During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.
Tuesday, November 09, 2021
In case you wondered …
… How Sweden swerved Covid disaster - UnHerd.
Checking the tracker, Sweden has had 15,065 deaths.
ReplyDeleteWe would never compare Sweden to US states, because we are in a completely different part of the world. Both Sweden and the USA are excellent at keeping the elephants away by not doinmg anything about them, not so in Asia and Africa. Even in the US, Covid-19 case and death rates look like a weather map, with the west having more problems recently than the east, especially the southeast.
Comparing Sweden's 15,065 deaths (population 10 million) to its closest neighbors, however, we find that Norway has had 925 deaths (population 5 million), Finland 1,209 (population 6 million), and Denmark 2,748 (population 6 million). The models in that area are Norway and Finland, then Denmark, but stay clear of Sweden's methods, unless you want to kill scores of citizens, right?
We further note how horribly Sweden has done with the pandemic, than only in allowing far far more citizens to die. There are those who survived but were terribly ill, those with permanent and significant organ damage, and those who will die younger because they had the virus.
We can use Sweden's failure to look at the comparative effectiveness of the policies of surrounding states, with Sweden and each other.