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Comment by jadamczyk | Hacker News Reader

Looking only at excess mortality is pretty shallow. Being European and knowing the differences in health care systems across countries, the excess mortality chart also reflects the quality of healthcare systems in these countries. It isn’t much surprise to see nordic countries being the best here.

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Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries. Three of the four Peaks of high mortality in Spain coincided with holiday season: April 2020 (Holy Week, first big holiday after the first case registered 31-jan), June (Start of the holidays) and August (peak of Summer holidays).

After seen how each government reacted in the pandemic, I just assume that everybody lied in the statistics.

> Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries.

Why do you feel that tourism is relevant?

The probability of being hit by a pandemic originated on a different country is proportional to the number of travelers moving in and out of the country (each one with a small probability of carrying the virus). Put the same amount of people visiting Swedden without any mask and the result would had been very different so "our plan: good and the other's: bad" is just too simplistic.

The variable excess deaths in a country depends also of how much people lives there. To have 100000 people killed by Covid is a different situation if your population is 9 millions or 60 millions. If millions of people visit a touristic location you will unavoidably have an increase in the people that died there just by accident. And accidents happen more often when there is alcohol and party involved. If a German died by heart attack while sunbathing in Marseille or another English commit balconing after drinking booze for all day in Valencia; those will be computed in the list of France/Spain deaths or is a +1 in the Germany/UK excess death?. Is unclear here. There was a lot of creative management of the info by everybody in the Covid years.

And there are a lot of other factors that must be taken in mind, like healthcare, but the main problem still is a question of trust. We don't have tools to verify if this data is real or not.

The interesting part is mostly comparing the nordic countries against each other. Sweden seemed to be doing much much worse early on due to the chosen strategy, but that no longer seems to be the case.

However, is NL (e.g.) healthcare that much worse compared to SE?

I don't know enough about Sweden, but while the overall quality of our healthcare is high, its capacity is tailored very tightly to normal situations and we have very little slack for an epidemic like this. So Dutch ICs overflowed while Germany still had space (and a lot of people were in fact transferred there).

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