Sweden did not lockdown in response to COVID-19. Many politically-motivated COVID-19 contrarians try to support Sweden's policy by making misleading comparisons between Sweden + other countries. This thread will address that.
Italy, Spain, + Belgium suffered from the pandemic earlier than did Sweden. So those 3 countries has less time to improve treatments, learn lessons from the responses of other countries, etc., than did Sweden.
So an ideal comparison to Sweden would be a country with:
- population and geographical size in the same vicinity as Sweden
- similar timing of the pandemic (being geographically near Sweden would help with that)
- prompt, relatively strong lockdown
So who fits that list?
8/S
Thus, comparing Sweden to other Nordic countries makes sense, even though Denmark is at a disadvantage due to a smaller population + smaller geographic size.
2019 population (in millions):
Sweden - 10.2
Denmark - 5.8
Finland - 5.5
Norway - 5.3
There are other benefits to selecting Nordic countries as a comparison to Sweden, such as some similar economic, climate, etc. factors impacting countries located so close to one another + sharing cultural/historical ties.
Just remember that the next time politically-motivated COVID-19 contrarians use misleading comparisons to defend Sweden's no-lockdown response to COVID-19.
There's a reason Sweden is such an outlier in its region:
Thread on a myth Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) continues to peddle to undermine confidence in public health agencies and to suit his policy agenda.
The myth may undermine responses to future public health emergencies.
Reporting systems are not perfect, so they sometimes miss infected people. That makes reported cases less than total infections, and thus CFR is higher than IFR.
The WHO was open about this since the early stages of the pandemic: