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Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Coronavirus: Sweden's nearly Twice the US Death Rate...

According to this UK Guardian article Sweden, with nearly twice (see here) the US death rate muddles on without dramatic, rights-stealing "lock downs."  (Article: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/as-the-rest-of-europe-lives-under-lockdown-sweden-keeps-calm-and-carries-on)

"While every other country in Europe has been ordered into ever more stringent coronavirus lockdown, Sweden has remained the exception. Schools, kindergartens, bars, restaurants, ski resorts, sports clubs, hairdressers: all remain open, weeks after everything closed down in next door Denmark and Norway. [underline mine]"

How is this possible?

If you read the article you see the primary difference is there isn't any panic.

Still twenty four (24) Swedish people per million die (in the US it's fourteen (14) though more like eight (8) if you remove NYC metro.

Everyone seems to function okay and not panic...

(Panic: If you, Lone Wolf, go out in public you will kill my husband who has health problems... Huh?  What do I have to do with your husband?  I don't know you...  I'm not sick and even if I was how do you know it was me and not the guy who made me sick...???)

As with many western countries "... closing schools would have knocked out at least a quarter of doctors and nurses, crippling the health service. By pushing children out into society, it might even have increased the threat to the elderly, particularly if they were called upon to babysit."

(Another point: We've changed the distribution pattern for Covid19, not eliminated it...  Now everybody goes to Lowe's or Home Depot, Aldi's has to throw people out for "congregating," and so on...)

If we look at these charts (from https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus) we can understand why Swede's are okay.  First, from China, which is suspect to a degree but it's all the data we can point at today we see:


By and large this affects the elderly.  However, it is critical to note that "Again it’s important to stress that the CFR simply represents the ratio between the number of confirmed cases and the number of deaths."

It's important to realize these number in and of themselves mean nothing because we don't know how many total cases there are.

(Another post will cover significant testing problems...)


You can estimate anywhere for five to ten times the number of cases are untested.  According to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries we see that there not active cases per million column.

We see "active cases" but without knowing about the number of actual cases what can we say?

Not much.

Next we see:


If you are all ready sick Covid19 doesn't help...

Finally we see this type of chart:


Which is rather disingenuous.  On the left is US flu data for which, one presumes, there are adequate and accurate tests.  On the right you see Chinese data.

What can one conclude for this?

Not much really...  Certainly if you don't panic with Covid your society is just fine unless you destroy it from within as the US is...

One also imagines from reading the article that people are thoughtful and not careless (as they are in NYC...)

EDIT: Oh look, a call to honesty in modeling and "lock downs:"

https://medium.com/@wpegden/a-call-to-honesty-in-pandemic-modeling-5c156686a64b



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