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Comparing death rates across countries is highly misguided because is depends directly on the testing strategy. The sickness is not different in Sweden than in Denmark and neither country's health care system is overburdened (even in Stockholm, worst hit region of Sweden) which would otherwise be a strong contributing factor to a higher death rate. So there is little reasons to believe that there should be a difference, let alone such a stark one.

>They have very many active cases and no recovered cases yet so this makes me think like all these people that have it right have just barely gotten it. So it is a little bit early to talk about how successful it is (otherwise it is time to talk about why is it taking so long to recover in Sweden if they have had it a long time)

I'm struggling to find a good source on this, ([1] is the best I could find, though it's in Swedish) but Sweden doesn't track recovered cases so that number is meaningless.

[1] https://www.mabra.com/halsa/friskforklarad-fran-coronavirus/

Ok, then less holy hell wtf. Although I think though most of the cases they have are still relatively recent because I could swear I remember Sweden having less numbers of people than Denmark with it about a month ago.

When I look at this chart of death rates they had 451 dead on April 2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105753/cumulative-coron...

which argues a much lower number of cases back then (haven't been able to find how many active cases they had then though, so I may be wrong)

I think this article is right on target

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/swedish-coronav...

on edit: added "then Denmark"

Perhaps the icu stats provides some insights https://www.icuregswe.org/data--resultat/covid-19-i-svensk-i...

Total case count isn't very interesting on its own because it depends highly on testing and policies related to testing. This is one reason why the reported death rates are total crap and why there is such interest in anti-body testing. What is less affected by testing policy and availability is the number of hospitalizations. The number of people currently in hospital presents a pretty good idea of the progress of the disease (it lags a bit.. typically 10 days).

Just growing the infection denominator alone should not change policy very much though without also considering how infectious COVID-19 appears to be. NYC, Italy, etc... have clearly had a lot of deaths from the virus regardless of the final death rate ends up being when this all over.

Where antibody testing does come into play (and assuming antibodies at levels those are tested for do give some immunity) is when things can start to go back to normal.

> So what does that tell me?

That you look at very unreliable data that is even more difficult to compare across countries?

No it tells me I was looking to get a really smart HN comment by somebody more competent than I in the relevant subject that would explain to me patiently why I was wrong - don't worry though - I shall continue to look.

on edit: I see some other people have replied with more cogent explanations as to why my worries are probably wrong.

A highly relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2295/

> 1. They have slightly over 12% death rate currently and Denmark has slightly over 4%.

This site isn't a great way to compare death rates. There's some baked in assumptions. If we compare statistical results we need 1 to 1 comparisons, or an understanding of the limitations of the comparisons.

The lion's share of testing is going to those that are sick. We've already established that <20% of covid cases go to the hospital. It is frequently recommended that one does not go to the hospital unless one is seriously sick. We also know that covid is highly asymptomatic. These people aren't ever going to be tested unless they are in a study specifically that is looking at random but representative samples of the population. Additionally, these countries have different median ages.This is important when we're talking about a disease that affects people dramatically differently by age. (e.g. Italy would be expected to be hit hard because it has an old population that frequently smokes). Also, countries are not uniform in their travel structure, i.e. how dense the country is and strength of nodal connections between dense areas. Finally, strategies were applied at different times in their curves.

So the issues are:

- We don't have 100% testing coverage and this data isn't a representative sample.

- Countries aren't uniform in their age or habits or pollution

- Countries aren't uniform in density and nodal connections.

- Countries applied different strategies at different times.

You should also be aware that the way Sweden is counting deaths by CoViD-19 is by attributing ALL deaths which tested positive for the virus to the disease.

This is very different from other countries statistics and one of the reasons why Sweden statistics are showing that there is very little undercounting of unexplained excess deaths when seasonally adjusted.

actually that seems to be the default method of counting deaths. I find it questionable to attribute (100% of) a death to covid when 4 other conditions existed and contributed to the fatality but there you have it. The undercounting issue has been a result of deaths of untested patients, e.g people found dead at home in NY.

Belgium on the other hand reports all deaths that could plausibly be covid related.