Sweden has had the lowest increase in COVID cases during Europe's "2nd wave" with one COVID-19 death on October 5th & October 6th and zero COVID-19 deaths on October 7th.
Why does everyone keep ignoring Finland? It hasn't had any deaths recently AND it has a mortality rate per million almost 10x lower than Sweden. Same with Norway.
I don't :(
I work directly with COVID data every day. It’s driving massive excess mortality. People dying is bad for the economy. And more people dying as we go about our life as usual would have been bad for the economy as well.
The only thing I’m skeptical of is why the US government downplayed the threat for the very beginning and refused to coordinate testing at the Federal level. Breaking up testing delays = living a more normal life.
I’ve been told by skeptics that the H1N1 outbreak was worse. Then we hit 1K-2K deaths per day. The skeptics said that the virus would die in the heat even though moderate climate countries like Ecuador were getting hit hard at the time. Then US deaths spiked over the summer. Today I’m told that Sweden actually had it right even though they’re suffering economically along with the rest of the world and have 10x the per capita deaths of their neighbors Norway and Finland.
Lock downs suck but I encourage everyone to look on the bright side. Firstly, we’re undoubtedly saving lives. Second, this whole year has been a massive proof of concept for working remote. The implications that has for high rent NIMBY cities that do not want to zone for density is huge.
Mathlete, why does everyone compare Sweden to Norway and Finland? It's superficially an obvious comparison because they're all part of Scandinavia. But Sweden is not that dissimilar to the UK, Italy and Spain is it?
I compared them because they’re neighboring countries with population density on the same order of magnitude and have similarly good access to healthcare. Sweden is bracketed by Norway and Finland in terms of median age with Norway being younger and Finland older.
Things that affect spread and outcomes the most are: density, age and obesity rates
Please refer to this population density map and identify which countries are most like Sweden based on that metric:
https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-these-maps-reveal-the-truth-about-population-density-across-europe-90345Densities (people/km2):
UK - 281
Spain - 94
Italy - 206
Sweden - 25
Norway - 15
Finland -18
Each of the non-Scandinavian countries have multiple cities with higher population densities and populations than Stockholm (>5000/km2). Just the parts of London that have 3x this density have nearly 50% higher population than Stockholm. London itself, whose overall density is similar to Stockholm's, has 10x more people (9m vs 0.9m). Madrid has 7x more. If one compares the densities of the surrounding metropolitan areas, Northeast italy has a similar density to the county of Stockholm (~300/km2) but with 20x more people (~20m). In fact, the UK and Italy's entirety (population 123 million) is on average 2/3 as densely populated than Stockholm county.
Regarding age >65: all the countries in question (UK, Spain, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Finland) have approximately 20% of their population in this age range so all are valid for that comparison.
Regarding obesity
https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/Obesity-Update-2017.pdf:
UK has the highest (27%), Finland (25%) Spain (17%), then while Sweden, Norway and Italy the lowest (12, 12, 10%).
So in general, it's a grab bag. I would say because of population densities, UK and Italy are not good comparisons to Sweden. UK again loses due to high obesity rates. Spain is probably a legitimate comparison as its density and obesity rates are lower. Norway meets all three criteria, Finland meets 2 out of 3 (loses on obesity rates).