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Comment by ptaipale | Hacker News Reader

Traditionally, Sweden has compared itself to other Nordic countries, which, as mentioned, share the same cultural/demographic/socio-economic factors.

Now the comparison points have suddenly switched to Italy and UK, or I've seen even Peru and Brazil. Which really screams "denialist".

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

For the note, I don't think it is meaningful to compare these statistics between other countries than OECD members. For instance, the Wikipedia list you mentioned indicates currently 45,000 deaths for Russia, whereas the Russian deputy prime minister has now said that the figure would be 186,000.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55474028

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To be honest it sounds pretty denialist to me when someone says you have to compare Denmark, Sweden and Norway, but adding other countries is "not comparable". To me it just sounds like cherry picking.

An example of a big difference between Denmark and Sweden is that Sweden has a much more lenient immigration policy (for better or worse). I have heard anectodes from (swedish) friends about how these groups fare worse. I can very much imagine that differences like this make the comparison between the nordic countries less valid, so to me it makes sense not to cherry pick those three countries.

It isn’t cherry-picking, it is a standard that existed long before covid. The Nordic countries have always compared themselves to each other and have been lumped into a group externally. They share many similar characteristics and few differences — the immigration straw you are grasping at is indeed weak sauce and not significant-enough to account for the scope and magnitude of Sweden’s covid failures.

I know these countries are often compared. My point is that it is not a very good comparison to make in all cases. And mind you, the original claim was that a comparison between Sweden, UK, Spain etc. was not valid "because you should compare Sweden to Denmark and Norway". Where should you draw this imaginary line of which countries can and cannot be compared? Sure Saudi Arabia and Sweden are pretty hard to compare, but why not include the baltic states? Germany? US?

It's also very strange to me when people compare the nordic countries they forget that there are real differences between them. The difference in immigration policy is one plausible factor for a different response to Covid. I'm not claiming that the high death toll is caused by immigrants, I'm claiming that the lenient Swedish immigration policy adversly affected the death toll, compared to a more strict one like Denmarks. Is that a straw man argument because it doesn't fit a specific version of reality?

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