Another country with equivalent sun exposure to Italy is Greece, again orders of magnitude less deaths (like Germany). They also had strong lockdowns and early enough.
It's the measures. Analyzing what happened in Europe (and still happens) can't be explained with anything else.
Compare it with fires. Small fires are easy to extinguish. Pretending "it will go away" will simply result in a big fires. Eventually there won't be anything to burn. With people, eventually everybody who can and "feels the heat" will try to protect themselves.
A lot of older people in Sweden stay in their homes and take care not to be infected. Masks are common in the supermarkets, etc.
Not sure where you got this information - masks are not commonly worn at all in Sweden. I see perhaps 1 mask per week, unless I go into the city center, then I might see 10 in a day.
The Swedish public health authorities are not currently recommending general usage of face masks, citing mainly the lack of evidence of the effectiveness of general mask usage (wearing a mask can cause you to get lulled into a false sense of security, for example).
See https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/utb...
(in Swedish, unfortunately)
Sweden adds vitamin D to food items so I wouldn't be surprised if Sweden has less vitamin D deficiency than many southern countries.
https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2015/05/28/Sweden-t...
This is outright false. I've been to a big supermarket twice this week and didn't see a single mask as far as I can recall.
i get super frustrated with the random corona rules at supermarkets in the US (like one-way only aisles, exit only doors), especially trader joe's, which is as draconian as it is arbitrary. for a while they weren't allowing you to take in your reusable grocery bags. later they relented and switched to just bagging your own groceries outdoors, leading to an awkward triple handling of your purchased items for what amounts to nothing other than safety theater.
for 6 months i've worn the same useless surgical mask to play my part in that misguided spectacle, when required. folks are slowly starting to realize their lack of utility, but have nothing else to latch onto because the obvious solution of modest distancing seems so mundanely unbelievable (and lacking obvious and spectacular conformance).
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
Vitamin D doesn't explain anything related to Covid-19 deaths in Europe, whereas the existence or lack of measures do, almost perfectly. Whoever can look at the curves of number of deaths since the begin of the epidemics, check the times of partial lockdowns or the introduction of some measures, can see that exactly around three weeks after these the curves stop going up and begin going down.
Italy as the first country seriously hit in Europe had the curve raising exponentially up until the measures started to work (there's a delay -- for people to stop dying the spread of infection has to turn first etc). Sweden also had the curve raising comparably to Italy, even if they had a negative example from Italy -- because there was a decision of targeting the "herd immunity". Germany's curve remained very low, as they had low prevalence at the time their measures started to be applied.
It's all about the measures and the adherence of the people to them.
In Italy, it gets worse the older the population gets.
It is also an issue in Germany: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4499202/
I make no claims other than: 1) there is a very strong correlation between vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency and poor outcomes for COVID-19, and 2) many populations, including those in sunny countries, suffer from widespread vitamin D insufficiency.
I for one have been taking 1,000 IUs of vitamin D every day since March, and trying to get sun exposure mid-day whenever I can.
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
The comparison is possible because it’s per million. See Italy and Spain hit before they were aware what is going on., then introducing lockdowns.
See Sweden’s and the US denial, then limiting the initial outbreaks but continuing just not doing enough.
See Greece and Germany doing early enough good enough measures, and still doing it.
It’s that simple. The US not being aware how wrong they are doing is a crime to their own people. It’s historical failure.
You claim: “there is a very strong correlation between vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency and poor outcomes for COVID-19“ — show me that on the graph above. It’s obviously a red herring talking about Vitamin D once one sees it.
No. USA: 608 per million. Sweden: 580. [1]
But the current trajectory is also important. In Sweden, the last day with more than 0.6 deaths/million was July 21 (according to actual date of death, not the date when death was reported), while the US currently is about 2-3 deaths/million/day.
Here in Sweden the right-wing folks want to lock everything down and the left-wing want to keep deferring it to the experts. In the rest of the world it seems to be the other way around.
https://www.thelocal.se/20200530/swedish-opposition-demands-...
While the official stance for all parties is that they support the strategy (the most right-wing party being the exception who is heavily criticizing it), it's more telling in social media.
Hanif Bali, one of the most prominent right-wing figures in social media, has really been pushing for lockdowns/masks and is cheered on by his tail of alt-right followers. Meanwhile the left is mocking him, lockdowns and masks in general.
The leader of the Swedish Democrats, the most right-wing in the Swedish parliament, called for the state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnells, to take responsibility and resign immediately: https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/jimmie-akesson-tegnell-mast...
Interesting enough it's also the same kind of fringe-right that are protesting in against restrictions in Germany that is calling our approach genocidal here:
"Tegnell is a danger to society" https://projektsanning.com/2020/03/12/coronaviruset-statsepi...
"Tegnell reported to the Police due to the mass death among elderly" https://www.friatider.se/tegnell-polisanmald-massdoden-bland...
Generally, the order of magnitude of a number is the smallest power of 10 used to represent that number.[2] To work out the order of magnitude of a number N, the number is first expressed in the following form:
N = a × 10^b
Nothing to be proud about for either of them. Anyway, until e.g. month ago Sweden had the lead.
Anyways, I don't think comparing the US to most countries in Europe really makes sense, considering the size and population differences.
According to ourworldindata, in reported Covid-19 deaths per million, on Sept 12:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
> I don't think comparing the US to most countries in Europe really makes sense
You are missing "per million" which is what I used. Comparing absolute numbers has of course no sense. When comparing relative numbers ("per million"), the big country spread across big area, like U.S. is, would be expected have huge advantages compared to any country in Europe (due to slower spread over the distances, much less dependency on public transportation). Moreover, the countries worst hit in Europe were only those where the spread happened first -- others took note and introduced measures early enough. Not the U.S. which totally botched its response even ignoring the initial hit in NY. Compare the slopes of all other European countries for months, v.s. what's going on in the U.S. The response in the U.S. is criminally bad, and continues to be so -- and not looking at the "cases" but simply and tragically, deaths. Those that are reported.
I admit that comparing some other estimates of "excess deaths" could give some other numbers, but I don't see any way in which U.S. can look good, especially as it was Italy being hit the first and everybody else having the time to react somehow.
Also see daily average of deaths per million, to get the idea how bad it is still:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-covid-deaths-per-mi...
What we see is that countries that were lucky enough to do strong enough prevention actions early enough had order of magnitude less deaths than those who didn't do them (and Sweden is in the latter camp, even if they did have more response than most admit -- they did close all universities, for example). The scale of deaths seen in New York would have never happened, had the use of masks been common early enough.
Eidt: Regarding "vulnerable populations" Italy and Germany have similar number of "vulnerable" and it seems Sweden would be better than Germany then:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_pyramid_o...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_pyramid_o...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sweden_population_py...