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Comment by timwaagh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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).

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