Sweden Picked The Wrong Strategy. Period. Dot. -- May 24, 2020

The single Wuhan flu meme that I detest the most: Sweden did best among the Scandinavian countries. What a bunch of malarkey. Absolutely not true, and not true by a long shot. At 396 deaths per million, Sweden has more than 9x the number of deaths as Norway, on a per capita basis.

Link: country data.

Yesterday: new deaths:

• #10 Sweden: 67
• #87 Denmark: 0
• #90 Finland: 0
• #93 Norway: 0 

Deaths per million population:

• #8: Sweden at 396
• #12 USA at 298
• #25 Germany at 100
• #26 Denmark at 97
• #34 Finland at 55
• World at 44
• #41 Norway at 43

I track the Scandinvian Wuhan flu statistics here.

Updates

May 16, 2020: update -- In fact, Sweden did not "win the contest," by criteria set by the mainstream press:

 

Original Post

 
Yesterday I posted this:

Sweden and Wuhan flu: Sweden is getting a lot of positive press about how that country handled the coronavirus. When one actually sees the data, one gets another impression. If one has time to read only one article on Wuhan flu today, this would be the article. 

This is the meme: Sweden won the argument.

Here is the graphic:

The CDC default spreadsheet is ranked by total number of cases, which is incredibly irrelevant, immaterial, and illogical. But for the record, here is the ranking provided by the CDC based on total number of cases:

#1: USA
#2: Spain
#3: Italy
#4: UK
#11: China
#14: Belgium
#22: Sweden
#39: Denmark
#44: Norway
#52: Finland

Now, rank them on number of total deaths per capita:

#1: San Marino
#2: Belgium
#3: Andorra
#4: Spain
#10: Sweden (283 deaths per one million population)
#14: USA
#23: Denmark (87 deaths per one million population)
#32: Finland (44 deaths per one million population)
#38: Norway (40 deaths per one million population)

Total deaths:

Sweden: 2,854
Denmark: 503
Finland: 246
Norway: 215

Sweden:Norway

• 13x the number of total deaths
• 7x the number of total deaths/capita

By any measure, Sweden did much, much worse than its Scandinavian neighbors, and it wasn't even close.