Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/26/uk-sweden-top-daily-covid-dea.html
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Meanwhile, in the White House, the reaction is “we can’t let Sweden beat us on these numbers. Any ideas on how to make us #1?”
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To get some perspective on the numbers, in Sweden average for earlier years is around 23 dead per million per day, and I imagine other countries are about the same.
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What? We’re number 4? Come on, America! We can do better than that if we just try a bit harder! Open the churches! Open the restaurants! We can be number one within two weeks! /s (except it’s what we are going to do so… maybe not.)
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Even easier: just be more thorough in counting the deaths that already occur. I suspect Brazil may be hard to beat though, from what I understand their undercount is dramatic.
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Sigh… the scientist in me is always watching for little details that let me distinguish a thoughtfully assembled data set from something spat out by a bot. Sure enough 
pops up… (ed: humour fail removed)
San Marino has (per Wikipedia) 32,000 people. Deaths per million is 4.21, so divide by 1m, multiply by 32k and times 7 since it’s a weekly moving average… yup: <=1 death. Checking the CSSE data, yup, 42 deaths, up from 41 last week.
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Ah, but that’s almost cheating and doesn’t get the churches and restaurants open. Undercounting and fake numbers is what this administration is all about.
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Yes, but this chart is average daily death rate in the last 7 days. So one death in the last week means 0.14 averaged daily rate. The number in the chart is correct.
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The number in the chart is correct.
It is, not saying it isn’t, but statistically it’s sloppy to put San Marino at the top of the chart when the sample size is so small.
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Iran, Russia, and China itself have been in the forefront of enforced undercounts as a matter of public policy, so we have a hard time knowing where on the graph they should properly be. (For that matter, include all authoritarian and soon-to-be authoritarian nations like: Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, Poland.)
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Yes, San Marino is unique, as it’s in the middle of the Italian hotspot. It would be the equivalent of treating Westchester, NY as it’s own country.
Brazil is very likely to climb – rapidly – in the next few weeks.Their testing figures are very low and Bolsinero is even more in denial than Trump. Watch out for Indonesia as well, very little testing with a large population and huge disparities of wealth distribution. And of course who know what the real figures might be in China, as they aren’t releasing much data (or at least data that it remotely accurate).
The Worldometer site keeps up to the hour (you might even catch the US as it crosses the 100000 death mark later today) figures for country, with country data sortable by several factors.
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Population density is important to consider too, but still this makes bleak reading at a time when the UK government is for some reason easing lockdown restrictions.
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Right - when it comes to population per capita data, when you have a very small number of people, it skews your numbers way off. Like in the past on BB we have looked at gun deaths and a small county in KS looks as violent as Kansas City due to a single suicide.
So yeah, statistically these charts are correct, but it does give a skewed perception at how bad (or good) something is.
I am not sure if including it is helper or hurting, but most people are going to say “who? where?” and skip over it.
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and I can’t see spain anywhere, and they should be up there with UK…
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Are you telling me America isn’t #1 Rob? Love it or leave it!
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That’s ridiculous. It’s line 4 for everyone. Just because some programming languages begin array indices at zero doesn’t mean anyone would interpret this line as line 3, “computer person” or not.
That high horse you’re sitting on looks suspiciously like a hobby horse to the rest of us.
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We know Sweden didn’t lock down, & my memory is that the UK locked down late because for a while Boris Johnson refused to take Covid-19 precautions seriously. To me that’s the message of these graphs: continue to shelter in place.
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The good news is that even at 4.52/million, it’s going to take over 600 years for the 'vid to kill everyone in the UK.
Wheeeereereeee! Stats! A game the whole family can play!
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I took the liberty to visit Folkhälsomyndigheten (Public Health Agency of Sweden) to work it out for myself. Thus, for the measuring public, here are two charts with Sweden’s death statistics.
A lot of statistics are available, some in spreadsheet format that I used to produce the above charts. Sorry I could not find any English language versions of the data to share. From those we can conjecture that the European agency have about a week’s processing and handling lag, which seems plausible.
Enjoy…sort of…
For a qualitative assesment of the Swedish story, from a swede, I’d be happy to oblige.
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This podcast has interviews with both Swedish and non-Swedish epidemiologists, and seemed like an unusually balanced assessment to me:
Their Norwegian counterpart does an interesting daily report I’ve been following, comparing the Nordic countries. However, it does not do rolling averages, and does not make the Swedish data available:
https://www.fhi.no/contentassets/ca5914bd0aa14e15a17f8a7d48fa306a/2020.05.26-norden-og-verden-covid-19.pdf
How hard would it be to produce similar charts to yours with Stockholm removed? The Oslo papers have coupled criticism of Tegnell with the suggestion that the rates in cities like Malmö are not all that much worse than Oslo; it would be interesting to see the extent to which that is reflected in these numbers.
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