Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bostik 2275 days ago
Looking at the log-graphs of confirmed cases, Sweden is a freaky outlier. Other countries with reliable (ish) numbers show a nearly continuous smooth slope, where as Sweden's graph has a rather curious inflection point.

In the official data, Day 1 is 2020-01-22. If you plot the confirmed cases for Italy, Spain, S.Korea, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, UK, US and Switzerland in the same graph, you can see how Sweden's rate follows the general trend until about day 50. From that point onwards, the growth rate of confirmed cases drops.

Knowing how badly Finland has handled this mess, I have serious doubts about the Swedish numbers. Such a sudden and rapid deviation feels more like a change in reporting (and testing) policy than anything else.
2 comments
Gwypaas 2275 days ago
From march 13th they stopped testing everyone suspected of corona and instead only test people seeking care with serious symptoms. [0] The metric the government agencies publicly communicate now is the number of people admitted to ICU per day, which lags the infection rate a bit more than simply testing for symptoms but is a hard fact since everyone being that sick will end up requiring the care and therefore reducing the unknowns.

[0]: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/samhalle/a/70GQRV/nya-str...

link
Jommi 2275 days ago
How exactly did Finland handle this badly? It's looking pretty good I think.
link
bostik 2274 days ago
Let me count the ways.

1. Long state of indecision. For a very long time, as the news from around the world brought images of falling skies, the Finnish government actively avoided making any decisions. G: "we defer to THL". THL: "we defer to government".

2. President had to intervene to get the government off of their asses. How messed up is that?

3. Artificially limiting the supply of ICUs. Of the 300 units in the country, half are earmarked for "not to be used for COVID-19 cases".

4. Completely ignoring the effect of people returning from their holidays. That's 200k potential transmission vectors, not taken into account at all. Until it was too late.

So the people who were supposed to be in charge have shown nothing but incompetence and avoidance of responsibility. The measures that are in place now seem good (quarantining an entire province!), but the handling of the pandemic until very recently was nothing short of disgraceful.

link