Which countries have protected both health and the economy in the pandemic? | Hacker News Reader

Which countries have protected both health and the economy in the pandemic?

ourworldindata.org

39 points_Microft46 comments

I don’t think I’d agree with the author’s characterization of the data. The graphs don’t seem to show any obvious trends, really. If anything, the graphs show how wildly variable the virus’ impact can be even among countries with similar economic and demographic profiles.

I'm not sure I agree with the source article's characterization of its data. There have to be confounding factors, given how widely the GDP impact varies among countries with similar death rates. So a negative correlation across countries doesn't demonstrate that individual countries don't face tradeoffs.

Quite fascinating, no India our there. India is worst affected, both Covid wise and economy wise. Worst mismanagement of all time.

Agree India should have been included. But they measured deaths per capita and I think India is still very low on that scale.

Could be more interesting to include both deaths and hospitalized or do another comparison but then include all void-19 cases in each country.

Like other commenters pointed out, I think it's important to look at the economy of each country. Spain's GDP, for example, heavily relies on tourism (12%, according to official sources [1]), with most of that happening during the summer. Almost no one is traveling to Spain right now, so you could expect almost a 12% drop in GDP. That's a big chunk of the 22% drop you see in the chart.

[1]: https://www.ine.es/dyngs/INEbase/en/operacion.htm?c=estadist...

Australia's not shown but it's been mostly business as usual apart from the tourism industry and brick&mortar retail which have been basket cases for years.

Peak contraction was something like 16% in April during the main lockdown and had rebounded back to year-on-year growth by June. Some industries like home renovation have been booming.

Queensland in particular with an equivalent population to New Zealand still only has 6 fatalities.

Australia spent $200bn within the space of a few months on direct welfare handouts alone, retailers selling imported junk are now giving out special dividends to investors like it's the peak of an economic boom.

It's yet to be shown they've handled the economic side well and I doubt history will judge the fiscal response positively.

That's a lot of wasted opportunity with regards to infrastructure spending. The National Broadband Network in comparison cost $40bn and estimates for an East coast high speed rail network from Brisbane to Melbourne came out at just over $100bn by infrastructure Australia and was deemed much too expensive to proceed by both sides of politics despite having a valid ROI business case drawn up.

More like $101 billion to date (over 6 months).

They announced 130bn initially, then revised that down by 60 due to an accounting error. I think there was need for an additional 15bn with Victoria going back into lockdown and some other extensions.

Probably well spent as any money you give directly to workers quickly circulates back into the economy. There's no trickle down, but it definitely floats to the top.

Wouldnt spending money on infrastructure create need for people to be in the same physical location to do at least the manual work part of building infrastructure? Recent maintenance of electricity infrastructure in this street created a congregation of at least 8 people.

Also building infrastructure seems like a win win but after the infrastructure is built there is also a commitment to maintain the infrastructure. Isnt this like signing up for a recurring expense? Too often I think politicians and others think of it like a one off purchase to garner votes.

See this: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/4/30/my-city-has-ma...

I am reminded of Switzerland before WWII. They read the German newspapers and listened to German radio and were well attuned to the Nazi threat. By making Switzerland too tough a nut to crack, they prevented invasion: something no other bordering state accomplished.

Taiwan is in a similar situation with the colossus next door. The disease threat from China is well understood in Taiwan and they took effective measures with the first rumblings from Wuhan. Masks and partitions were mandated and supplied. Suspected contacts were put up in hotels to prevent familial transmission. The quarantined people were supplied with food and a stipend and visited frequently to ensure their needs were taken care of.

The CDC had attachés stationed in the US embassy in Beijing until Trump cut their budget.

Canada had a respected emergent disease monitoring service that got neutered by being put under the thumb of bureaucrats.

> By making Switzerland too tough a nut to crack

I remember reading that most "oligarchs" in Germany and other parts of Europe had their interests there, and for that reason Hitler didn't want to mess with it.

I'm not sure Switzerland would have been "too tough" for the German army otherwise.

This was part of their defense (and there is no sarcasm intended in this comment). It was a true defense in depth, from mining the tunnels and arming the citizenry to diplomatic efforts to make themselves not worth invading (or conversely, worth leaving alone).

Similar strategies are adopted in nature, both by animals and plants.

Is the pandemic over? Because if it isn't, there is no way to tell yet.

Sweden and Belarus

There is no data for Belarus but here is a link comparing Sweden with countries that have either comparable casualty rates (Spain, Italy, UK, USA) or comparable or even less economic contraction (Denmark, Lithuania, South Korea, Taiwan).

Sweden is the small blue circle to the right side of the large USA circle.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/q2-gdp-growth-vs-confirme...

Isn't Sweden one of the worst countries in terms of protecting health? Last I checked they were around around #7 in the world for highest death rate

They have had single digit death rates for months.

Your statement may have been accurate 3 months ago but have you looked lately?

They're done with Covid just like Tegnell predicted meanwhile a good amount of the world that locked down is still fighting it.

Are you referring to the case fatality rate? It's indeed single-digit for Sweden, albeit twice as high as other nordic countries or Germany:

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

Nice Cherry Picking.

France, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, UK, Netherlands, all have worse CFR's than Sweden.

Also, all of Europe in aggregate is pretty close to Sweden.

It's fascinating to see how people are so devoted to demonizing Sweden.

Also, CFR is a weird measure to use.

1 infection and 1 death is a 100% CFR even if the rest of the population is fine!!!!

ref: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

> 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.

That's almost every country in Europe. Not sure your claim that they're all hot spots stands up.

But I can see you're super invested in your narrative and we're not going to have a meeting of the minds on this one.

Best luck to you anyway.

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.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-covid-deaths-per-mi...

> 1 infection and 1 death is a 100% CFR even if the rest of the population is fine!

The number of infections per million inhabitants in Sweden is also not better than the numbers from countries from the selection. [0]

Maybe just pick a different of the nordic countries as new role model and argue for that in the future?

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

Nordic categorization is a cherry picked categorization to fit a demonizing of Sweden narrative.

Sweden is on par with the rest of Europe with all manner of their Corona stats.

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.

Well numerous Swedish epidemiologists would disagree with your assessment.

Why would the current death rate be a better metric than overall deaths?

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.

When will China and Taiwan catch up? You're talking about potentially millions of deaths

The only way out is through. It's all just delaying otherwise.

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?

There were no massive deaths in Sweden. Did you even look at wiki page?

I believe that Sweden currently has the 8th highest death rate in the whole world. Their 5,000 deaths look small because it's a small country. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

> everyone else is going to catch up.

Or get a vaccine.

Did you read the article? Or are you just regurgitating to Fox News talking points?

Sweden - on both health and economic measures - has fared nearly as worse as the United States (read: not great).

I have no idea what Fox News says, I used Wikipedia. Sweden did very good. Take a look at 'All-cause daily deaths 2015–2020'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden

Please read the article; it covers this. And as for your link--Sweden doesn't fare that well in contrast to some of its neighbors, and isn't really a standout case.

Sweden is doong better than almost all places now .

It has single digit death rates.

It's basically done with Covid.

Which neighbors are you referring too?

Let's say Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway. If ONLY THERE WAS AN ARTICLE SOMEWHERE THAT COVERED THIS.

> Notice too that countries with similar falls in GDP have witnessed very different death rates. For instance, compare the US and Sweden with Denmark and Poland. All four countries saw economic contractions of around 8 to 9 percent, but the death rates are markedly different: the US and Sweden have recorded 5 to 10 times more deaths per million.

I'm not trying to "demonize" Sweden, but the poster above is trying to imply that Sweden is some kind of exceptionally good case. By the metrics I can see, it's not that either.

Off topic: that was one of the most ambitious Wikipedia pages I've ever read.

How do people find time for these stuff?

WHO Special Envoy Heaps Praise on Sweden’s Covid Strategy

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-31/who-speci...

Two important notes on Sweden:

1. Its economy relies heavily on export. When the rest of the world do bad, Swedish economy does bad too.

2. It has been argued that Sweden has a very odd definition of covid deaths: if you had it when you died, you died of covid. Two recent studies showed that only 15% of those who "died of covid" actually died because of covid.

This might explain their very high death rate at care homes...

Edit: haven't read the studies and can't find them right now so don't quote me on that.

"2. It has been argued that Sweden has a very odd definition of covid deaths: if you had it when you died, you died of covid. Two recent studies showed that only 15% of those who "died of covid" actually died because of covid."

You are wrong. You are making the same lie that those in the usa are making when they try to claim that of 180,000 dead only 6% actually died of covid and the rest died with covid.

You die of covid when you die with fluid in your lungs of pneumonia. You die of covid when you get in a wreck and they have to take you to the next county over skipping the two hospitals that are overcrowded with covid patients. You die of covid when your heart gives out or you have respiratory failure. One thing causes the others and leads to the death.

Quit being ignorant or blatantly lying.

A source would help to make me fill like an idiot. Please make me feel like an idiot and have a source.

Indeed this reminds me of how they characterize dying "of old age." That nearly always means heart attack. Sometimes it means some other organ failure, and often it is connected to a cancer. But "old age" it is. Even though it could have been any one of dozens of conditions. It is often hard to tell whether those conditions are what killed them, or whether they aggravated a different condition enough to make that condition kill them.

I think a lot of the issue with Covid is deciding whether or not to label the deaths in that same manner. Some countries do. Others don't. And they'll probably never agree which one is right.

How do you die of covid? It makes you weak or shut downs an important system and you die. If you cant breathe because your lungs are not working due to covid, do you die because of suffacation or covid? Should that go to 15% or 85%?

I am sure can use this reasoning for quite a chunk of that 85%. When your body does not work as expected you will be more suspectible

What you mention goes into the 15%, the remaining 85% is basically "we also found traces of covid during autopsy"

Mind you, this whole argument could off course be nonsense and made up to make the authorities look good. But the statics over all deaths (someone posted a link in this thread) seems to partially confirm this.

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