Today's episode of "Sweden's masterclass on How to Lie with Statistics to keep its people content" #coronasverige #CoronaVirusSverige #covid19 #SwedenInDenial
Notice anything odd on the image below? Y axis missing, and is very much off-scale nyhetsbyran.org/2020/05/06/svt…
Notice anything odd on the image below? Y axis missing, and is very much off-scale nyhetsbyran.org/2020/05/06/svt…
SvT tv show in which they were comparing testing in Denmark vs Sweden. Blatantly dishonest with the Swedish bar unreasonably high. (If adjusted per population, it would have looked even worse)
When you compare Sweden to our Nordic neighbors, make sure to omit the Y axis (again) so that our numbers don't look so dire (ht and via @edalmaxwell)
The "ever-falling-death-count". Complicated trick, watch closely. The numbers of deaths get updated daily, but they often go to add to the totals of previous days (up to a few weeks back). In this way, the bars of the last few days *always* seem declining
{I am *not* claiming that deaths are steadily rising, nor plateauing. It's always early to know. Truth is, we always need to wait a good 3 weeks to have a clear sense of a steady trend, but the constant impression that things seem to get better is deceiving}
Selective use of evidence at its best (this is beautiful). Tegnell goes on tv to show that countries that use face masks have high numbers of deaths. The bloody red was a tad too dramatic perhaps? (ht @edalmaxwell)
It would be nice to compare Sweden to other countries that have been using face masks such as Czech Republic, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina. What happened there to the death rates? (note, log scale, so the distances are actually very great)
When you compare Sweden to other countries, always pick the handful (literally, it's only a handful) that are performing worse than you, so that you show up at the bottom of the ranking (ht and via @edalmaxwell)
Because in so many other lights, data would look extremely unflattering for Sweden. For instance,
1. Sweden and the UK are the only 2 of that sad group where numbers are not noticeably going down yet
1. Sweden and the UK are the only 2 of that sad group where numbers are not noticeably going down yet
2. Or, you want to look at the last 7-day rolling average of deaths per million people (how many of our people have we lost to the virus this past week, compared to our population?) Sweden is performing worst in the world. Why is this not news? Source ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-…
Vanity metrics, ignore the rest: Yesterday at the press conference Sweden reported 114 new deaths, cases steady or not falling, unknown transmission rate. They did praise that the ICU beds occupancy was going down (blue line)
And again, this *might* be a good sign, I concede, but a) there is a big concern about the new infections, which is always hovering high since early April b) too much focus on empty beds, why not on lives saved?
(And a chapter of its own would be needed for how flattering media have helped the FHM and the Swedish government portray optimistic, rosy pictures, but that's for another day)
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