List of countries by CFR:
Belgium 13.22% UK 13.07% Italy 12.97% Netherlands 11.13% France 10.98% Spain 10.46% Sweden 10.09% Iran 6.25% Brazil 6.04% Greece 4.65% Switzerland 4.64% Denmark 4.63% USA 4.25% China 4.06% Poland 3.62% Ireland 3.54% India 3.43% Canada 3.34% Portugal 3.31% Austria 2.74% Germany 2.66% Peru 2.23% Finland 2.22% Turkey 2.15% Norway 2.15% S. Korea 2.12%
Sweden's not in an enviable position on that list, and it's only going to get worse.
"The difference between stupidity
and genius is that genius has its limits."
--Alexandre Dumas-fils
To play devil's advocate on a purely procedural point, CFR is currently dependent on a lot of factors other than government response to mitigate the spread.
It could be because testing is being focused only on those showing serious symptoms, producing a much lower confirmed-case figure, which would exaggerate the deaths in relation.
It could be because of differences in evaluating what qualifies as a "death due to COVID-19".
It could be because the tests they've been using are garbage and not working (true in the USA, at least, according to recent info).
It's way too early to draw firm conclusions about these figures. A country that tests everyone who wants a COVID-19 test will have much higher infection rates, and much lower mortality rates relative to that figure, just by increasing the testing. But that does not mean the testing is doing much to mitigate the spread; if the populace are already self-isolating, then a confirmed test doesn't change much for any particular individual; they'd be a bit more stringent than they already were. Or it could be. Again, we flatly don't know.
At this point, comparing figures like this is essentially comparing apples to oranges; there is no standardization behind them.
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Case Fatality Rate.
It's laughable that you don't even get that you're just poking holes in your own fantasy.
Their rates are lower not because they're more medically advanced, obviously, but because they're either a) at the beginning of their infection curve, and/or b) they're testing much more than others at their same point in the infection curve, which artificially lowers their CFR compared to others.
Because the IFR for the virus is the same everywhere.
So you're just pointing out that it's not the quality of the medical care that's affecting this global variation in CFR, it's how widespread the testing is.
The even more sad part is that you're pointing at the tests per capita and showing that Sweden is high. Yet they're still showing a CFR that's super high, which simply means that the virus has just spread like wildfire among their population.
"The difference between stupidity
and genius is that genius has its limits."
--Alexandre Dumas-fils
Well that list gives a whole wrong image of things let's take us in comparison to other nations.
Covid19 deaths for us are counted: Hospital deaths (tested), Elderly homes or other care homes (untested counted), deaths under reasonable suspicion (Not tested counted)
@PhaelixWW Why your list is not worth considering as a benchmark for how well a nation is doing and i call into question what the purpose of that stat actually is, beyond creating some sort of disturbing competition on who is reporting the least amount of deaths.
COVID-19: how is Belgium doing compared to other countries?
First of all: we should not compare apples and oranges. Belgium is now including all deaths in its daily figures, i.e. confirmed corona deaths in hospitals together with deaths in care homes, including many unconfirmed COVID-19 cases. It is not always clear whether the people who died in a care home actually succumbed because of the novel corona virus. So this is why our daily rate may look high.
In order to make the right comparison, we should only take into account the deaths in hospital, like the countries listed below do (France, Netherlands, U.K. and Italy). Since a couple of days, these deaths are reported separately from the care home deaths by the National Crisis Centre.
In addition you have to consider we are densely populated and even that being the case we still have about 80% of our ICU bed capacity. That being roughly 4K beds free.
And as the graph in the article will show you if we just include data like other nations do like deaths in hospitals we are well below most neighbouring nations, so that data can be throw in the trash an ignored for comparison purposes.
On another note, the WHO has declared the Airport of Leige to be main one for medical supplies.
Source?
But you're making my point exactly. You can artificially "lower" the CFR compared to other countries by doing massive testing. But you can't likewise artificially raise the CFR. The only way a higher CFR happens is if the virus is far, far more widespread than your current testing, whatever per capital levels they may be, are suggesting it might be.
Lulz. That's absolutely ridiculous. It's all anyone is doing. It's what you've been doing here.
Comparing deaths, comparing cases, comparing the ratio of the two, comparing testing. None of it is "standardized", but we muddle through the best we can, and don't even start pretending to be above it.
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Yep, they're at the beginning of their curve. It's why their CFR is so low (as deaths lag behind infections by a few weeks). It's also why their testing per capita is so low, because the virus isn't very widespread... yet.
It'll get a lot worse for India.
"The difference between stupidity
and genius is that genius has its limits."
--Alexandre Dumas-fils
Discussing about mortality rate right now is a futile exercise.
All the numbers are wrong ,even the number of deaths ( many countries are just starting to account the deaths in geriatric centers...now) and on top of that almost every research center suggest that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg regarding infections ( the imperial college 10 days ago calculated that the real numbers were between 10x an 70x for some countries).
Curve of hospitalizations ( not even the absolute number...the curve) is the real measure we should be looking at. There's demographic differences like population age,cultural like the number of smokers,geographical like the population density ( it would be ridiculuous thinking the virus is gonna spread through the nation territory at the same speed in a small country like Belgium over a giant like US)...and many others but once this shit is done we will look back and we are gonna see that western world is a rather homogenous bubble and that there's not gonna be a huge difference in numbers ( in real numbers not this current mess).
So how am I doing? Look at the curve of an objective data like hospitalizations given that, as I said, the percentage of people who needs medical treatment is not gonna be widely different among countries.
At that point you'd have to question the very consistent number of daily hospitalizations due to Corona in Sweden for the past three weeks. If the virus is spreading like a wildfire, the daily number of hospitalizations should also increase like a wildfire. But it does not.
People are arguing the toss about the statistics and how testing rates impact them.
Truth is, a lot of things impact the statistics. Some countries will only count fatalities confirmed with a test. Some will include "covid like" symptoms such as pneumonia and some will exclude them so unless you are pretty familiar with each methodology its hard to even begin to compare them.
In the UK for instance, the office for national statistics did this https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52278825
which show deaths are up pretty dramatically compared to the numbers expected. If you want to see whats happening in Sweden, I'd advise a similar approach (its probably been done somewhere). It's approaching the numbers from a different angle.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3
Another step — the one that leading scientists are best prepared to address — was working out the most reliable test to use. Many decided against the CDC’s version. “I don’t want to be disparaging, but the people who made the CDC kit simply failed at molecular biology — they created a nightmare,” says Urnov. He considered using the WHO’s recommended protocol, but worried about running out of essential components, because labs worldwide are using this test. Left and right, he says, researchers were talking about shortages. U
China is tightening its grip on coronavirus research
Some scientists welcome government vetting because it could stop poor-quality COVID-19 papers being published – others fear it is an attempt to control information.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01108-y
Doesn't it, though? The info from here certainly makes it look like those hospitalization numbers are still climbing upward. 30-45 new ICU hospitalizations ever day since 3/23 (23 days). In that time, total active ICU usage has gone from 103 beds to 954 beds used.
This graph also belies that idea:
And it doesn't even take into account the continuation of the rise during the last week.
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Yeah, that was the first test, literally months ago, back when there were under a hundred cases in the US. It has nothing to do with, like, 98% of the tests done in the US, and certainly not recently, as Endus claimed.
"The difference between stupidity
and genius is that genius has its limits."
--Alexandre Dumas-fils
You need to see statistics in the context in which they are produced. Weekends trough and the days after a weekend catch up. So this week you'll see a spike Wed/Thurs as countries catchup after Easter.
You can't just look at Sunday and say "yay, they are lower!" We have to look a little bit wider.