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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

You're cherry picking Portugal's screwup in general healthcare response when there are much better comparisons. The excess death rates in Sweden are much higher than all its neighbors which are much more comparable. At the peak z-scores of almost 15 in Sweden compared to less than 5 for Denmark, Finland and Norway. Right now Sweden is still of the 4 the one with more excess mortality.

https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

And yet we keep hearing the same argument. You just wait and enough people will die in all those places to make up the difference.

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I didn't cherry pick portugal. I used it as it is my country and I have the most data about it. I also used it because we were called 'the miracle' from media from Eastern Europe to even US media, and I didn't want to say anything about other countries that I could back up with evidence.

Today we had 680+ cases. Our ICU patients are increasing, but for 3+ months I heard how we were doing so much better than Sweden, how they were idiots, etc. But Since the beginning we had researches from the UK, our medical professionals, saying that we had too much excess deaths not being counted as COVID (statistically very improbably increase not being related) and we still kept acting like Swedish were idiots.

Now they have like 100 cases per day or so, with a test rate almost double that we have, when we are on average on 400, and climbing every week (was 200 daily average, then 250, 300 and now we are around 400).

They also has a 8% GDP drop vs 16% for PT, and we got into much more debt than they did to 'pay' for all the stopped economy, which they didn't (as much)

I'm also from Portugal and know our stats well. We're not doing well, and haven't really done all that well in the past either. Comparing Sweden to their 3 immediate neighbors makes a lot more sense.

I never understood that part (compare to neighbours).

There are so many different variables between countries, even neighbour ones, that it makes no sense.

Sweden old people homes are (from what I read) basically glorified death waiting rooms. People don't stay in them long (months vs years in other places). Also people movements during the high 'season' of covid spread is different (Students do different things in spring break between countries). etc etc etc etc.

Not saying Norway or whatnot is not doing better, just we don't really know. (Same as saying Portugal is doing great because look at it's neighbour spain kind of deal)

> Not saying Norway or whatnot is not doing better, just we don't really know.

But we do, excess deaths have all causes integrated. Comparing to the Nordic neighbors makes sense because they have more similarities than comparing to Portugal but feel free to compare to all the countries in that website. Sweden is worse than most.

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