Oh look, a NYT article with a glibly ignorant statistical comparison;
Quote:
Sweden's total death toll reached 7,667 as of Tuesday. The country now has 74 deaths per 100,000 people, less than the United Kingdom, with 97, but far more than its neighbor Norway, with seven.
The devil, as they say, is in the details...
Quote:
Many observers argue along the lines of the Latin expression post hoc ergo propter hoc, usually translated as "after this, thus because of this." The idea is that because Sweden's horrific death rates followed its refusal to lock down its society as strictly as other countries, the latter must have been the cause of the former.
We invoke another Latin expression as more pertinent to Sweden's excess corona deaths: ceteris paribus, or "all things equal." Many international observers, particularly Americans, might make the mistake of thinking that all the Nordic countries are the same Minnesota-sized countries with roughly the same language and culture and social-democratic institutions.
Not so. Sweden differs in identifiable ways from Norway, Finland, and Denmark. Moreover, the pandemic is particular, and the particulars of time and place can matter enormously.
Most people don't want to spend the time to research views opposite that of the majority/previously held positions. I'd encourage more people to do so, however.
Quote:
By using the timing of lockdowns, we discuss a more devastating argument against the belief that they would have helped Sweden much. The other Nordics rapidly closed their borders and societies around March 12, which is the date when a counterfactual Sweden could have followed its Nordic peers and done the same. According to the World Health Organization, it takes something like 12 days from first corona symptoms to death add another few days from exposure to first symptoms. We simply calculate 18 days from March 12 (the red bar in the figure below) and suggest that spread and infections before then could not have been prevented by a lockdown:
Now, sure, it is cold in all of the nordic countries (peak ILI season there), their politicians are largely under pressure to "do something" and the data denialists are advocating strongly that Sweden has uniquely failed. The data just doesn't show that, when honestly studied.
