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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

This chart from Sweden says its not worse than influenza: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ejd0IpdVcAASTqR?format=jpg&name=...

Looking at the source data, the numbers seem roughly right: https://knoema.de/atlas/Schweden/Sterblichkeitsrate

I don't know what to think anymore.

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Well the UK chart also shows that:

- Influenza and Pneumonia are counted as one, because the majority of Pneumonia deaths are due to Influenza

- Influenza and Pneumonia deaths have been SUBSTANTIALLY lower ever single month in 2020 than the five year average

- Of the deaths where both influenza and pneumonia, and COVID-19 were mentioned on the death certificate, the underlying cause of death was counted as COVID-19 in 95.8%

So basically this alone already highlights the gross overestimation of COVID-19 deaths. I feels plain wrong to attribute almost all deaths to COVID-19 when the person also had Influenza when it is evident that we've seen so many less Influenza deaths this year. Clearly we're not giving Influenza enough credit in being the cause of death which is wrong IMHO.

Also further below when you look at the age distribution, the vast majority of deaths happened in 80+ year olds, even more in 84+ year olds, which makes one really think. COVID-19 is not nearly as much of a threat to the vast majority of the population as we are made to believe. It seems the people who are dying from COVID-19 are those who have reached an age which is well beyond the average life expectancy of a first world country.

Not saying that COVID-19 isn't a threat, it is, but it's not like the Spanish flu which was killing predominantly young people or the plague which was wiping people of all age groups.

EDIT: Typos corrected.

Doesn't it make sense that influenza numbers would be far lower this year given all the health security measures employed for covid?

It would, but when you look at the data for the last 3 months Influenza has killed more people than COVID-19, so apparently that logic is not true.

It's also well worth factoring in what Amnesty have just reported about the state of care homes, their residents access to medical care and DNARs in the UK during this period.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/10/uk-older-peop...

> It seems the people who are dying from COVID-19 are those who have reached an age which is well beyond the average life expectancy of a first world country.

Some data in support of this:

„According to the CDC’s data, the survival rate for COVID-19 is as follows:

0-19: 99.997%

20-49: 99.98%

50-69: 99.5%

70 & over: 94.6%

Life expectancy in the USA per CDC: 78.7 (2018)“ [0]

[0] https://twitter.com/drsimonegold/status/1313948710523424768?...

I belive the average age of people who die from COVID is higher than the average of age of people who die

Note that despite what you might think, Swedes do socially distance. So if they have what looks like a bad flu season despite all the changes to everyday life you can assume that it's at the very least worse than influenza for which no such restrictions are done.

I've seen a joke that is along the lines of, "Swedes are looking forward to the relaxing of the 2m social distancing rule, so that they can resume the 10m social distancing of the past."

I'm of the opinion that comparing countries is mostly a pointless exercise, because there are so many variables involved.

Agreed. But you can compare Sweden to itself and it's pretty clear that Sweden had a much stronger reduced social life during Covid compared to the mentioned flu seasons.

Are there instances of hospitals corridors turning into morgues in recent years due to Influenza?

If Covid-19 is not worse than the Influenza we should have similar impact due to influenza.

I was not able to confirm that Influenza creates similar strain to healthcare infrastructure as Covid-19 which makes me think that the Covid-19 situation in Sweden is more nuanced than the numbers say.

Afaik such things happen, although I don't know about Sweden. But many reports that induced panic were just things that happen from time to time, only the population was not used to seeing it (no reporting). There were other aspects, too, like morgues closing out of fear or because of regulation (can't handle the dead because of risk of infection).

Edit: HN doesn't let me post more comments atm, so here is my reply to "needs citations":

They "need" citations? Why do they need them, because it is my duty to convince you? Why?

If you are interested, you can ask if I have citations, or you can google yourself. But there is no "need" as such, because it is not my duty to convince you.

These things made the rounds at the high time early in the pandemic. Maybe if I have time I'll google them later. Maybe you could google for "Morgues closing corona" or something like that.

New York especially afaik has a problem with Morgues, even in normal times there are not enough of them, and it is not easy to build more because of regulations.

Strong claims, all these points need citations. It would be interesting that medical professionals did not notice that if true.

Even if this data was correct, the difference is that in 2020 there were pretty stringent measures in place to reduce the spread of Covid (which were not in place in the past for major influenza outbreaks). We do not have a clean counterfactual to what the number of deaths would be in the absence of those measures, but the height of the outbreak in Italy can perhaps serve as some approximation, and there the excess mortality was orders of magnitude above previous years.

Not sure if you misread, but MrBuddyCasino's comment was about Sweden.

Have a look at those dates along the bottom of the charts.

COVID dates are in spring, Flu is the middle of winter. TBF we don't have data on what COVID is like in the winter so the jury is still (a little bit) out on what that looks like but this comparison is misleading.

I bet if you plotted Flu for those dates (i.e. in spring) you would see significantly fewer deaths than from COVID.

Doesn't seem right to me. Euromomo does show a bump for Sweden, though it is still smaller than some other countries that did lockdowns:

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

Also, several countries show no excess mortality.

Compare Sweden to its immediate neighbors like Norway, Finland, and Denmark and the cost of Sweden's failed response becomes pretty obvious.

Compare the last few years then. Sweden did not have a bad flu seasons unlike the neighbours, who did.

They didn't have to shut down the country though and since August there's 6 or less deaths a day.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

Norway has a death every 3 days or so right now.

This is an oversimplification. What specifics do you claim puts Sweden closer to the other Nordics than other European contries?

For example, Sweden had school breaks around the time of the large outbreaks in northern Italy and Austria, leading to many ski vacations to those areas. Did the other Nordics?

To be clear, I don't proclaim this little example to be an explanation for why Sweden had more cases, only to shine some light on how complicated things can be. It is not clear that Sweden's response "failed" and it certainly isn't "pretty obvious".

> For example, Sweden had school breaks around the time of the large outbreaks in northern Italy and Austria, leading to many ski vacations to those areas. Did the other Nordics?

Yes, Norway and Denmark had ski vacations at the same time with a lot of travel to the Alps. All three countries had very similar initial conditions and trajectories for the epidemic until early April. The differences in outcomes were clearly related to policy decisions made in March and April.

You are cherry-picking countries based on geographic proximity, but that's not really a meaningful factor. Germany is right next to France, France had the stricter lockdown, yet Germany has no excess mortality.

Meanwhile, Norway has almost twice the per-capita GDP of the other nordic countries. Finland has no large metropolitan area. Sweden has more people in elderly care. Lots of factors to consider, but geographic proximity isn't really one.

> France had the stricter lockdown

You are begging the question. France might have stricter rules, but didn't enforce them. German police enforced (and enforces) the rules that they have in terms of contact tracing, quarantine/isolation, indoors mask rules, regional/local lockdowns etc far more rapidly and stringently than France, Spain, UK or US. (Not as well as East Asian countries, but in European comparison the stereotype of following orders kind of works.

Also Sweden does not only have geographic proximity to Norway and Denmark, but similar holiday travel behaviour, similar wealth level and business travel pattern, similar cultural mores of proximity. A far far more even comparison than with France, say. (And yes Finland has cities, ever heard of Helsinki with 1.4m people in the metro area?)

So we both agree that geographic proximity alone is not a good factor to compare by? Good.

It then makes sense to compare Sweden against all other European countries instead of just those few neighboring countries.

Why show five graphs between 1990-2000, and zero for the next twenty years?

Those are the worst flu seasons (in recent history) in Sweden.

According to what? Even if that's the case, a glance at the second graph should show that skipping twenty years is intentionally presenting misleading information.

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