> the rest of Western Europe has much higher rates of death than the US

Or not, depending on country.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-daily-covid-deaths-...

Norway and Sweden are in other measures very similar countries. We lie right next to each other, we have quite similar political environment etc. Our societies are in general quite similar. We had a very different response to the corona virus though.

I agree Norway has been a bright spot. If Norway was a US state, it would be ranked 14th in deaths per capita. So better than average. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covi...

I'm completely aware that there are different countries in Europe that have different strategies for containing this thing. But so do the states in the US.

But New York has over 1400 COVID deaths per million [1]. New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachussets are all more than double of Sweden's deaths per million, and still climbing steadily. The US only looks good next to Sweden because there are big areas of the country that are way more spread out.

[1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=states...

fair point, but doesn't this imply that the spread out areas don't need such severe lockdowns?

I think each area can and should take the local situation into account. My understanding (as an American living in the UK) was that they are doing so, to a large extent. From what I can tell from friends and relatives on FB, restrictions in Michigan came on hard and strong after being probably one of the worst hit early on; restrictions in Ohio started earlier and never got as tough. The anti-lockdown side of my FB feed seems to think that South Dakota never had much of a lockdown to speak of at all.

I don't claim to know better than local governments what the best decision is -- we're all just making this up as we go along, and I'm glad I don't personally have to make the decision between massive death or economic damage for millions of people.

As I keep saying, comparing to "Europe" is almost meaningless because of the diversity of governments and cultures. It may also be unreasonable to talk of the US as a whole in this case.

Infections are inherently locally clustered. There seem to be all sorts of factors affecting spread, and there's no clear picture of what they are. Eastern Europe isn't very heavily affected and nobody seems to know why. Belgium is a disaster; why?

The UK made a number of big mistakes; the first cases were appearing at the end of February, but the Cheltenham Festival still went ahead in mid-March putting 250,000 people close to each other. We're now relaxing the lockdown and putting people back on packed public transport despite still having thousands of new cases per day.

In a month's time, the best handling countries will be almost entirely out of lockdown with weekly COVID deaths below 10. The worst handling countries will still have lockdown and weekly deaths in the hundreds. It looks like that will include the UK and New York state.

Genuine question: how will these countries keep deaths below 10 a week while being completely out of lockdown? Doesn't that rely on a treatment or vaccine?

New Zealand is at 21 total. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/new-zealand-coronavirus-elim...

1) Stop infected people from entering the country. If you have enough testing capacity, you can allow in those who are clear. Otherwise they have to be quarantined.

2) Track every infection within the country.

3) Test all their contacts.

Of course, those are very hard to do in an airtight fashion. But the smaller the absolute numbers the easier they are to do. Countries not working towards building this capability are just going to keep struggling.

Even NZ has not fully lifted the restrictions yet. They've not even sent kids back to school. https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-new-zealand-eases-loc...

Why do you compare almost an entire continent to one country ? why not compare Sweden to NYC ?

Sweden is handling it, not great but not terrible and so is the US and many other countries.

On top of that there is a lot that we don't understand, for example why do many Mediterranean countries has low death rate even though the sick count is not low ?

How about we compare Wisconsin to Sweden? The article is about Wisconsin.

Wisconsin (pop 5.8 mil, 10.6k cases, 418 deaths). Sweden (pop 10.2 mil, 27.9k cases, 3460 deaths).

How about Oman ? pop 4.829 million, 4,019 cases with only 17 deaths. Or Belgium that does have quarantine rules but still have more cases of deaths.

It's not a game, and we don't fully understand how this works so maybe we should stop comparing.

Wisconsin has a large Swedish immigrant population (immigrants 5 generations ago, not first generation), so that rules out genetic factors to a small extent.

Yeah that was my first thought too -- lots of Scandinavians in the Wisconsin-Minnesota area, lots of snow, etc.

If we're talking about efficacy of government lockdown policies, universal healthcare, etc., then we absolutely should compare. And a cursory glance at the data suggests that government lockdown policies have minimal effect on the spread of the virus, there seems to be little to no correlation between severity of lockdown and cases/deaths

That’s a really weird conclusion to draw looking at what’s happened globally and in local pockets. Look at Singapore and South Korea — full lockdown and great control, and then outbreaks in places where the lockdown put people in close quarters (immigrant labor in Singapore) orwhen restrictions were lifted (bars in South Korea). Look at Wuhan itself, where it took time to establish a lockdown and contact tracing, then they got control of the situation and had better outcomes, then a secondary wave once they lifted restrictions. Look at Italy, where the lockdown means Northern Italy has had a very different experience from the rest of the country. Sweden has had a mostly voluntary lockdown and high death rates compared to the rest of Europe and other very similar countries (Norway, Denmark, Finland) have had stricter lockdowns and better numbers.

Also let’s look at the fundamentals. This virus is spread through contact with viral laden particles, either in an aerosol or on a surface. It is obvious that to get the disease you need to come into contact with the virus. Limit contacts and you limit exposure, this is so basic I hesitate to call it science.

You have a tough row to hoe if you’re going to try and prove no correlation between lockdowns and cases.

The data is here [1], that's [2] Europe's correlation between death rate and restriction and that's [3] worldwide (I didn't collect the data nor did the analysis)

[1] https://github.com/ronigold/Covid19-Analysis [2] https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd03177682d9061.jpg [3] https://rotter.net/User_files/forum/5ebd019c5e89dca42.jpg

Sorry, but there is so much confounding an analysis of this sort that I can take a 30s look at it and blow holes a mile wide through it. For instance, there is no correction in there for density. There is also the fundamental problem of attributing cause and effect -- if the lockdowns reduce transmission, then no correlation in the outcomes could be exactly your goal. Put another way, I'd like NYC to have the same case load per capita as rural Utah. If lockdowns achieve that, you would evidentially tell me that rural Utah, with no lockdown, is the same as NYC and therefore the lockdown was useless. That is not a sound analysis.

The way to do an analysis of this sort is to find very tightly constrained natural experiments. Sweden and Norway (or Sweden and Finland) is an interesting example. Germany and Austria (picking them randomly, I don't know how well-coordinated their lockdown policies are). Or you can pick city twins, like NYC and Mexico City and compare the results each got from their approach.

IOW, in order to say something meaningful about effect of lockdowns, you have to go narrow, not broad.

I saw someone else saying that today, do you have a source for that ?

The cases/deaths per million stats by country (and by state in the US) are everywhere. The US is doing decent compared to most of Western Europe, especially Italy and Spain. Though Germany is doing far better than the US. Sweden isn't taking any significant measures to restrict their populace and while they're doing worse than their neighbors like Norway, they're still better than a lot of Europe.

> There seems to be a myth going around that Europe is handling this better than the US and the statistics don't really support that claim.

Do you mind showing your work? What do the statistics say about Europe vs. US? I see you mentioned Sweden and Germany but Europe has many more countries than those two.

If you add together UK, Spain, and Italy they have more deaths than the US as a whole.

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data

You just went and cherry-picked 3 of the most impacted countries in Europe, not very convincing.

I can just as easily pick 3 of the least and tell you a completely different story.

I am simply stating there are more deaths in Europe than in the US. I can prove that with only 3 countries. Please don't interpret my statement as a comment on each individual country. There seems to be miscommunication here.

Europe also has double the population of the US.

And even you ajust for population you then should also take into account how densely populated, etc. It's hard to make fair comparisons.

[Removed due to lack of civility]

The lack of civility is pretty disappointing. I linked a bunch of data for you, ignore it if you wish.

You picked a handful of countries that fit your argument and called them Europe. Italy, Spain and UK aren't "Europe" just like California, NY and Florida aren't "The United States of America".

> https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Sort by deaths/1M. You’ll see the US doing better than UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, etc.

And in absolute terms, there’s still more cases and deaths in Europe as a whole (I find it funny that when it comes to GDP, we like to think of Europe as “United States of Europe”, but when talking about corona deaths, not so much).

You have to take into account that Europe is much more densely and uniformly populated than the United States, and had outbreaks start earlier than the US.

WRT. "United States of Europe", thanks to the EU, you can often consider the Union as a unit in terms of trade; Europe is also more homogenous culturarly than the states. However, when talking about COVID-19, EU has almost zero influence on how the pandemic is handled (somewhat by design, definitely by vote); it's only meaningful to talk about individual nations, with their own healthcare systems, their own emergency policies, and their own sovereign, locked down borders.

> You have to take into account that Europe is much more densely and uniformly populated than the United States, and had outbreaks start earlier than the US.

Now take into account that these countries have supposedly superior healthcare systems, a healthier population, and leaders not named Trump. I’d say that negates those factors.

Sure, if you cherry-pick a few countries (your list is basically the most impacted countries in Europe).

If you include all European countries you get a different story.

And Europe has roughly double the population of the US, it's not surprising that it has more cases in absolute numbers.

> Sure, if you cherry-pick a few countries (your list is basically the most impacted countries in Europe).

And yet we’re constantly compared against these countries and told they’re doing things “right” and the US is a disaster.

> If you include all European countries you get a different story.

You mean a bunch of Eastern European countries that basically aren’t doing any testing?

> And Europe has roughly double the population of the US, it's not surprising that it has more cases in absolute numbers.

EU 446M versus US 330M...

EU is not Europe.

Why is it so difficult to stick with the same terms and definitions? Just in this thread Europe has been defined in like five different ways, all of which are various subsets, presumably picked to suit each argument as needed.

Those numbers shouldn't be taken at face value and should certainly not be compared. For example, here in Belgium every death at a nursing home is counted as a Corona casualty. Which increases the death by Corona massively in comparison with a country not doing that.

An article that really shows that difference is: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lbsbusinessstrategyreview/2020/...

> For example, here in Belgium every death at a nursing home is counted as a Corona casualty. Which increases the death by Corona massively in comparison with a country not doing that.

New York City recently reclassified 3K+ deaths as “likely” due to Covid, despite none of those people having been tested. And our CDC’s guidelines state that anyone who died WITH Covid is assumed to have died FROM Covid. I would say we’re definitely not being conservative with the reporting here...

I'm not sure who the 'we' is in this context, so I can't address that point.

But my point was that picking a handful of countries and calling them Europe isn't very accurate at all.

I mean, put ALL European countries together and there’s way more deaths in total than the US, and I suspect the deaths/1M figure is very similar if not slightly higher than the US. Slice it however you want, the US is not doing that poorly relative to its peers in Europe.

Yep. But Sweden is run by an ultra leftist government, so if course it is not criticised.

But the same lies about "the US is doing worse" are told here in Europe as well. Just need to look to the stats, do the sum, and suddenly the US and EU are about the same.

Oh well, modern journalism is about clicks, not facts, unfortunately.

How is Sweden ultra leftist? The ruling party are Social Democrats.

Have a look at their program.

Care to be any more specific? Last I checked Sweden has been ruled by the the Social Democrats for most of the 20th century, yet Sweden still has a working capitalist economy and more billionaires per capita than the United States.

Just like here in Germany, it is the ideology of the party that changed (a lot).

I've been a Social Democrat for over 30 years, that's why I left the social democratic party here.

But if anything the problem with German Social Democrats (and European left-wing parties in general) is that they've moved too far away from left-wing politics and more towards a neo-liberal financial policy.

I don't see how you can call that ultra leftist. For me that would be introducing a planned economy.

That was 20 years ago. They are at a completely different place nowadays.

I have absolutely read articles, in the NY Times, comparing Sweden’s approach to other countries. Initially they were positive and then they turned negative when the death rates started climbing.