It's common these days to measure the impact of the COVID pandemic by looking at total excess deaths as a more accurate measure than deaths attributed directly to COVID. So here are excess death rates for most of the large European countries plus the United States. Do you notice anything interesting?
Here's a similar chart. The countries are in a slightly different order, but the same interesting thing is there:
Hint: It starts with an S.
I'm more interested in the fact that graph 2 treats England and Wales as different places. That hasn't been true since 1282.
Graph 2 probably depends on NHS data, and I believe each constituent part of the UK (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) has their own “NHS” agency, independent of the other 3. So I’m guessing graph 2 only has data from NHS England and NHS Wales, and lacks data from NHS Scotland and whatever the Northern Ireland equivalent is called (it’s not “NHS”), so the graph creator decided to write “England/Wales” to ensure nobody thought it was the same as “United Kingdom.”
I agree. Scotland, where I was living at the start of the pandemic) adminsters healthcare separately from England, Whales and Norther Ireland. Healthcare is a "devolved power" since the seperate parliaments were setup in 1998-1999.
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Interesting. But way to use bureaucracy to ruin a quality joke. But I guess bureaucracies are where humor goes to die, so fair enough.
No it doesn't. It treats England and Wales as one combined place, by listing them together with the same entry. But if Scotland is a different place, why isn't it on the list?
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Solipsism ?
Snap!
ex-Soviet and Warsaw Pact countries do worse ?
Ahh .... *Slavic*
Former Soviet countries and satellites are at the top of the list, which may be strange in a way because one thing the Soviet Union did right was provide universal medical coverage, though not the most advanced technically. I haven't seen a comparison of those countries in terms of current medical services with the Western European ones, which also have better medical coverage than the US.
A Soviet emigre told me a story about healthcare in the USSR. His father needed surgery. First, he had to bribe a hospital administrator to move him up the wait list. Then, the surgeon gave him a list of supplies he had to find and buy on the black market. Imagine buying black market anesthesia for your father's surgery.
Universal medical coverage in the USSR was crap.
Scandinavian countries did much better than the rest.
ah yes, could be that too!
Sweden, or Scandinavia?
Sweden. They're the ones who did the weird non-lockdown.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious…….
If you rearrange the letters you get “I give up”
I always wanted to do that
The right frequently held up Sweden as a country with no lockdowns, but from what I read, that wasn’t true. They had some strict rules, and they were widely obeyed, or so I read.
And with a well-run public health system, generous sick leave, and income support for those who need it, it was actually *possible* for people to quarantine when ill without becoming destitute. That might havee something to do with adherence to even voluntary guidelines.
Yeah, comparisons to Sweden’s excess deaths might wanna look at baseline health characteristics, like % diabetics, % heart disease, % obesity.
I think it’s all too much of a mess to make much sense of.
But in general, Swedes don’t really live in dense cities, aren’t as fat, aren’t particularly gregarious and close-talking, aren’t poor, don’t have as many immigrants (who are often poor, from Syria or Turkey or Eastern Europe, Latin America or Africa). Don’t have a perpetual underclass of people in jail/homeless/uneducated.
I personally dislike studies with cross-country comparisons, but in the comparison of Sweden with Norway/Netherlands/Denmark, if it does still indeed have an advantage, what do we think it is? (Besides noise/randomness).
Is the argument that not attempting as much official mitigation (if it did indeed do such, and it was not offset by non-official - voluntary, individual - mitigation) led to better outcomes? Did the masks themselves weaken/poison people? The the vaccines prime the pump and lead to paradoxically worse outcomes?
Catching the disease earlier, before vaccines got there, was better? (Who knows, I definitely don’t).
Tthe right frequently points to Scandinavian countries when it suits them (“did you know that gun ownership per capita in Sweden is comparable to the US?!”) and ignores Scandinavian countries when it doesn’t suit them (“did you know that taxes are as high as 90% in Sweden and they still have a successful capitalist economy?”).
You should never take what the right says at face value. They aren’t arguing in good faith and they have no sense of shame if their hypocrisy is exposed.
Sweden is a socialist economy. But when forced to confront scandinavia's success, the right choose to bald face lie about that.
Weird that your words seem to indicate care about right-wing lies when you're parroting one.
One of the frustrating things about the pandemic is that it was hard to get good information about what mitigations were being used where, particularly in practice. I still am not really clear on how much distancing was being done there.
I understand that Sweden started out with no lockdowns but, when they realized that was wrong, they quickly changed. They were smarter than the average, were able to see what was happening and made changes. A friend in their government sent me weekly notes. Unlike many "governments", Swedes seem to be not adverse to admitting mistakes and actually go ahead and make corrections, as opposed to donnie's appointees.
Trump's people were horrible, but even the CDC and people like Fauci were sticking with the fomite hypothesis well after it was obvious that COVID spread as an aerosol. That led to mixed messages about using masks, something that actually helped cut the spread. It gave the hospitals cover for refusing to let their staff wear masks in the early stages of the spread. Meanwhile, stories of mask and sanitizer theft and fraud, many involving Trump administration figures, spread widely.
The vaccine development and approval went well, but the confusing roll out with its rules and supply problems was discouraging. There was no sense that someone was trying to manage things and actually get the shots into arms. Is not fucking up a sign of socialism? Even now, there is no discussion of anything past the booster rolled out last fall. Does that booster still provide protection? Is there a new vaccine in the works? COVID is mutating more slowly, but, like flu vaccines, it wanes in effectiveness pretty quickly. Is anyone even thinking about the issue?
The right frequently held up Sweden as a country with no lockdowns, but from what I read, that wasn’t true. They had some strict rules, and they were widely obeyed, or so I read.
I'd argue the relevant thing is social distancing—no matter how it's accomplished. In some countries (China, Australia) this was achieved through laws and stiff enforcement. In some countries (Japan, Sweden?) it was achieved mostly because the public followed the advice of the country's health experts (that includes masking, too)
And some countries (US, UK) were mostly a shitshow throughout.
Why not name a few?
The three restrictions Sweden had were that 1) groups needed to be fewer than 50 people, 2) people had to be seated at bars and alcohol couldn't be served after 10 pm and 3) those over 16 had to use online learning while those 15 and younger attended school
Sweden's response to the pandemic, along with mask-wearing and the lab-leak hypothesis, has long-since become yet another politicized issue. Call me crazy, but I suspect that many on the Left will be highly resistant to acknowledging anything positive about Sweden's Covid strategy.
And now I might make myself even more unpopular by pointing out that I was always sympathetic to the Sweden approach (as best I understand it). Certain measures here in the USA and other corners of the West, especially school closures, struck me as potentially doing more harm than good. There, I said it.
I do certainly remain open to further info that might change my perspective. And there's no question that Sweden simply found its own preferred set of pros and cons rather than some sort of magical solution. There are no silver bullets against pandemics. But I remember reading a recent science article which indicated little if any covid-related learning loss in Sweden. And that sort of thing really does seem worth taking into consideration.
Sweden relied heavily on school closings.
Pshaw - that is fake news. We've decided Sweden was a bastian of Freeedom and had a great outcome. So no one should ever do anything ever.
Except truly emulate Sweden.
Schools remained open for those under 16, but we have known since May 2020 that closing schools did nothing to slow the spread of coronavirus.
We didn't know any such thing in May 2020, and it is a questionable claim now. In any case, the school closings were intended primarily to protect vulnerable teachers at a time we had no vaccination or effective treatment against COVID. Teachers are asked to sacrifice enough without having to risk their health and lives for the crappy pay they get.
I'm pretty liberal and I think some restrictions in the USA were unnecessary or unhelpful. It's hard to navigate a pandemic with incomplete information, but you don't have any other choice.
In my area, we only had 3 months of school closings. We did have a small percentage of students go virtual the following year, but most kids were back in school by fall 2020, which I think is about as reasonable as you can expect.
I'm still not sure what Sweden did right or wrong, but they seemed to get through it OK, so that's a point in their favor.
Speaking of Sweden, something which popped up over at the Guardian recently: https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/07/sweden-worst-performing-eu-economy-bad-housing-policy
Starts with an S. Statistics? That would be boring.
But S as in es-cargot. That would be snails!
Also a red herring, still too obvious, clearly a trap. But drop the S and now it's cargot, as in cargo pants.
The countries that do worse have the least incidence of cargo pants. This is the power of statistics.
Imagine the decimation in North Korea. No wonder they're nuts.
[The S cancels out, you see, because it's shaped like a snake, so you have to run over it with your car, back up and run over it again, and whatever's left must be the right answer.]
My school couldn't afford an S license so we used R.
Why are Japan and South Korea never included in charts like this?
Maybe because it's a chart of European countries' results.
I must be very dumb. I don’t get it.
The line chart appears to show Sweden had lots of excess deaths (comparatively) early in the pandemic, but fewer excess deaths as time went on.
Might be something to learn here,
The main reason was that Sweden had a very mild flu season the year before thereby leaving many more vulnerable compared to other countries.
Don't know about the "S" but with the exception of Spain, Portugal and Greece, which are peninsular, the countries that did the best are cold places. The warm southern/Mediterranean countries fared poorly.
Taiwan, New Zealand and Australia have done well by global standards, and most of their citizens enjoy warm climates.
I suspect in the case of Europe, what we're seeing is simply the effect of wealth (the richest European countries are in in the north of the continent).
I'm indulging in cultural stereotyping here, but could that possibly be related to the fact that people in the Mediterranean countries tend to stand closer when talking to each other than is the case in the northern countries?
Socialized medicine? I think that's all of Europe....
So, just socialism?
What I noticed was how how much easier it was to read data from the lower chart.
You should separate the US into two groups.
Democrats died at a significantly lower rate than Republicans after the vaccine became politicized.
How did the sane 65% of America do? I know it isn't possible to exclude the 5% on the insane left and the 30% on the insane right. However, in this case, the evidence is there was a yuuge difference in deaths.
Now, do a plot against population density.
I wonder why Canada is never included in these charts.....