ago

I don’t think I’d agree with the author’s characterization of the data. The graphs don’t seem to show any obvious trends, really. If anything, the graphs show how wildly variable the virus’ impact can be even among countries with similar economic and demographic profiles.

rehman 6y ago

Quite fascinating, no India our there. India is worst affected, both Covid wise and economy wise. Worst mismanagement of all time.

jbergens 6y ago
Agree India should have been included. But they measured deaths per capita and I think India is still very low on that scale. Could be more interesting to include both deaths and hospitalized or do another comparison but then include all void-19 cases in each country.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 6y ago

I am reminded of Switzerland before WWII. They read the German newspapers and listened to German radio and were well attuned to the Nazi threat. By making Switzerland too tough a nut to crack, they prevented invasion: something no other bordering state accomplished. Taiwan is in a similar situation with the colossus next door. The disease threat from China is well understood in Taiwan and they took effective measures with the first rumblings from Wuhan. Masks and partitions were mandated and supplied. Suspected contacts were put up in hotels to prevent familial transmission. The quarantined people were supplied with food and a stipend and visited frequently to ensure their needs were taken care of. The CDC had attachés stationed in the US embassy in Beijing until Trump cut their budget. Canada had a respected emergent disease monitoring service that got neutered by being put under the thumb of bureaucrats.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> By making Switzerland too tough a nut to crack I remember reading that most "oligarchs" in Germany and other parts of Europe had their interests there, and for that reason Hitler didn't want to mess with it. I'm not sure Switzerland would have been "too tough" for the German army otherwise.
- gumby 6y ago
  This was part of their defense (and there is no sarcasm intended in this comment). It was a true defense in depth, from mining the tunnels and arming the citizenry to diplomatic efforts to make themselves not worth invading (or conversely, worth leaving alone). Similar strategies are adopted in nature, both by animals and plants.

dwd 6y ago

Australia's not shown but it's been mostly business as usual apart from the tourism industry and brick&mortar retail which have been basket cases for years. Peak contraction was something like 16% in April during the main lockdown and had rebounded back to year-on-year growth by June. Some industries like home renovation have been booming. Queensland in particular with an equivalent population to New Zealand still only has 6 fatalities.

DarthGhandi 6y ago
Australia spent $200bn within the space of a few months on direct welfare handouts alone, retailers selling imported junk are now giving out special dividends to investors like it's the peak of an economic boom. It's yet to be shown they've handled the economic side well and I doubt history will judge the fiscal response positively. That's a lot of wasted opportunity with regards to infrastructure spending. The National Broadband Network in comparison cost $40bn and estimates for an East coast high speed rail network from Brisbane to Melbourne came out at just over $100bn by infrastructure Australia and was deemed much too expensive to proceed by both sides of politics despite having a valid ROI business case drawn up.
- dwd 6y ago
  More like $101 billion to date (over 6 months). They announced 130bn initially, then revised that down by 60 due to an accounting error. I think there was need for an additional 15bn with Victoria going back into lockdown and some other extensions. Probably well spent as any money you give directly to workers quickly circulates back into the economy. There's no trickle down, but it definitely floats to the top.
- blm 6y ago
  Wouldnt spending money on infrastructure create need for people to be in the same physical location to do at least the manual work part of building infrastructure? Recent maintenance of electricity infrastructure in this street created a congregation of at least 8 people. Also building infrastructure seems like a win win but after the infrastructure is built there is also a commitment to maintain the infrastructure. Isnt this like signing up for a recurring expense? Too often I think politicians and others think of it like a one off purchase to garner votes. See this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-massive-infrastructure-liabilities-so-do-99-of-the-cities-in-america https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-ma...

ergl 6y ago

Like other commenters pointed out, I think it's important to look at the economy of each country. Spain's GDP, for example, heavily relies on tourism (12%, according to official sources [1]), with most of that happening during the summer. Almost no one is traveling to Spain right now, so you could expect almost a 12% drop in GDP. That's a big chunk of the 22% drop you see in the chart. [1]: https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=estadistica_C&cid=1254736169169&menu=ultiDatos&idp=1254735576863 https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=estadist...

anoncake 6y ago

Is the pandemic over? Because if it isn't, there is no way to tell yet.