> France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, all have worse CFR's than Sweden.
I mean if we're gonna talk about cherry-picking, did you notice that more than half of the countries you picked were the earliest hot-spots of the outbreak in Europe?
In any case, although the comment you are referring to mentions CFR, the article itself does not use CFR, it uses "Confirmed deaths per million people" as its metric. Still hard to see Sweden as a particularly standout good case in that data.
Sweden political narrative a few months ago was: "we are doing much better than other European countries by doing different."
Then they had to shut down secondary schools and universities, ban assemblies over 50 people, extend paid sick-leave without consulting a doctor to 21 days and no first-day penalty, forbid visits in care homes, and other measures, and yet have a worst death per capita ratio than many countries, including their closest neighbors (and France where the lockdown was too late but effective nonetheless at flattening the death per capita ratio).
Sweden ratio is close to Italy’s death per capita, which is not considered a success in Europe.
The US death per capita ratio is still growing quite fast and will cross Sweden and Italy in a few days, later UK. Hopefully it will not reach Belgium levels…
So Sweden is certainly not a good example. Not the worst (Belgium is so sad…) either. They managed, probably did some things right, as they have now a flattened death curve, but they had a few weeks to prepare and ended up with a similar ratio than Italy.
While I agree that it seems our strategy has gotten its results the past months, I don't really agree that this would point to it being a successful strategy overall. We will need to update our strategy for future pandemics. The most important part of Sweden's deaths (which imo i see way too few talk about) is that more ~98% of them are in ages >50.
I would say our strategy of trusting the population to by their own following safety precautions (not large gatherings, work from home of possible...) to keep the infection rate somewhat stable while infections increase, was ok. The thing we really need to change 'til next time is protecting our old and vulnerable better. Though that needs larger changes in the elder care as a whole so that will be a hard thing to achieve.
Because Sweden is done with the virus. Their countries death count is still rising. Sweden front-loaded their deaths everyone else is going to catch up.
I don't understand. Those countries were able to make it out without going "through" the massive death rates of countries like Sweden and the US. Do you think they are just delaying the inevitable? Will the whole world end up with a death rate as high as SWE?
