Sweden currently has lowest new covid19 cases per capita in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Sweden currently has lowest new covid19 cases per capita in Europe

ourworldindata.org

29 pointsrossdavidh25 comments

The probable reason is that they only rarely test vaccinated people.

https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency...

In addition they don't test kids:

The Public Health Agency of Sweden recommends that those who are unvaccinated with symptoms of COVID-19 get tested to see if they have an ongoing infection. The same recommendation applies to children of school age and older, i.e., from about 6 years of age. Younger children of preschool age are primarily advised to stay at home if they are ill, without taking a test. The regions decide which people should be tested. There may be regional variations from the national recommendations, so you need to find out what applies in the region where you are.

If either of those were the reason, wouldn't we expect that to have made a difference throughout most of the pandemic? In other words, we wouldn't expect them to have just recently become the lowest in Europe, they would have appeared to be the lowest for a while now.

There are only two Covid statistics that matter—Deaths and hospitalization due to Covid. If those two stats are trending downward, great. All this demand for testing every time someone gets a cough or sniffle creates unnecessary authoritarian reactions to what for most is a mild illness.

There are many posts here deriding the Swedish "success", claiming that the low SARS2 incidence is either caused by not testing, by only testing unvaccinated, that Sweden used to have a higher incidence and more of such. All these replies are missing the significance of the fact that Sweden, possibly due to the fact that it never locked down, that it never hid children behind masks, that life has been far less affected than in neighbouring countries now may well have a better chance of riding out the "fifth wave" without the spikes seen in other countries. In other words, the Swedish approach may actually have been the better one by limiting the duration of the epidemic. Time will tell but if this ends up being true let it be a lesson for all those who call for stringent measures.

Note: lowest _new_ covid-19 cases. They're more like the middle of the pack, even above average, in _total_ cases per capita.

I agree that focusing in the number of cases today is a bad idea. Anyway, since the middle of May 2021 they are below the average of Europe https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

Edit: I just notice my link is for confirmed death, and you say confirmed cases https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Sweden is still above the average of Europe.

The problem is that I only look at the death number. It's too difficult to compare the number of cases, because there is a lot of asymptomatic cases, and very mild symptom cases and the detection depends how much each country is testing. Death are more difficult to hide.

Yes. You need to look at testing rates, and positive rates to have a meaningful comparison.

where is the mention of false positives with low quality commercial testing here ?

Any positive non-PCR test in the Nordic countries would be confirmed with a new PCR test before reaching the official statistics.

It seems claims about Sweden are the go-to for people thirsty to promote vaccine and lock-down skepticism. It’s just sad, because the claims are always eviscerated, yet they keep going back to the Swedish case as if this time it’ll be different.

The most suceptible people to Covid are already dead.

I'm not sure if you're jesting, but I was wondering about that. Does this indicate that they have run closer to "completion"? Or that they're just lagging a few weeks behind the rest of Europe this time?

Spain and Italy are also somewhat lower than Germany, Austria, etc., which would fit the theory of just having more cases early, but Belgium and the Netherlands (also early high rates) are much higher. Also, per capita mortality in Sweden and France is quite similar the entire pandemic, but France seems to be seeing more of an uptick.

But, again, it will be an anomaly more in need of an explanation if it actually persists for more than a week or two, and there is still at this point the possibility that it is simply a delay in spiking upwards compared to the rest of Europe rather than not doing it at all.

It was a morbid joke, but I also wonder about how truthful it is, also in a morbid way.

The countries that had strong outbreaks like Spain and Sweden have quite good numbers. Sure, testing ratios make it difficult to compare, but I do believe that many people probably caught it and those that survived are probably less likely to spread it further.

Still, by absolute numbers of dead Sweden does look worse compared to its neighbors. We probably need to compare numbers when those countries went through the current wave.

They have low death rate too. 117 deaths = 1.125 covid-19 deaths per 100,000 in the last 28-days

The weak are dead & vaccinations work.

Covid-deaths per 100,000 during the epidemic:

  Sweden:  145    
  Finland:  22.7

Curious as to why the post is flagged?

Because it’s misleading, countries have different methodologies and different coverage for testing Sweden doesn’t test vaccinated and only tests symptomatic unvaccinated, it also doesn’t do testing for children on any substantial level.

In the UK for example children are tested with lateral flow tests multiple times a week and each lateral flow test that isn’t negative also then requires a PCR test.

Also it seems that Sweden only accounts for PCR tests for reporting of cases, many countries now report positives from both PCR and antigen testing.

So this is still pushing the narrative that Sweden was right to not enforce a lockdown, which can easily be used to push the narrative that the looming lockdowns across Europe aren’t needed or won’t help.

Well, the relevant point was that it's different than what we saw a year ago. So, unless there's been a big change in how Sweden measures now compared to a year ago, or a big change in how the rest of Europe measures now compared to a year ago, the change in per capita cases is still interesting.

The CDC estimate of US cases, by the way, is that there are 4.2 times as many actual cases as we catch via PCR. So I'm quite certain that Sweden (and every other country in Europe) miss a lot of cases, but unless their methodology changes over time, the change in the ratio over time indicates that _something_ has changed.

Yes there has been a big change in both which is mentioned in my comment.

Most countries still do testing for everyone and encourage it, many countries do tests at schools for children. Sweden is now only testing unvaccinated people that show symptoms and doesn’t do testing for school going children.

Our world in data isn’t a good source for anything out of context. Same goes for vaccine coverage you can see countries with 90%> vaccination coverage but a limited scope or eligibility whilst other countries with a far wider eligibility criteria have lower coverage. And with the booster shots things get even more complicated. You can’t compare apples with oranges…

Interesting! Do you know when (about) this change happened? In the U.S. we only do testing (normally) for people who feel symptoms and go to get tested, so the lack of testing for school going children didn't register with me as unusual. Do most European countries require testing for school going children?

Looking into this, it appears that Sweden has recently backtracked on that change, so it will be interesting to see what kind of uptick we see in the next week or so! https://news.trust.org/item/20211117120236-6wk93

I don’t know about the US, I live in the UK which reports all testing including the at home self reported LF test results.

I don’t think that our world in data being a rubbish data source on its own is a new thing (any data source is rubbish without context), even in the beginning of the pandemic you had major discrepancies.

Perhaps other than for a short time when everyone was basically doing mass testing during the initial lockdown period around mid 2020 but pretty much since then and especially since the vaccine was rolled out every country has been doing their own thing.

Just to put things into perspective for the past month the UK averaged about 900K tests per day, Sweden averaged about 15,000… even if you account for Sweden having about 6.5 times fewer people it’s still a drastic difference. And whilst not everyone went as nuts as the UK, Italy is still doing about half a million tests a day.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-...

> So this is still pushing the narrative that Sweden was right to not enforce a lockdown, which can easily be used to push the narrative that the looming lockdowns across Europe aren’t needed or won’t help.

So is this an ‘unwanted’ narrative?

Lowest testing rate and sample size too… see no evil…

also a factor to consider is population density which is 10x lower than Germany

This argument does not take into account the fact that the majority of Swedish population lives in cities. The Stockholm metro area has about 2M people out of 10M in Sweden. Then there’s Malmö and Göteborg..

Or if you turn it around, if Germany bought Siberia and their population density went down, would they see the an improvement in the situation?

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