I strongly suspect the correlation between developed countries and coronavirus cases has more to do with poorer countries not verifying coronavirus cases with testing than it does anything else.
I strongly suspect the correlation between developed countries and coronavirus cases has more to do with poorer countries not verifying coronavirus cases with testing than it does anything else.
josh1988 wrote:
Sweden has a death rate 12 times that of neighboring Norway yet they are doing the right thing? Crazy how people can disregard facts in order to get to the conclusion they want.
Give it a couple of years.
Then we'll see.
As of today, Sweden is leading the world in terms of new fatalities. The following are the top 10 countries in the world in terms of daily new fatalities per million, smoothed over 7 days, with the 2-week rate of change in daily new cases in brackets):
Sweden - 5.62 (-11.8%)
Brazil - 4.54 (+85.8%)
Peru - 4.18 (+40.0%)
UK - 3.80 (-41.7%)
Ecuador - 3.08 (insufficient data)
USA - 3.02 (-7.2%)
Mexico - 2.84 (+63.1%)
Canada - 2.73 (-14.7%)
Belgium - 2.50 (-44.0%)
Chile - 2.27 (_147.3%)
Sweden is declining gradually (new cases), so is likely to be caught by Brazil and Peru, and maybe eventually Mexico and Chile. But for the moment, Sweden is the champion! Yay herd immunity and easy restrictions!
Giles Corey wrote:
josh1988 wrote:
Sweden has a death rate 12 times that of neighboring Norway yet they are doing the right thing? Crazy how people can disregard facts in order to get to the conclusion they want.
Give it a couple of years.
Then we'll see.
Just two more weeks, right?
adelaide wrote:(1) Percent urbanized is really just a indicator or level of development rather than population density.
(2) To me the biggest unanswered question is why some Asian countries don't fit the pattern. Japan has the oldest population in the world (percent 65+) and the advanced economies such as S Korea and Taiwan are similar to the counties of Western Europe in terms of measures such as life expectancy, percent in poverty, etc. I suspect if you removed Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore your correlations would be even higher.
(1) Great call. Urban population is completely uncorrelated with overall population density, but is highly correlated with GDP:
https://ibb.co/hcxRvc3This suggests (to me) two underlying reasons connecting GDP to higher cases and fatalities:
- longer life expectancy and therefore a higher proportion of more vulnerable people
- more people living in urban environments where chances of interactions and exposure are higher than in rural environments
I've spent time in some extremely crowded poor places in the developing world (slums in Guatemala, Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, villages in St. Lucia following Hurricane Tomas) for my work, as well as remote indigenous communities in the far north, where I've been expecting the disease to completely ravage populations, but so far, fingers cross and knock on wood, these places seem to have been largely spared (at least according to formal data). Mind you, a colleague's brother is looking after covid response for a major NGO across Africa, and word from him suggests that the situation on the ground is completely different than what we see in the data. I hope he is wrong or exaggerating.
(2) That's a great question. I think a big factor is these places lived through SARS (the real version, not the tepid effects we saw in North America) and were much better prepared to respond strongly, within a culture that's already worried about airborne respiratory viruses (hence many Asian tourists wear masks as a matter of course).
adelaide wrote:The problem with using test per capita as a metric is that it is dependent on a country's testing capabilities and strategy.
Well, sure, but the same / similar can be said about any of the indicator data I've plotted. Causative connections with cases and fatalities can be guess at best, given the host of potential confounding factors.
interested reader wrote:
adelaide wrote:(1) Percent urbanized is really just a indicator or level of development rather than population density.
(2) To me the biggest unanswered question is why some Asian countries don't fit the pattern. Japan has the oldest population in the world (percent 65+) and the advanced economies such as S Korea and Taiwan are similar to the counties of Western Europe in terms of measures such as life expectancy, percent in poverty, etc. I suspect if you removed Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore your correlations would be even higher.
(1) Great call. Urban population is completely uncorrelated with overall population density, but is highly correlated with GDP:
https://ibb.co/hcxRvc3This suggests (to me) two underlying reasons connecting GDP to higher cases and fatalities:
- longer life expectancy and therefore a higher proportion of more vulnerable people
- more people living in urban environments where chances of interactions and exposure are higher than in rural environments
I've spent time in some extremely crowded poor places in the developing world (slums in Guatemala, Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, villages in St. Lucia following Hurricane Tomas) for my work, as well as remote indigenous communities in the far north, where I've been expecting the disease to completely ravage populations, but so far, fingers cross and knock on wood, these places seem to have been largely spared (at least according to formal data). Mind you, a colleague's brother is looking after covid response for a major NGO across Africa, and word from him suggests that the situation on the ground is completely different than what we see in the data. I hope he is wrong or exaggerating.
(2) That's a great question. I think a big factor is these places lived through SARS (the real version, not the tepid effects we saw in North America) and were much better prepared to respond strongly, within a culture that's already worried about airborne respiratory viruses (hence many Asian tourists wear masks as a matter of course).
Like I said, using this data to try and draw conclusions is misleading. Developed countries are testing and trying to confirm the causes of death. Even in developed countries we found it difficult to confirm deaths in elderly homes.
Do you really think in Guatemalan slums deaths caused by Covid-19 are being accurately captured?
Life expectancy is so low in some of these areas it's probably not even statistically significant if a few thousand people in their 50s/60s drop dead.
Really analyzing this data is fun (for you) and an interesting exercise but very little conclusion can be drawn from it. Especially when trying to compare between developed and undeveloped nations.
Further, the data ignores the subtleties in Covid-19 response between nations. South Korea had an amazingly proactive response as they were already prepared for this epidemic. You cannot compare South Korea or China including Taiwan to Europe.
ex-runner wrote:Like I said, using this data to try and draw conclusions is misleading.
I'll agree with you there. Any "conclusions" I've included have been tentative at best. I'm struggling to understand all this. I believe I've taken a deeper dive than most in an effort to understand, but I won't pretend I've found all (or any) of the answers. Mainly just sharing some of what I've learned to generate discussion.
ex-runner wrote:Do you really think in Guatemalan slums deaths caused by Covid-19 are being accurately captured?
I really have no idea (nor do you). I have my suspicions (as I have with all sources of data in this situation), but they're as likely to be wrong as right. For example, one might imagine that conditions in the Bangladesh refugee camps (~ 1 million Rohingya from neighbouring Myanmar) would be underreported. However, I have access to decent information to suggest that they are likely fairly well tracked and reported. Of course, the slums in Guatemala (and South Africa, Rio, Phnom Penh, etc, etc) don't have the same degree of first world NGO involvement. And yet, I'm often surprised by the validity of information coming from places where I expect otherwise.
All that to say... who knows?
The hability and the will to accurately test does play a role, or had played a role in the early stages of the epidemy I believe, and should not be negated when trying to explain why numbers are huge in some countries.
I believe excess deaths when compared to the average previous years to be more usefull to compare country to country.
https://www.ft.com/content/6b4c784e-c259-4ca4-9a82-648ffde71bf0
There still are some problems with this approach, though:
1° some countries are better at publishing this all-causes mortality in a timely manner as others
2° deniers will explain all that with suicides caused by lockdowns anyway
3° numbers should be corrected with demographics, in order to account for the percentage of high risk population
4° although the virus is in every country, some populations are less permeable to external influence, and could enjoy a very temporary delay in the outburst of the epidemy just due to them not having attracted a lot of tourists from the first hotspots of the disease. I believe it might have been the case for Brazil until the Rio carnival. So one shouldn't read too much in absolute or per capita numbers.
I believe an interesting approach could be to use excess death numbers/Official Covid deaths at the same date as a correction for the reported covid death. This way, you could apply this correction to your 7-days smouthed averages and see if it changes anything (hint: I didn't bother to calculate these exactly, but I believe it might change the narrative of "Netherland doing better than Belgium despide less severe lock-downs", "Sweden doing better than France or Span", and some others).
interested reader wrote:
ex-runner wrote:Do you really think in Guatemalan slums deaths caused by Covid-19 are being accurately captured?
I really have no idea (nor do you). I have my suspicions (as I have with all sources of data in this situation), but they're as likely to be wrong as right. For example, one might imagine that conditions in the Bangladesh refugee camps (~ 1 million Rohingya from neighbouring Myanmar) would be underreported. However, I have access to decent information to suggest that they are likely fairly well tracked and reported. Of course, the slums in Guatemala (and South Africa, Rio, Phnom Penh, etc, etc) don't have the same degree of first world NGO involvement. And yet, I'm often surprised by the validity of information coming from places where I expect otherwise.
All that to say... who knows?
All I'm saying is I would first be pointing to data discrepancy as an explanation for poorer countries apparently doing better than richer countries in this epidemic, Vs trying to explain it with other factors such a life expectancy, lockdown/no lockdown or the weather.
Just my opinion. I know for a fact certain African countries simply have no idea what the effect of coronavirus has actually been for them.
ex-runner wrote:All I'm saying is I would first be pointing to data discrepancy as an explanation for poorer countries apparently doing better than richer countries in this epidemic, ...
I will grant you that is an entirely plausible hypothesis, and I imagine it's partly correct, but I think the trends are too strong for that to explain all the variability.
We'll know better in a year or two when the dust has settled and all the data are in.
Or end-May, when according to some of the idiots on this board the whole thing will be finished...
Yes!!! My great country the Kingdom OF SWEDEN survived and concured the covid 19 without total lockdown . Today "only " 8 victims !
Sorry JS they do minimal data collection on the weekend. If you check Sweden's daily numbers you will see this pattern. The numbers will climb back up during the week as they have every week. Action taken to control Sweden's catastrophic spread of the virus through nursing homes is taking effect now so death rates should continue to slow.
1600 Swedish deaths in the 25 days between the 18th and 19th death in my State in Australia. We have just 6 people in hospital from the virus. 19 deaths with population of 6.8 m. Compared to 4400 with population of 10.3 m.
Here are the data for Sweden over about the past three months, showing daily new cases and fatalities (7-day smoothed), using data taken from the Johns Hopkins University site:
You have to be fairly optimistic to view these trends in any kind of positive way. Sweden is currently producing the most fatalities per day (per population) among ALL countries of the world, hardly a statistic to be proud of, regardless of the count in any one specific day.
I read all the news above and I get scared. I run and I continue to train freely. I worked in coworking Stockholm and was already thinking of going out to work. Is it better to wait and not go to the office? Please advise what your opinion is. I don't really believe the news, so I'm trying to find information here
The Swedes are so polite, they don't want to spoil anyone's weekend and thus wait until Tuesady or Wednesday before dying. Or maybe it's their adherence to work-life balance principles and thereby refusing to put the extra work/effort needed to take one's last breath during non working hours. I am sure if we dig deeper into the statistics, all the covid deaths in Sweden happened between 9am and 5pm. Such marvelous creatures, so civilized, so humble, never wrong...
Mopac wrote:
Sorry JS they do minimal data collection on the weekend. If you check Sweden's daily numbers you will see this pattern. The numbers will climb back up during the week as they have every week. Action taken to control Sweden's catastrophic spread of the virus through nursing homes is taking effect now so death rates should continue to slow.
1600 Swedish deaths in the 25 days between the 18th and 19th death in my State in Australia. We have just 6 people in hospital from the virus. 19 deaths with population of 6.8 m. Compared to 4400 with population of 10.3 m.
Hot off the presses:
The architect of Sweden's failed approach has admitted that, if given a do-over, he would do things differently. Imagine that.
Here's a number for you.
11,000.
11,000 members of a Facebook group in MA I belong to.
The question was posed as to how many have had the Covid.
Answer.
Zero
Giles Corey wrote:
Here's a number for you.
11,000.
11,000 members of a Facebook group in MA I belong to.
The question was posed as to how many have had the Covid.
Answer.
Zero
Sounds like a great scientific study there.
RIP: D3 All-American Frank Csorba - who ran 13:56 in March - dead
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RENATO can you talk about the preparation of Emile Cairess 2:06
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Hats off to my dad. He just ran a 1:42 Half Marathon and turns 75 in 2 months!
I’m a D2 female runner. Our coach explicitly told us not to visit LetsRun forums.