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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

They have 3x the deaths per capita than germany and 30x that of south korea. "Better than italy or spain" is a rather low bar.

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One-third of which were in elderly homes [1]. This is an issue that's being worked on but apart from the failure to protect elderly homes, the Swedish strategy seems to be working well enough at the moment.

[1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/en-tredjedel-av-alla-dods...

If you discount those 1/3rd (why should you? it's still a policy failure) it would still be 2x the rate of germany.

It would still be high but it's honestly way too early to tell if Sweden is doing better or worse than Germany since the virus will likely be around for quite a while.

It's also worth pointing out that different countries haven't been reporting COVID-19 deaths in the same way. Finland, for example, have just now started including nursing home deaths in their statistics [1]. In Sweden, it's my understanding that pretty much anyone who was infected with and suspected of dying due to COVID-19 has been included in the statistics, even if the actual cause of death might have been something else.

[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_coronavirus_fata...

Even if other countries are missing some deaths (most are), these charts look still very different. Sweden 1200 deaths vs Finland&Norway at 80-150: https://images.app.goo.gl/krLeDxnBHCdQ9817A

>>One-third of which were in elderly homes [1].

That's entirely irrelevant. In Spain, about 80% of the deaths were of people over 70yo, with 40% concentrated on the cohort of between 70 and 80yo.

Let's also remember that some countries (like the UK) don't even include deaths in care homes in their numbers(!).

South Korea is a huge outlier.

Not really. If you look at the Asian Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan), and going by COVID-19 deaths per capita (rather than infection rates), South Korea is actually the worst performer.

Singapore is 2.5X better than South Korea. Hong Kong is 3+X better than Singapore. And Taiwan is 2X better than Hong Kong.

And it's got nothing to do with "but the West is free and democratic." Taiwan and South Korea are super-free democratic countries.

Stop letting western governments off the hook for their incompetence.

Singapore and Hong Kong have both had to go into lockdowns. Their death toll is lower because they reacted earlier, and everyone agrees the West should have reacted earlier, but they don't reveal fundamental flaws in western strategies if they have to do the same kinds of things.

Taiwan reacted incredibly early - their response started on 31 December, reportedly because some CDC official was trawling a web forum and happened to come across a screenshot of a Wuhan doctor's group chat. They've certainly done a lot of other things right, but I think it's fair to say that's a multiple week head start beyond what anyone else could reasonably have gotten. Heck, it was 2 weeks before the WHO famously declared there was no person-to-person transmission.

> Taiwan reacted incredibly early

Pretty interesting to guess why:

- they're Chinese, so they understand what's going on in China

- they in fact understand it better than mainlanders since they are not bound by the censorship therein

- they get first hand reports since iirc a million Taiwanese are in mainland China at any given time

- they are on constant alert against Pekin aggression

Taiwans reaction was great because they still very much had the last SARS outbreaks in mind, and as a state that has been denied WHO membership they have not many options other than making dead sure this is handled propperly as a pandemic in Taiwan could weaken it enough for mainland china to consider attacking them.

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