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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

> several orders of magnitude more deaths than in comparable neighboring countries

One order of magnitude, not several.

And not really worst that the rest of Europe...

Just dramatically worse than their comparable neighbors who, unlike the rest of Europe, share the same cultural/demographic/socio-economic factors. Nothing screams denialist more than people trying to hand-wave the Swedish failure away by ignoring neighbors and comparing them to some other, bigger, EU covid clusterfuck.

According to [0] Sweden has better deaths per capita than the US, UK, Spain and Italy. We still have no data about what the longer term effects of all these business closures will be, because the pandemic is ongoing. And at the time the decisions were made it was wishful thinking that a vaccine would be almost upon us by now.

This Swedish "failure" is not yet manifest. They are an apparently weak performer, but by no means outside the pack. And the better performers in the pack are suspect - India and China may as well be several different countries packed together by population. Their numbers are a bit unrealistic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

Traditionally, Sweden has compared itself to other Nordic countries, which, as mentioned, share the same cultural/demographic/socio-economic factors.

Now the comparison points have suddenly switched to Italy and UK, or I've seen even Peru and Brazil. Which really screams "denialist".

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

For the note, I don't think it is meaningful to compare these statistics between other countries than OECD members. For instance, the Wikipedia list you mentioned indicates currently 45,000 deaths for Russia, whereas the Russian deputy prime minister has now said that the figure would be 186,000.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55474028

To be honest it sounds pretty denialist to me when someone says you have to compare Denmark, Sweden and Norway, but adding other countries is "not comparable". To me it just sounds like cherry picking.

An example of a big difference between Denmark and Sweden is that Sweden has a much more lenient immigration policy (for better or worse). I have heard anectodes from (swedish) friends about how these groups fare worse. I can very much imagine that differences like this make the comparison between the nordic countries less valid, so to me it makes sense not to cherry pick those three countries.

It isn’t cherry-picking, it is a standard that existed long before covid. The Nordic countries have always compared themselves to each other and have been lumped into a group externally. They share many similar characteristics and few differences — the immigration straw you are grasping at is indeed weak sauce and not significant-enough to account for the scope and magnitude of Sweden’s covid failures.

I know these countries are often compared. My point is that it is not a very good comparison to make in all cases. And mind you, the original claim was that a comparison between Sweden, UK, Spain etc. was not valid "because you should compare Sweden to Denmark and Norway". Where should you draw this imaginary line of which countries can and cannot be compared? Sure Saudi Arabia and Sweden are pretty hard to compare, but why not include the baltic states? Germany? US?

It's also very strange to me when people compare the nordic countries they forget that there are real differences between them. The difference in immigration policy is one plausible factor for a different response to Covid. I'm not claiming that the high death toll is caused by immigrants, I'm claiming that the lenient Swedish immigration policy adversly affected the death toll, compared to a more strict one like Denmarks. Is that a straw man argument because it doesn't fit a specific version of reality?

They have higher numbers of migrants and that makes up (part of) the difference (https://apnews.com/article/1d7916cf6e48b7a231b894ef9cda1a19).

But the worst in Northern Europe, by far.

Which metrics are you using?

Deaths attributed to Covid, or excess mortality in general, take your pick.

For example:

Sweden:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

Norway:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

UK is worse, Belgium is worse.

Being German, I don't consider these countries part of Northern Europe. While the UN might put the UK there (but not Belgium), the way I got taught the terminology, the UK would belong to Nordwesteuropa as a sub-region of Westeuropa, whereas Nordeuropa consists of the Nordics (and maybe the Baltics).

Cf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Grossgli...

You can definitely consider Scotland part of Northern Europe.

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