Hacker News Reader

At 90 days some their first 100 cases, Sweden has half the cases of China. Does that mean they have been twice as effective at fighting the disease? Half as impacted?

Chinese statistics is unreliable. It makes sense to compare Western countries, but not Western countries to China.

OK Sweden has fewer confirmed cases (40k) than most if not all of Western Europe.

Compared to population?

Sweden doesn't test nearly as much as other countries in Western Europes. Comparing deaths is already complicated, comparing "confirmed cases" is completely useless.

And if you start with X cases, and have and Rt of 2, you get 2X cases, no matter if X is 10 or 1000.

Perhaps it didn't make sense in the beginning, when outbreaks are sparse, but now that it's spread everywhere and it's a matter of suppressing it, that changes things, doesn't it?

If you start with 10 cases and immediately take action like Taiwan, you have 7 dead. If you start with 10 cases and do nothing like Sweden, you have 4500 dead.

Sweden hasn't "done nothing", please don't make things up.

In some cases they did worse than nothing, like when advising people not to wear masks.