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Comment by bildung | Hacker News Reader

Response type absolutely matters. Sweden has 10x the death rate of Norway, for example.

Norway, Finland, Denmark, even Cuba, a poor country with 3x the population density of the US is significantly below 700.

Australia stands at 45, not 700, BTW.

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Cuba isn't comparable because the age structure of it's population will be different. 90% of covid deaths happen in the 65 and over cohort so mortality will be drastically lower.

Cubas age structure is practicaly identical to the US, both have about 16% aged 65+.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/388539/age-structure-in-...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/270000/age-distribution-...

I’m not sure what you can get out of comparing small Scandinavian countries.

Out of the big ones, Germany is at 1,200 and the US is at 2,000. What’s the effect of response type when you account for the scale of obesity in the US versus Germany?

Sweden has the same numbers as Germany. Sweden and Germany are very similar with respect to culture, clustering of people in cities, percentage of people with a migration background. Norway and Sweden are not.

Turns out that Sweden and Germany have similar results:

https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/why-does-no-one-ever-talk-abou...

Yeah, right. Let’s compare Sweden with 10M people and a very low population density with Germany with 83M people and 10 times the population density instead of Norway that has comparable population and density and 10 times less deaths just because it helps your narrative. Such comments spreading misinformation should not be allowed at all here in my opinion.

Empty land doesn't get sick. The people in Sweden are concentrated in one fairly dense area, Stockholm.

I don't think the overall #people/surface area of the country is something meaningful to compare.

I hypothesize that comparing Sweden and Germany is about the same as comparing Stockholm to an average of German cities. I don't have the German and Swedish skills to find and compare the data though

> The people in Sweden are concentrated in one fairly dense area, Stockholm.

So exactly like Norway, were almost all people live around Oslo/Bergen

“Empty land doesn't get sick”

That’s exactly the point. In Norway and Sweden, unlike Germany, there is a huge amount of empty land. For this reason it doesn’t make sense at all to compare Sweden with Germany when you have a far, far better comparison in the nearby country.

If you have a hypothetical country with a huge swath of empty land, and a single city with the population density of Hong Kong, the population density of that country will appear to be low, but in fact all the people living in the country live in a highly dense city. Perhaps a better measure than population/land area would be the average of the population density in the square kilometer surrounding each inhabitant (or something like that).

As it happens, we don't live happily ever after unless the evil covid kills us. There are plenty of other death causes, some directly caused by lockdowns like delayed health care, suicide, OD, increased poverty. What we really want to look at is excess mortality, and possibly excess 'quality years lived' for some definition thereof. Some Canadian researchers looked at excess mortality in Canada and found it 3x than 'deaths with covid'.

Covid is a long term issue. It is fairly pointless to compare response outcome for the first year and a half of an extremely contagious mutating endemic virus. Look at a 10 year horizon, possibly longer. Sweden is middle of the pack within Europe if we don't cherrypick, and that outcome could possibly be driven by chance more than anything else.

Speaking of other costs, it is really pathetic what we do to children. At my kid elementary school they detected two kids with covid. No word of severity of symptoms, if any symptoms whatsoever. As a result, the entire grade was sent home packing for weeks, after a whole two weeks of in-person instruction. This when kids have about the same risk for severe covid as for severe flu, and teachers have one of the lowest covid risk of all occupations (!).

Delayed healthcare doesn't fit in there. That's directly related to covid, whether there's lockdowns or not. No lockdowns means you can't get healthcare because the doctors and nurses are busy with covid patients

Delayed healthcare is also people scared out of their minds missing cancer screenings or even mundane teeth cleanings because 'what if I get covid from the doctor's office'?

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