[useerup]

> Sweden is just marginally worse off against Covid overall than the US. And they didn’t have to spend $4 trillion or lose 40 million jobs to achieve that.

Sweden took less drastic action than the US. Sweden did take some action early, encouraging social distancing, increased hand hygiene etc. Then again, in Sweden you can take sick leave with full pay. More people will stay home if they feel sick.

Parts of the US took more drastic actions, but very, very late (during a pandemic where number of cases double every 4-5 days, one week is late, several weeks is very late). Shutting down borders to foreigners doesn't cut it when the virus is already spreading in the communities.

While they ended up in almost the same place, you really cannot compare them. The Swedish circumstances are so different from those of the US, that you cannot expect the Swedish same strategy to work the same way in the US.

And before you claim that the Swedish strategy is a success, consider how Sweden compares to its Nordic neighbors, where you can compare the circumstances.

Per 1,000,000 inhabitants:

    Sweden  4042 cases, 450 deaths
    Denmark 2040 cases, 101 deaths
    Finland 1247 cases,  58 deaths
    Norway  1567 cases,  44 deaths

[mikem170]

But yet Norway's prime minister thinks they overreacted with their lockdown:

>Leaders in some European countries have suggested enforcing tough lockdown measures early in the COVID-19 outbreak may not have been entirely necessary.

>Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg said during a television interview last week with state broadcaster NRK that its approach had been over cautious.

>“I probably took many of the decisions out of fear. Worst case scenarios became controlling,” Ms Solberg explained.

>She assured viewers that strict restrictions were imposed based on the international state of the disease at the time, but said that on reflection perhaps they were misguided.

[0] https://au.news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-norway-pm-regrets-not-...

[kspacewalk2]

Why are we cherry-picking Nordic neighbours? Because they happen to back one of several competing narratives? We can find plenty of other countries that have implemented stringent lockdowns and have similar or higher cases and deaths per capita.

That's the beautiful thing about these almost meaningless cross-country comparisons - the data is so low-quality and heterogenous that you can pick a pair of countries and validate pretty much every hypothesis with it.

[BlackNitrogen]

The comparisons aren't meaningless, cause they are very similar. People who want to defend Sweden don't like how terrible Sweden looks. Because of idealogical reasons around locking down a lot of people want Sweden's strategy to work, and they torture themselves into weak arguments to justify killing a lot more people. If you can't compare them for some reason, then you basically can't do any comparisons because you ruled out their nearest neighbors.

[kspacewalk2]

That is exactly right - you can't do any cross-country comparisons, because the data simply is not comparable across countries. It can be used to a limited degree for tracking the epidemic within a country over time, and even that's got plenty of caveats. But cross-country comparison is a non-starter. Here's an incomplete list of giant confounders:

- for cases: how widespread was the testing? How quickly did it ramp up (e.g. how many tests per 1M in relation to 1000th case)?

- for deaths: what counts as a COVID death? Is death with COVID = death from COVID?

- how soon after the onset of the epidemic in the particular country were lockdown measures enacted? How long did they last? How stringent were they in reality vs on paper?

[BlackNitrogen]

Well I think you can compare, but with caveat you have to compare amount of testing, and various other situations. I only see people who say "you can't compare" to be those who want to minimize their own problems. It's endemic to the US where multiple states have been caught reducing the numbers, firing the people who organize them and prohibiting them from talking about it.

[kspacewalk2]

So wait, if they are reducing the numbers, we'll then turn around and use them for comparison?

There are many countries who figured out how to play this numbers game. Russia, for example, faithfully reports any and all cases of COVID and simultaneously employs every trick in the book to minimize the number of deaths. They have already and will continue to win propaganda points from people who then use these meaningless death numbers to compare to another country's far more accurate death numbers and proceed to draw garbage conclusions from garbage data.