https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...
Note that countries have different ways of counting.
Here are the excess mortality statistics for some countries. This statistic takes a while to gather, so it lags 1-2 months, depending.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...
Sweden reached no excess mortality sometime in June, and is doing quite well.
Really? I can think of a narrative here about the virus being not as serious as people thought.
I can't relate to your complain at all. We want more straight fact not "helpful" opinions. If someone can't form an opinion on their own it's fine, just dont participate in the discussion. The last thing we want is some people joining some discussion just to magnify other people's thoughts.
Edit: I (heavily) edited the comment, there was way more snark initially than I should have posted. My apologies.
Staff went to work without PPE, and some were ordered to go to work despite showing symptoms.
The effects of COVID19 are not tied solely to the immediate actions in March and April but are affected by systemic issues too.
[0] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/covid-19/situation-updates/wee...
[1] saved image in case it changes https://imgur.com/a/bVtvv92
the population density, demographics, intergenerational living, and healthcare are vastly different between Scandinavia and the rest of Europe.
For example, Sweden has a density of 25/km2, while Belgium has 383/km2. The Stockholm county, the worst hit, has less population density than Lombardy (360/km2 vs 420/km2), while Lombardy has more inhabitants than the whole of Sweden. You can easily see how population density relates closely with the intensity of the epidemic[0]. See also household size[1]
The one _really_ doing well is Germany.
But as I said: Sweden's choice may have been perfectly good for Sweden! It just doesn't translate as-is to all countries, because each country is different.
Anyway, the problem was never the survival rate, but the overloading of ICU, if that is less likely to happen you'd do very well to not have a lockdown, but this was not and is not the case everywhere.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
_PITEU17.png){kind=link}
In general, scandanivian countries should be much better protected against the virus, all other things being equal. Scandinavian countries tend to have much lower population density, they culturally require more personal space, they have much lower average dwelling occupancy, in fact they have a lot of people living alone in their apartments etc.
If you compare Sweden with their Scandinavian neighbors you can see how their coronavirus policies failed. If you compare England with their European neighbors and peers (e.g., France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium), you can see how their policies failed.
Comparing Sweden and England is not as instructive. These are two countries that both had failing policies but Sweden did much better because it was better demographically and culturally set up for a pandemic.
One thing I’ve personally found interesting in the US is that nobody talks about the general poor health of a plurality of Americans. We lead the way in obesity and related diseases. Surely that is a factor in covid deaths but I haven’t seen anyone say it aloud.
My opinion is that, along with population density, is the only significant factor.
The reason it's not discussed much is that society as a whole is still under the pharma paradigm, where individual agency on health is all but negated, and "health", is mostly dispensed by a doctor prescribing medicine. Hence the focus on things like masks and expensive drugs like Remdesivir (which is useless) VS getting proper vitamin D status, for example (which is crucial for immune system function and has been shown to be a major factor in COVID).
The each step in the shift from subsistence agriculture => industrial labor => sedentary lifestyles are characterized by their own maladies. It starts with chronic malnutrition, then moves to chronic diseases cause by pollution, then to chronic obesity and heart disease and is compounded by climate. Each country has its own unique mix of the four but the overall rates don't change much.
I don't agree that America doesn't have the highest rate of lifestyle-induced disease, of that's what you were implying.
It's not even particularly right anyway. Most of the western world is a few years or a few decades behind the United States in obesity rates and not far behind at all on heart disease.
I suppose it's not strictly "useless" as it apparently can reduce time spent in ICU in patients who would get better anyway, but in my view to call it useful it should affect outcomes.
I'm also betraying my frustration with pharma's hold on the medical system and minds, where common sense interventions like correcting deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc etc. are seemingly ignored. Even the media is in on it. It's really an awful situation.
it's the same as with the performative aspects of masks: worn in public to feel affirmed for positive action but having no meaningful impact, while doing nothing in private (due to psychosocial awkwardness and its negativity), where some distance can meaninfully reduce transmission rates but provides no positivity (esteem).
In that context Sweden’s strategy is actually reasonable for such a low population country to attempt.
A more general measure is urbanization, and by that measure Sweden is more urbanized at 88% than both Germany at 77.5% and United Kingdom at 84%.
As such nationwide population density isn’t that important, but local population density can be a very useful metric. Norway has 5,432,580 people and Óslo Norway is by far the the most populous city has 952,000 people or 17.5% of the population in the urban area at 8,500/square mile.
London has 8,961,989 people out of 63,182,000 (14.2%) in the Uk at 14,670/sq mile. And Birmingham at 1,141,816 people at 11,040/sq mi and you see the UK might have similar rates of urbanization, but it’s significantly more densely packed.
As to Stockholm Sweden, again the largest city out of 10,367,232 people in Sweden 1,605,030 million (15.5%), are living at 11,000/sq mi.
Of course this is still just an approximation. 1,000 people in a single apartment building sharing elevators adds a risk of transmission those same people living in duplex housing doesn’t.
That doesn’t really tell you much about the short term efficacy of lockdowns, as they were enacted in response to an alarming rise in deaths.
Germany has an extensive contact tracing scheme in place that allowed us to find and quarantine as many contacts of infected people as possible. This limited spread and is why we fared better than others so far. The relatively low numbers gave a false sense of security unfortunately which lead to increasingly risky behaviour of people. Currently, we are seeing a rise in case numbers, albeit not as bad as in neighbouring countries which easily report multiple times the number of cases per 100000 inhabitants and week. Local health authorities are slowly reaching their limits with contact tracing at the moment, this is why measures similar to lockdowns are used locally to get them back under control. The Bundeswehr, that is the german military, also trained a few thousand soldiers to support local health authorities with their tracing work, so all is not lost yet. Turns out that having a large number of decently organized people that are easily deployed to where they are needed are a good thing, after all ;)
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Looking at the graph, the clear trend is death rate lowering year after year since the 60s. That would mean that each new year, statistically, there will be several months that happen to be the 'lowest' ever. I don't see how this data proves (or disproves) any coronavirus strategy.
My point was that one can't draw any CV conclusion from the Sweden death graph in the month of September 2020.
As to the strategy and effectiveness, that is subjective - they had a higher mortality rate than their Nordic neighbors but not a catastrophic level, I guess.
Yes, it has been a catestrophic fuck-up. As predicted.
1) From the comments of the blog post: "todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20."
So one theory is that people are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as surgery this year. I am sure that people are driving less, flying less, working less, and in general, doing less that can increase the risk of death.
2) There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I am always wary of some totally random fact. "Least deadliest September on record." There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.