Not just in the beginning. The December numbers for deaths in care homes are pretty bad, too. 247 in week 52. There were 0 in week 36. Total deaths per capita is about 10 times higher than in neighboring Norway and Finland.
Where are you getting that about week 52?
A Swedish government agency publishes an Excel spreadsheet on that gets updated every week.
https://www.socialstyrelsen.se/globalassets/1-globalt/covid-19-statistik/statistik-over-antal-avlidna-i-covid-19/statistik-covid19-avlidna.xlsx
It has weekly stats including the form of living. It also deals with demographics, comorbidity, etc. It’s not all that easy to navigate but the weekly stats are in a tab called “Vecka” on the far lower right side. It also has some diagrams for care homes. The most recent data is likely incomplete due to a lag in when the agency receives death certificates from doctors.
Agree. That was the point of the 24 Mar '21 Reuters article that I posted. What difference does it now make what happened at the beginning of the pandemic, other than the unalterable impact on the aggregate total number of fatalities since then?
I have no data, but I’ll bet you can count on one hand the number of permanently shuttered restaurants, bars, and other businesses in Sweden that can be directly attributed to the pandemic.
How many have been forever lost in New York, which has about the same population? Or anywhere else in the US. How many in San Diego? In LA?
And the general mental health of the Swedish people seems, in all of the in-person news interviews I’ve seen, to be a heck of a lot better than here, where burnout is rampant.
The comparisons to neighboring Nordic countries is always quoted, as if that matters now. There are a whole lot of other countries where total deaths per capita are much lower than in Sweden too. But total deaths per capita in Sweden since the beginning are currently significantly lower than in France, Spain, Italy, UK, USA, and 20 other countries. Live in the present tense.
(Source: www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries. Click on column heading.)
The reason to compare Sweden to its nearest neighbors is that those countries are somewhat similar. Much more similar than, say, Brazil and Sweden.
Here are a few numbers for deaths per 100,000.
US: 168
Spain: 161
Brazil: 148
France: 140
Poland: 136
Sweden: 130
Austria: 104
Germany: 92
Canada: 62
Denmark: 42
Finland: 15
Norway: 12
Australia: 4
Now, these are different countries, so one would expect there to be variations. Sweden’s number is lower than some and higher than some but it’s not particularly low. Australia is dramatically lower than the rest since they implemented really drastic measures. Norway and Finland are doing way better than Sweden. Sweden is not even in the same ballpark even though these are all sparsely populated Nordic welfare states with generous healthcare systems. So what did Sweden do wrong in order to be worse off by a factor of 10? And what do you think the number for the US would be if it had used the same policies as Sweden?
US is currently at least 181. What you want to compare is the curve of deaths over time, not just the totals.
Sweden’s numbers are similar to those of many countries that had long, serious lockdowns. That’s what’s interesting.
The US effectively has no policies. It varies wildly by state, county, and city.
Australia is lower in large part because it"s an island and closed its borders. It got things under control and was able to reopen with occasional local lockdowns to stop outbreaks.
I’m not sure I understand the first paragraph or how you would arrive at the number 181. How does the math for that work?
Sweden is very different from a lot of countries where it’s more common for multiple generations of a family to share the same living space. What Sweden has, though, is a lot of elderly in various forms of assisted living. The same probably goes for Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Yet, those have numbers that are significantly lower than Sweden’s. That even goes for Denmark, which eased up on its lockdown a bit and had to do a second one effective Dec 25. Norway, which has had the strictest adherence to its lockdown, has a number that is a factor of 10 lower than Sweden’s.
BTW, the second wave of Covid-19 that hit Sweden in Oct-Nov has now killed more people than the initial wave that hit in March last year when a lot of people were unprepared.
Australia has little to do with being an island but their strict policies. Countries like Vietnam show that it’s really about the right policies
Places like Australia and New Zealand shut their borders to shut out any influx of infected people. Being islands helped those two countries – and others – do that. Other countries that are not islands also slammed their doors shut, and prevented infectious people from entering. Canada has been closed to the US for a year, for instance. The downside is that by staying in their closets, people in these countries have remained suspended in time, in the “susceptible” part of the SEIR epidemiology chain (susceptible-exposed-infected-recovery). Until and unless their populations are almost fully vaccinated (and lucky for them effective vaccines have been developed) these populations will remain in that status: Susceptible. Meaning that Covid-19 or its variants could explode in those places at any time before herd immunity is achieved, with herd immunity relying almost entirely on widespread vaccinations. To remain in the same state of suspended animation in the US, we would have had to not only immediately close our doors to all outsiders, but we would have had to prohibit all interstate, and intra-state, travel – and keep it that way indefinitely. As if.
Several US states have had requirements for quarantine or testing for interstate travelers, including NY and NJ, but those rules haven’t really been enforced much. Hawaii, though, is much more serious about enforcing its rules, which are pretty tough. A test must be taken no earlier than 72 hours before the departure of your flight there and if you don’t have a negative result ready when you depart, you are out of luck. You will be in quarantine for 10 days (or until you leave) with no ability to exit the quarantine by showing a delayed test result or taking a new test in Hawaii. Should you test positive while in quarantine, you will be subject to isolation. There goes your vacation. And currently, a proof of vaccination won’t exempt you from the quarantine rules. If you want to go there, plan on spending a full day on preparations related to the travel regulations (including understanding what is current) prior to the trip.
If it would have been enforced 400000+ people would be alive today… (and just to say it is hard is a lame excuse as examples like Vietnam show.)
Vietnam still has the doors shut to foreigners other than those who want to be in quarantine there for 3 weeks, after a medical check.
My point is, unless Vietnam has achieved herd immunity (which I very seriously doubt is the case), almost the entire population there (and in other such places) is still susceptible to the virus. They don’t dare open their doors to foreigners until all are vaccinated, or until almost everyone in other countries has been vaccinated (or other countries have reached herd immunity) – to their benefit. You’re susceptible until the virus is eradicated (which will never happen); or you’ve been vaccinated; or there’s herd immunity in your country. The same for individual people who have been hiding in their personal closets. They’re susceptible until herd immunity has been achieved by the rest of the population, through infection spread plus vaccination – or until they’ve been vaccinated themselves. There’s no way to stop the virus from spreading without herd immunity, and deaths are inevitable. You can “flatten the curve” (spread the transmission out over a longer period of time) to prevent hospital overload. Well, we’ve done that. But you can’t prevent deaths altogether.
Countries where homes are drafty seem to have much lower numbers, by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Today I see 168. Sources vary.
The statistic you cited is interesting. Virus spread within families has no doubt been from being confined in closed homes with family members, in many cases asymptomatic carriers, like children. That’s how colds and the flu spread among family members – indoors in close, closed quarters, especially in winter. I wonder if the same countries have low incidence of other viruses? With windows open, or simply drafty construction, the concentration of airborne virus particles would of course be reduced.
If you are looking at the Johns Hopkins numbers, that was my source, too.
The fact that “sources vary” is a good point, though, in the sense that different sources may use different methodologies making exact comparisons between geographies harder. Most likely, it will not have much of an impact on the big picture, but the different methodologies that are floating around are kind of interesting. For instance, you could base your statistics on conclusions made by medical providers, e.g., in the form of death certificates. San Francisco’s official webpage for tracking Covid-19 deaths says somewhat vaguely:
“The deaths shown here are suspected to be associated with COVID-19 or have COVID-19 listed as the cause of death. Deaths are reported by medical providers and the medical examiner.”
That’s supposedly the basis for San Francisco’s contribution to the numbers that go into Johns Hopkins. Perhaps in a similar vein, Sweden has an official set of Covid-19 statistics based entirely on death certificates sent in by doctors to a certain government agency. However, those are not the numbers that go to Johns Hopkins. Instead, the Johns Hopkins numbers for Sweden are provided by a different government agency using a different methodology and that methodology is also used by Denmark and Finland. It essentially says that if someone dies who has tested positive for Covid-19 within the last month, it’s counted as a Covid-19 death. To quote the Danish authorities:
“Deaths = the statistics on fatalities include deaths recorded within 30 days of the detection of COVID-19 infection in the individual on the basis of PCR tests. COVID-19 is not necessarily the cause of death.”
Seems like a very quick-and-dirty approach and, at least, it’s likely quick. If all positive test results go into some official database and authorities immediately get notified whenever a person dies, it should be easy to generate up-to-date numbers, according to this metric, on a daily basis.
While the die-within-a-month-of-a-positive-test criterion for a Covid-19 death may seem a little crude, there are a couple of things to be said. First of all, if you have Covid-19 and die within a month, it’s quite probable that Covid-19 had something to do with it. Secondly, what this approach is essentially measuring is how many people got Covid-19 and then died within a month of it being detected rather than how many deaths could be attributed to Covid-19. So is there a big difference? A Swedish study tried answer that question and threw in excess deaths as a third methodology as well. The study essentially concluded that, overall, the three methodologies were pretty much in synch with respect to the total number of deaths and trends in time. There were issues, of course, including the fact that during the very early days of the pandemic, very few people would have been tested, something that could affect a metric based on having tested positive within a month of death.
As for the Norwegian methodology, it’s somewhat of a hybrid. It assumes that a person who dies within 30 days of a positive test has died of Covid-19 unless there is concrete information to assume otherwise. I assume it would be a doctor that would be responsible for that sanity check so it would be less of an automatic conclusion than for Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. The general observation, though, is:
“Denne rapporteringen innebærer at covid-19-assosierte dødsfall omfatter både dødsfall der personen dør av og med covid-19.”
which I believe implies that the reporting metric for Covid-19-associated deaths includes both people that die because of Covid-19 and people that die while having Covid-19.
But that’s the whole point - by having the right policies in place, like in Vietnam, Australia etc. you get the time to vaccinate your population without killing >500000 people. Other countries have shown the US or Sweden how it should have been done - there is no reason why these policies should have worked also here.
Island nations have fewer points of entry so it’s easier for them to close their borders and enforce quarantine on overseas arrivals.
Vietnam’s official statistics are around 2500 confirmed cases and 35 deaths total. Their model is not one the US could follow.
The “excess deaths” statistic is useful for comparing countries as it’s less subject to variation. There’s a universal standard for dead.
I think Covid-19 is unusual in spreading only lung to lung.
Yes, strong-arm measures and closed borders did suppress virus spread and did buy time in Vietnam. It’s fortunate for them that vaccines were developed as quickly as they were, though. Otherwise the same repressive measures used to control virus spread initially would probably have to continue indefinitely, and they’d have to keep their borders shut indefinitely, until an effective vaccine was finally developed and fully administered to 80% or more of the population.
That is an opinion from one newspaper but there are also very different opinions which recognize their success on very different measures
And it is not only Vietnam - there are other countries like Taiwan, Thailand