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Especially considering the death toll from Corona is about 6k people so far (which is a lot for a small country). It is about the same as all deaths caused by

• thu2111 6y ago
  The correct response to that statistic is to wonder why COVID appears to have so neatly replaced deaths from other respiratory viruses, and to wonder - given the relatively vague symptoms - if there's some reclassification going on. The wrong response is to ignore the point of the Swedish numbers specifically, even though the conclusions are painful. A reasonable conclusion isn't "oh that's terrible they're lying with statistics" and then proposing a meaningless alternative (nobody cares if COVID shifts expected mortality around by a few months, they only care about deaths that were avoidable and wouldn't have happened anyway). The correct response is to remember that Sweden was supposed to be a bloodbath in which every single hospital would be overflowing onto the streets, in which people would be collapsing unable to breathe in their hundreds of thousands whilst the rest of the world looked on in pity, safely locked down at home. Clearly that didn't happen, which invalidates the claims of the 'experts' that said it would. When you read their papers the problems that led to these erroneous claims are very clear, but given the top rated comment on this thread it'll probably be a long time before the wider HN community is able to critically examine the deep structural flaws in the field of epidemiology. If ever.
  • ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    Can you elaborate on the clear problems you mentions? I agree that the statistics were too easily dismissed but I don't understand how to reconcile them with the rest of the world where it was/is a bloodbath with overflowing hospitals.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      The rest of the world was NOT a bloodbath with overflowing hospitals. Look at the UK. Excess death once of the worst in Europe but not actually bad at all, lower than 1999/2000 in fact. Hospitals were ghost towns during these periods, cleared out with operations cancelled and people told to avoid attending to make way for a wave of COVID patients that never came. Same story is repeated all over the world, hence viral videos of dancing medics on TikTok. The hospitals were quiet, there was no bloodbath. See past the groupthink and mass hysteria: the stats don't show anything except a normal year made worse by lockdowns.
      • jiofih 6y ago
        Oh man, you’ve been watching too much TV. Hospitals were not quiet.
        • thu2111 6y ago
          I don't watch any TV dude. The stats on admissions are public. There are also plenty of medical workers going public saying they feel guilty to be receiving public adulation at a time when they weren't even working because caseload dried up, which matches the stats.
  • panpanna 6y ago
    This is borderline conspiracy theorist. Even if your numbers were correct, you have to remember these are the numbers we have _despite_ drastic measures taken. And of course with the amount of hand washing and social distancing going on right now, I could see how it will have affected the "normal" flu deaths. Edit: let me just add an answer to this statement > Clearly that didn't happen, which invalidates the claims of the 'experts' that said it would It did happen in Italy, which forced Sweden to mobilize the whole country to avoid it. And they almost failed.
    • antpls 6y ago
      The whole point of analyzing Sweden is that they first enforced no drastic measure for covid19
    • thu2111 6y ago
      What? Sweden didn't mobilize the entire country, they did the exact opposite, which is what this whole discussion is about?! Are you thinking of somewhere else?
  • hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    > The correct response to that statistic is to wonder why COVID appears to have so neatly replaced deaths from other respiratory viruses, and to wonder - given the relatively vague symptoms - if there's some reclassification going on. Except it HASN'T, and nevertheless, if you wanted to make that argument, the graphs and data in OPs post do not support that argument. This is my entire point: if you want to make an argument about some feature of the Swedish data, that's fine. For example, the argument about "shifting deaths up" is also one you might be able to make with different data sets, but certainly not what was presented in this original article. Indeed, the data on the Financial Times website shows an excess of just under 6k deaths in Sweden that has not, as of yet, resulted in some lower number of deaths later in the year. Whether or not other countries overreacted is a fine thing to have a debate about, but that debate needs to be made around not just pulling bullshit numbers out of thin air.
    • thu2111 6y ago
      Sweden had an unusually low number of excess deaths between Jan 2019 and March 2020, much lower than its neighbours. That's very likely the reason it did "worse" than e.g. Denmark - simply because it did "better" the previous years. Words in quotes because it's unclear they're actually doing anything different and waves of elderly deaths due to respiratory viruses seem rather random. https://www.aier.org/article/swedens-dry-tinder-accounts-for-many-covid-19-deaths/ https://www.aier.org/article/swedens-dry-tinder-accounts-for...
  • jiofih 6y ago
    I have no idea how you could make that argument after looking at the stats posted. Guess you must live in USA fantasy-land?
• antpls 6y ago
  There are many discussions whether covid deaths are correctly identified, or if basically any respiratory related death get counted as "dead by covid19", in 2020.
  • morberg 6y ago
    I think it is pretty clear from this chart that Sweden has excess mortality and that they correctly account for COVID-19 deaths: https://morberg.github.io/covid-notebook/excess.html https://morberg.github.io/covid-notebook/excess.html