> This argument does not make sense.

The OP compares Sweden to its closest neighbours

> +87% of the Swedish population live in urban area

As do +83% +85% and +88% of the three closest neighbours OP compared Sweden.

In what way does that comparison not make sense?

“but a country with very low population density”

Wrong!

1. Not the main thrust of OPs point.

2. Sweden's population density is 200th on this list of 250 countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

25 people per square kilometer is a low population density. Look at how they define urban area.

That's not an accurate figure for the density where a typical Swede lives. Most of the population lives in the southern part of the country, a quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area as well.

It's like using Canadian population density with the whole country when almost the entire population lives within a hundred miles of the US border.

> quarter of the population lives in the Stockholm metro area

You've never been to Stockholm metro area. It's very sparsely populated compared to many big metro areas.

Stockholm is a small city (800k people or so) surrounded by villages (another 1.5 million people) spread over 6,519.3 km2. Density is 360/km2

And that's the biggest city in the country.

In comparison, Paris (as we were talking about France): 13 mln people over 18,940.7 km2 with a density of 690/km2. That's for metro area. Urban area alone is 10 mln people with density of 21,000/km2

I was in Stockholm last week. My point is that 25/km^2 is an absurd figure to use because northern Sweden has more reindeer than people.

But when you look at the average distance between two random people who live in the same town/city it would probably indicate that lack of contact doesn’t explain any success they’ve had with their numbers

Elsewhere people have already pointed this out: Swedes also have smaller families and a large proportion of people living alone, which (positively) contributed to numbers more than population density.

Which is why Tegnell had the gall to blame immigrants for the spread of Covid-19. Immigrants live in more densely populated areas.

And all this still doesn't explane a significantly larger mortality rate than immediate neighbors that have similar populations.

Determinants of pandemic performance has proven to be very multi-factorial, but from day one, urban density has not that been significant a factor, especially in richer countries. The initial wave just looked urban because the virus reached each _country_ via internationally-connected urban centers.

Given that pandemic spread has almost entirely played out indoor, a much more likely risk factor is multi-member (and especially multi-generational) households. As mentioned in the article, Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia have a small household size and especially high proportion of single-person households.

While I don't doubt you have Swedish family, I would like to see your data for the French economy being "killed". Certainly the economy contracted somewhat, but they seem to be doing just fine now.

France has increased its public debt enormously (100% to 120% of its GDP). Maintaining the economy had a cost which may have serious consequences.

Isn’t the interest rate close to 0%? If, like in 1918, they come back stronger than places which had more disruption due to deaths and prolonged closures that’s not anywhere near a crushing level of debt for a rich nation-state with a diverse economy.

At the cost of an enormous additional debt.

Also "just fine" is still not pre-pandemic levels so we'll have to see in a year or two.

this comment shows how half of the West's population has entered a foreign dimension.

Do you really think the economy only "contracted somewhat"?

Can we trust any statistics from people that depend on them to be good?

We absolutely cannot trust anything claimed by the crooks in power.

If we look at the data Sweden is still one of the top countries in the world regarding health care.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/healthcare-access-and-qua...

https://www.ghsindex.org/

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/countries/country-details/...

The above was a direct reply to:

> In the 70s and 80s, the Swedish medical infrastructure was one of the top. They still live on that legend. Please talk to Swedish friends around you and ask them how it is now (Part of my family is Swedish).

I’ve seen accusations in the US that people were being counted as Covid deaths that died “woth” Covid, and would have even without it - I have no idea if these accusations are true, just that probably-nonsense leads me to the question:

Isn’t it tough to compared countries with how strictly or loosely they count a “Covid death”?

Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).

By that comparison Sweden has done very badly compared to its peers. See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

As this very article says:

However, Dr Bhatt, the University of Copenhagen professor, is keen to point out that for all of its successes, Sweden saw more Covid fatalities than its Nordic neighbours who took a more interventionist approach.

The death rate was between three and four times that of Denmark, and nearly 10 times those of Finland and Norway - suggesting Swedes died that didn’t need to.

> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).

The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.

Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway:

> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper.

It may be that Sweden had more older people than Norway at the beginning of the pandemic, i.e. a more vulnerable population. Also they admitted to doing a poor job early on in nursing homes.

I think you are simplifying this too much, insisting that it is valid to come to a conclusion on lockdowns based on a comparison of Sweden to two nearby countries. That doesn't exactly explain why a bunch of countries like the U.K., France, Spain, and Portugal that did lockdown had more per-capita deaths than Sweden. It ends up looking like you cherry picked your data, ignoring contradictory data, and not really explaining anything.

About Dr. Bhatt, from the same article you quoted:

> Samir Bhatt, professor of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy.

It's too bad nobody asked him why the the U.K. with lockdowns had more deaths that Sweden without lockdowns.

[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...

> The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.

The excess mortality graph only goes back 19 months, because that's when COVID start. It uses excess mortality, so those numbers are based on numbers in the previous years.

It's like looking at a chart showing inflation over the past year and saying "this says nothing about the prices two years ago!" They're used to compute the numbers on the chart, not be shown on the chart.

I mentioned this because the comment I was responding to was factually incorrect when they states that Sweden mortality rate was worse than Norway over the past few years. It was not.

The article I linked to explains the significance, which I tried to sum up in my comment:

> In other words, excess mortality from COVID-19 may be less conspicuous than previously perceived in Sweden, while mortality displacement may be used to explain at least part of the observed findings.

> More specifically, mortality displacement implies temporarily increased mortality (i.e., excess mortality) in a certain population as a result of external events, which likely arises because individuals in vulnerable groups die weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise – primarily due to the timing or severity of the unusual external event. The excess mortality is, thus, predated or followed by time periods of lower than expected mortality.

In other words, Sweden was better than Norway at keeping older people alive before the pandemic. Therefore during the pandemic there were more older people in Sweden. Older people are notably more vulnerable. This may be the explanation why more people died of covid in Sweden. It alludes to there being more factors involved than just the nearness of two countries and lockdown protocols.

Another way of saying this, exaggerated for clarity: More people will die of covid in a country of 80 year olds than in a country of 20 year olds.

Remember that only 1 out of 695 people have dies from covid in Sweden since the start of the pandemic [0], two thirds of them over 80 years old [1]. This is consistent with the above information.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...

Exactly. I don't really understand what they are thinking there.