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"Up to now Sweden has recorded 5,838 coronavirus deaths, giving it the fifth-highest per capita death rate in Europe, [...]" Yes they have the fift worst morta

• tonymet 6y ago
  Don’t judge until the end
  • ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    When is this end? After how many deaths do you throw in the towel and admit you fucked up? Is treating you country like a guinea pig really a good leadership idea? It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance. We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't but there's no political will to implement since most politicians care more about being reelected rather than making short term unpopular decisions that could save lives long term since most of their Average Joe voters care more about their freedom to go on vacation and not having to wear masks everywhere than stopping the virus.
    • JoshuaDavid 6y ago
      The end is when COVID is either endemic in your country, or is no longer able to spread exponentially even without any non-permanent large-scale interventions. Sweden can't "throw in the towel" and go back to before 2020 -- the people who have died have already died (and notably, more than half of the COVID-19 deaths so far in Sweden happened before May 1, and about 90% before mid June). Implementing lockdown measures now won't bring those people back to life, and since the number of cases is low and continuing to decrease now, also would have very little benefit otherwise. Unless you're referring to stopping lockdown measures as "throwing in the towel and admitting you fucked up", in which case the answer is "definitely not before there's some plausible story you can tell about why it's fine to do that now but wasn't before". And any country that hasn't had widespread community spread like Sweden is likely to see the same sort of spread Sweden saw early on if they implement the same measures Sweden did.
    • SahAssar 6y ago
      When the virus is either under control or has become a normal part of the disease cycle like the flu. Right now all stats are incomplete and no one knows how the situation will develop based on the strategies. > It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEOs performance. Yes, it's like that if it was in the middle of a worldwide recession with incomplete numbers and all companies were dealing with similar issues. Sweden has done some things differently, and it will be interesting to see how that stacks up when we eventually know enough to judge it. > We have enough data at this point to see what works and what doesn't Do we? To me it seems like we have both successful and non-successful countries taking wildly different strategies and the long term effects on society are not known. Either you know something the rest of us don't or you're wrong.
      • elcritch 6y ago
        Precisely, it’s pretty easy to tell from the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden that’s its reached a saturation point. The last few weeks have had < ~5 COVID-19 related deaths per day. It’s flat-lined, while many countries will continue likely having second, third, or even fourth waves. If a vaccine is developed and widely distributed, then that’d be a good stopping condition as well. The health institute in Sweden isn’t by running an experiment anymore than the "experiments" running in say NY & CA. Every thing I’ve read indicates broad national Swedish support, of course there’s dissenters but news sources would indicate they’re in the minority. Compare that to the contention in say CA, or Germany over the lockdown/shutdowns of normal life. In the grand scheme I believe most people will realize a total of 5,000 deaths in a country that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year isn’t extreme. Unfortunate, but not much different from most years (it’s possible Sweden will overall lose less people than the average on previous years). Just this cause has a lot of scary news behind it.
        • SahAssar 6y ago
          > Precisely, it’s pretty easy to tell from the Covid-19 death rate in Sweden that’s its reached a saturation point. To be clear: I said no such thing. I think it's far to early to evaluate that. Currently things in sweden look pretty good IMO, but "currently" and "pretty good" can shift radically and fast. > that normally has a couple hundred thousand die every year Seems like the normal deaths per year are around 95000. My point is mostly that I think it will take at least a year for us to get stats that are comparable between countries since different countries track it differently and have different efficiency/centralization of tracking. What will be even harder will be to track secondary and societal effects of both the virus itself and the measures taken to prevent spread, which will probably have a ongoing effect for many years.
    • nabla9 6y ago
      Anders Tegnell (current state epidemiologist of Sweden) said that the success of strategy can bee seen after a year or so. Tegnell's opinion is that Sweden failed to safeguard the elderly, and that's the cause of the high death rate at the beginning (this seems to be true).
    • gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
      > Is treating you country like a guinea pig really a good leadership idea? How is indefinite house detention, destroying small business and lower levels of the economy, and ripping asunder the fabric of normal society any less "treating your country like a guinea pig"? > It's like saying let's wait for the company's bankruptcy before we judge the CEO's performance. Ok let me try doing you: "I'm going to hold you hostage indefinitely...it's for your own safety!"
    • tonymet 6y ago
      You’re assuming the trajectories will remain static . Refrain judgement until the pandemic subsides. The rankings will change
  • kingnaldo 6y ago
    "the end" as in "the world's end"?
• maa5444 6y ago
  the test sre non sense ...they amplify 40 times .. just to find something
• controversy 6y ago
  The disease will not be wiped out by masks and hand washing. Germany and other countries are finding their rates of infection increasing as people leave their bunkers. The model used by most of Europe is not sustainable. People can’t bunker down in their homes forever. Sweden’s model shows that you can keep your economy open and reasonably manage the disease. People who are going to die are the elderly by enlarge. That is sad. However they would die soon enough due to their age and pre existing issues. Why sacrifice the economy for the elderly’s two years while harming the next generation by poor remote education and harming the current adults due to destroyed economic activity?
  • ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Nobody in Europe is bunkered in their homes since March-April. The numbers have increased exactly because people are free to go anywhere on their summer vacation and party as they wish, causing new fires to erupt.
  • cygx 6y ago
    Your cost-benefit analysis is incomplete: Covid-19 can cause long-term lung damage even in the young.
    • listenallyall 6y ago
      So can smoking. What is your point?
    • controversy 6y ago
      We don’t know that. The body could heal. Also there was little thought to comorbidities in most papers.
      • cygx 6y ago
        You're right to point out that I should have thrown in some further qualification (it's too early to make definitive statements about long-term consequences). Apparently, there was some significant recovery of lung damage in the aftermath of the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak (Pulmonary interstitial damage and functional decline caused by SARS mostly recovered, with a greater extent of recovery within 2 years after rehabilitation. [1]) This doesn't change the fact that this has to be accounted for if you want to play the numbers game. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41413-020-0084-5
• qeternity 6y ago
  Sweden and the US will likely have very front loaded death tolls. Other countries will either accept the reality that a vaccine is still far away, or they will yo-yo in and out of lockdown while wreaking economic carnage.
  • matz1 6y ago
    US have lockdown though
  • emerged 6y ago
    I do sometimes wonder how consistently different countries attribute deaths to COVID. There's no way a naive direct comparison is accurate.
  • arrrg 6y ago
    The US experience is yo-yo-ing in and out of lockdown. Many countries do not have that experience.
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  On the other hand, it looks like they're only slightly ahead of the U.S. in death rate and behind the UK, so... I'm not totally sure what that tells us, to be honest.
  • pavlov 6y ago
    US and UK responses to the pandemic were probably the worst mismanaged in the developed world, so that’s not a peer group that Sweden would like to be in.
    • worker767424 6y ago
      That was true a few months ago, but have you seen the current surge in new cases in Spain and France?
      • zimpenfish 6y ago
        Worth noting that the UK is currently undergoing a large surge in new cases too.
• matz1 6y ago
  11th worst mortality without lockdown? that is a win for me.
  • p1necone 6y ago
    There are 195 countries in the world. 11th worst is bad.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • jonplackett 6y ago
      Isn’t the point that they didn’t close the country so that’s a massive up side. Here in the UK we closed everything (much too late to be effective), spent billions on furloughing everyone, and still loads of people died, and now cases are going up again anyway. (For clarity - I’m not anti-lockdown. I haven’t been to a shop for months. I’m doing my bit either way)
      • wolco 6y ago
        Now if you started sooner and if people took it more seriously perhaps numbers would be different.
        • jonplackett 6y ago
          They did make it unnecessarily hard for people - the health minister went on live TV in late Feb and said it was about as deadly as Flu (no it's 10x more deadly). Then Boris Johnson went to a hospital and shook hands with Coronavirus patients and bragged about it (then got coronavirus). Then his top advisor broke lockdown by driving the length of the country (while he had coronavirus). Oh and our chief medial officer also got coronavirus. Couldn't ask for a less useful bunch of people.
          • elcritch 6y ago
            Currently the IFR is estimated between 0.2-0.6%, or roughly about 2-6x deadlier. That’ll looks to keep decreasing in Sweden, and elsewhere. It’s not unreasonable that if it turns out to be only 2-4x deadlier that many would consider it not much worse than a bad flu season. Especially if you give them absolute numbers for scale, including total deaths in their country every year.
• toip34 6y ago
  The US has the 10th worst mortality per capita in the world (excluding microstates), so they're doing better than that at least.
  • 0xEFF 6y ago
    s/better/worse/ Edit: No, better is correct, missed the switch from 11th in europe to the 10th in the world.
    • toip34 6y ago
      No, better: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  • triceratops 6y ago
    "Better than the worst" is not really a "vindication" though, is it?
• rossdavidh 6y ago
  Well, they are better off so far than France, Italy, the U.K., Spain, and Belgium, which is most of western Europe. So in other words, as good or better than most of western Europe. Now, why western Europe, as a whole, has the worst mortality rates in the world, is a valid question, but it has nothing specifically to do with Sweden.
  • paulryanrogers 6y ago
    By what measure are they better off?
  • cma 6y ago
    France has 5X the population density of Sweden though, so maybe France did much better considering that. Sweden has lots of barren arctic area though so it may not be a fair measure. You'd want to know how many people the average person interacts with pre COVID or something.
    • dariusj18 6y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-population-density?year=latest&time=2020-09-09 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...
    • SahAssar 6y ago
      One of the most populated reigons of sweden (skåne) has one of the lowest per capita infection rate. Globally (on a country level) there does not seem to be a strong correlation between density and infection. I think it will take years to get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't and why.
      • cma 6y ago
        I'm not sure what explains Skane being so low, but the highest per capita case county was also the county with the first case. So random seed case event timings seem to have been more important there: "On 31 January, the first Swedish case was confirmed in a woman in Jönköping who had travelled to Sweden from Wuhan, China, on 24 January directly from Wuhan. "
• odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
  They had 5838 COVID deaths, and around 5900 excess deaths. Portugal has 1800ish COVID deaths, 5800 excess deaths. Yes, Sweden fucked up and Portugal is amazing! OR maybe, just maybe, either COVID deaths are counted differently OR the lockdowns caused people that wouldn't have died of COVID to die for other causes due to lack of treatment and support. [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    Do you happen to know how they got that data out of euromomo? https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ hides per-country absolute value of excess death, giving only z-score by country or the value for all of Europe.
    • odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
      No clue, but Portugal has almost real time reporting of deaths here: https://evm.min-saude.pt https://evm.min-saude.pt They mentioned euromomo but also have countries not in it, so I assume they use various sources?
      • jeffbee 6y ago
        I feel for the poor intern who has to visit a different site for every country (and every American state, probably) daily to compile this information.
        • brnt 6y ago
          European statistics bureaus have mandates to share and normalize such data. Eurostat aggregates such data.
  • pedrocr 6y ago
    You're cherry picking Portugal's screwup in general healthcare response when there are much better comparisons. The excess death rates in Sweden are much higher than all its neighbors which are much more comparable. At the peak z-scores of almost 15 in Sweden compared to less than 5 for Denmark, Finland and Norway. Right now Sweden is still of the 4 the one with more excess mortality. https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ And yet we keep hearing the same argument. You just wait and enough people will die in all those places to make up the difference.
• listenallyall 6y ago
  You're being obtuse. If, in fact, they have reached herd immunity (and obviously that's a big if) and future case counts are near zero, while other countries continue to record thousands of cases, they will rapidly move down the mortality list. I'd much rather be living in a country that's essentially done with the virus -- or at least isn't under perma-panic -- rather than one whose "experts" warn that kids won't be able to safely return to normal school for "years." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/coronavirus-scientists-warn-it-may-take-years-before-students-return-to-normal-schooling.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/08/19/cor...
  • okamiueru 6y ago
    How is he being obtuse? Are you not giving an example to the same hypothetical he presented?
    • listenallyall 6y ago
      He's stating they are 11th in mortality without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths. It's like calling a horse-race at the quarter-pole (except this is a race you'd prefer to finish last).
      • okamiueru 6y ago
        I think my reading comprehension is good enough to say that you are wrong. In fact, it is more the opposite of how you interpreted what he said. So, let's break it down. He said "...unless you imagine scenarios where the rest of the countries have huge moralities due to second wave". And you're reading it as "without acknowledging that they will soon be passed by many countries who continue to have lots of new cases and deaths". So, let's compare them. He presented it as a hypothetical about the future, and you presented it as fact about the future. So, the same sentiment, except you don't have the grounds for it. On top of that, you read it, and claimed he said the the opposite of what he did. I'm left wondering if you didn't understand what he said, or perhaps have a different idea of what "obtuse" means. I'm not sure. In any case, I don't really need an answer, as I'm sure we are done here.
• simonsarris 6y ago
  If the point of their herd strategy involves front-loading deaths then the higher relative death count at this point is a necessary baked-in expectation, not a failure.
  • pedrocr 6y ago
    If you have to argue your stats are bad because you've "front-loaded deaths" maybe don't go around saying you are vindicated just yet?
    • pmarreck 6y ago
      Ripping the band-aid off certainly hurts less overall than the slow peel, no? :)
    • just-juan-post 6y ago
      On the other side of the coin perhaps we shouldn't restrict our fellow humans lives "because we just don't know what the long term effects are!!"
  • cygx 6y ago
    But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky.
    • ardy42 6y ago
      > But one would also expect death rates to be higher initially due to our ignorance of the disease, so front-loading could be risky. Yeah, the front loading strategy pretty much presumes that there will be no effective treatment or it will come too late to do any good. That may or may not be true. If an effective vaccine is developed, then Sweden's strategy will be the opposite of vindicated.
      • thu2111 6y ago
        No, it won't. Vaccines are irrelevant, they are far too slow to develop given the timelines of a virus. The virus has come and gone in most of the world and vaccines are still at the stage of being paused because of serious reactions.
• goalieca 6y ago
  A very shallow analysis only compares reported deaths on the scoreboard. We need to looks into the deaths and find out how many were actually preventable and where they all occurred. In Sweden, the care homes were particularly hard hit. There’s also more to life than merely covid and must consider those factors in the whole cost/benefit exercise. I’m not saying Sweden is better or worse, but an in depth analysis won’t be available for a while and especially while everything is still in chaos including our health care system which we were trying to save on the first place.
• username90 6y ago
  > Yes they have the fift worst mortality per capita in Europe excluding microstates (Andorra, San Marino). If you count excess mortality instead of registered deaths then Neatherlands is also worse than Sweden. And if you also consider that the countries that are above Sweden are on average larger than the countries below then there are about as many who lives in countries with worse results than Sweden as there are people living in countries with better results. So it is fair to say that they have pretty average resullts for Europe. If you also add USA and Canada and talk about the west then there is no contest since you add 340 million people living in a country with worse results.
• rasz 6y ago
  Zapp Brannigan got a medal using same strategy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EF3g4Ua5e7k