@mighty_tiger said in [Coronavirus Outbreak](/post/1426200) said:
Ok I will bite re Sweden, nice cherry pick of data but tell the full picture.
Lets focus on deaths Denmark, Norway & Finland with a population of 16mil had 4351 deaths all countries comparable given location etc. These 3 countries did apply restrictions against herd mentality.
Sweden with a population of 10mil had 12,700 deaths during the same time. 3 times the deaths with 40% less population.
That was in Feb and when they hit the peak then they did infact put in restrictions around operating hours of businesses, public transportation limits and list goes on which have stayed until stage 3 restrictions removal have been announced recently. They also did restrict travel to Sweden with the US being approved to travel as part of stage 3 restriction changes. The restrictions they applied did see a dip in cases until the Delta strain hit in April.
Sweden have been since the 2nd wave in April one of the most aggressive to go on the vaccine with 60% of the population having a form of the vaccine & 40% deemed fully vaccinated within 3mths. They have openly attributed the vaccine adoption by locals as the reason for things to get under control however they do still have recommended restrictions in place which the public adhere to. For a country not in fear they haven’t exactly left the doors open and being anti vax. It’s clear they a knowledge the strain the virus has hence the urgency of the vaccine rollout.
It’s not about living in fear it’s about reality is people who get covid get infected faster and the impact is worse than anything else that spreads. Sweden hospital cases and emergency cases are hardly something to also be modeled as a success either something our medical systems have zero chance of coping with thats for sure.
Sweden will have a lower death rate in 2020 than it had in 2010
January 4, 2021by philg
This Statista bar chart has been suggesting for months that the all-cause death rate in Sweden for 2020, a year in which the country gave the finger to the deadliest virus within the memory of Humankind, will be lower than the death rate in 2010, an unremarkable year from a disease point of view.
90,487 residents of Sweden died in 2010, when the population was 9.34 million (Google). The population today is 10.4 million (Statistics Sweden, a government agency).
The 2010 death rate applied to the 2020 population would be consistent with approximately 100,750 deaths.
The Statistics Sweden folks make fine-grained death data available for download. The latest iteration, released today, shows 95,022 deaths for all of 2020. However, it seems that the data are incomplete starting on December 21. If we normalize Dec 21-31 with averages from 2015-2019, we would expect Sweden to experience an additional 1,846 deaths in 2020, for a total of 96,868 (i.e., well below the 100,750 who would have died if the 2010 death rate occurred).
[Update: The January 18, 2021 version of the spreadsheet shows 97,941 deaths for all of 2020. More than the above guess, but still occurring at a lower rate than in 2010.]
It will be worth checking back in a couple of weeks for the near-final 2020 number. (The Swedes will publish their final number for 2020 on February 22, 2021, seven weeks after the end of 2020. Their U.S. counterparts at the CDC, published their final numbers for 2018 in January 2020, 13 months after the end of 2018.)
Summary: the Swedes sent their unmasked children to school, sent their unmasked selves to work, sent their unmasked selves to the gym and social events, and generally went right into November before losing their nerve (adopting masks on public transport and cutting “public events” (not private house parties) back to 8 people max). They’ve emerged from what in most countries was the Year of Coronapanic with their psyches, civil liberties (freedom to gather, freedom to travel), education, and work skills intact. They’ve suffered more deaths than in some previous years (but maybe partly this was due to having fewer-than-expected deaths in the most recent years), but have had a lower death rate than they had in 2010 and they’re not even on the first page of countries ranked by COVID-19-tagged death rate.
(What does a moderately northern place with a big city look like when the Church of Shutdown is worshipped and the Ritual of the Mask is observed? The Maskachusetts COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 people is 182 (CDC). Sweden’s rate is 86.)