Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus strategy’

Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by notacoward on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @06:58PM (#24426897)

> sort the countries and take the ones that are worse

Ranking items and then choosing the most favorable is exactly where the phrase came from. "Clear and consistent" is not sufficient. Any lie can be clear and consistent. There also has to be a reason beyond self-interest for limiting the sample to a particular subset.

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Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by irq11 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @07:15PM (#24427060)

The term literally came from picking cherries.

Observing where an item lies in a ranked list is no more or less biased than picking a median.

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Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by cygx on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @07:51PM (#24427355)

For reference, here's the list of major western European countries (population > 1M) ranked by deaths per capita attributed to COVID-19:

    Belgium
    Spain
    United Kingdom
    Italy
    Sweden
    France
    Netherlands
    Ireland
    Switzerland
    Portugal
    Germany
    Denmark
    Austria
    Finland
    Norway
    Greece

"As good or better than most of western Europe" does not look like an accurate characterization of Sweden's position to me...

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Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by irq11 on Wednesday September 09, 2020 @08:34PM (#24427650)

I didn’t say that, so I’m not sure why you’re making the argument to me.

Belgium, Spain, the UK and Italy are indeed worse off than Sweden, and it isn’t selective to point it out. That’s all I’m saying here.

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Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by username90 on Thursday September 10, 2020 @01:45AM (#24429251)

Same list but with population >10M.

    Belgium
    Spain
    United Kingdom
    Italy
    Sweden
    France
    Netherlands
    Portugal
    Germany
    Greece

So 4 countries worse and 5 better. If you count excess deaths then Netherlands is also worse than Sweden so 5 worse and 4 better.

Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.

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Re:Sweden’s low positive test rate ‘vindicates coronavirus s... by cygx on Thursday September 10, 2020 @03:38AM (#24429864)

Anyway the point is that counting UK, Spain and Italy with the same weight as countries one tenth of their size doesn't make much sense.

If you want to go that way, it's better to look at integrated metrics instead of discarding data points (I only did so because I was lazy and didn't want to look up the data for all the countries with less than a city's woth of inhabitants).

So let's do that:

Sweden's death rate per 1k population is 0.58, whereas the average rate (averaged over population) for western Europe[1] is 0.42. Sweden just isn't doing as good or better than most of western Europe.

For reference, spread among countries is 0.025 (Monaco) to 1.24 (San Marino) with a median of 0.20 for the full list, and 0.028 (Greece) to 0.86 (Belgium) with a median of 0.30 for my restricted one. The median of your list is 0.52.

[1] Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

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