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Comment by KarlKemp | Hacker News Reader

Sweden has the highest per-capita rate of deaths from COVID.

In Sweden, 4,500 people have died. In neighbouring Norway, 237 people died. Even adjusted for population, Sweden has 10x the deaths.

I'm a scientist as well and my math skills say their strategy sucks.

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4500 out of 10 million ? 0.045% not bad considering Sweden doesn't do lock down. I wish more country adapt Sweden approach.

It’s not like there are no interventions at all in Sweden. I haven’t been at the office since early March. People are restricted in traveling and crowds over 50 people are forbidden etc.

And perhaps most significantly of all, people with the disease in outbreak areas aren't travelling to Sweden in large numbers like they were to the UK before it was forced into aborting the 'Swedish strategy'. The other side of that coin is that Sweden isn't forecasting better economic performance this year than the countries which had bailouts.

They haven't stopped dying, though: Yesterday, Sweden had 74 deaths. Norway, meanwhile, hasn't had a single death in 9 days.

> Yesterday, Sweden had 74 deaths.

That's a pretty noisy value since sunday reported zero. Because there is no weekend reporting, a 7 day average is better. That average is around 45.

Actually on the 3rd of June there was 1 death attributed to COVID-19. This is very likely to increase as we get more confirmations and backfills the data. The other 73 deaths reported are confirmed cases for other days.

Yes, the data is very noisy, and yes, much of it is backfill, but elementary queuing theory suggests that if deaths by reporting date keep oscillating around the same level, deaths by occurrence date will eventually converge to that level as well.

Depends on how much more they have, if their hospital is not overwhelmed, its acceptable.

>Norway, meanwhile, hasn't had a single death in 9 days

But Norway has lockdown ? of course its a trade off

> But Norway has lockdown ?

No it doesn't. We have prohibitions on large gatherings but private individuals may come and go as they please, visit each other's houses, etc.

Finland also only has 300 deaths.

Sweden is not the highest in Europe, per capita, it’s fifth [0]. So it’s pretty bad out of 31 countries but better than Belgium.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Lies greater lies and statistics... Belgium counts people who die in nursing homes as covid 19 deaths. They say Belgiums figure would be twice as small if they counted the way others did. Removing that anomaly the only countries higher are Spain, Italy and UK. The first two were hit very hard very early and the last had similar issues as Sweden, reacting very late.

So does Sweden. The public health agency also reports weekly on excess deaths. About 80% of excess deaths are captured in the official COVID-19 statistics.

Yup. All discussions should also include excess deaths.

The thing is, at least in Norway, less people than normal have died since COVID-19... So there is no excess.

Then they would report negative excess deaths. That's important information.

This is the only source I've found to easily compare those https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

I’ve been wondering if you take population density into account where that would put the figures as UK has much higher population density than Sweden

I can't imagine the Belgians being that much more inefficient than the Dutch. I always felt because of the lack of testing in The Netherlands the numbers are probably a bit higher. Until the 1st of June testing was extremely limited even for people that had all of the symptoms.

Sweden has also been very good at counting deaths, there was a New York Times report that compared excess deaths and Sweden was the only region where reported COVID-19 deaths actually outnumbered excess deaths

The "negative excess" was due to reporting lags, repeating the NYT analysis with up-to-date data for that period there are actually "unexplained" deaths. But it actually seems they make a better job at counting than some other European countries (maybe not as good as Belgium, I don't know).

Yeah being nice is all well and good but the results more or less speak for themselves. I hope they at least got some echo economic benefit out of it. It surprised me to see a country where politicians don't make this call. More surprising to see that the result turned out like this.

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