Population density is entirely the wrong metric to look at here. You could fudge the denmark “population density” count by just including Greenland, and including the empty swathes of land in the nordic countries has the same effect.
Well said. Eyeballing the chart shows no correlation between population density and covid death rate. Looking strictly at Europe, CSPI has a good chart (halfway down the long detailed post) showing minimal correlation. My take on population density is that the pro-lockdown media in March and April 2020 were predicting bodies piled high in the streets and the total collapse of healthcare systems without lockdowns. Because back then populations hadn’t normalised extreme losses of freedom so you needed to predict Armageddon in order to sell the lockdowns. Sweden, and later the US red states, proved that Armageddon was factually false. So the journalists needed some rationalisations for why Sweden hadn’t turned into a hell-hole and population density was the first thing they thought of.
If you still want to control for population density, compare Stockholm against European cities likeParis with similar population density. I’m pretty sure I read a good report finding that Stockholm was average again, but I seem to have lost the link.
Fair point. The relevant metric might be something like average population density around an average person (or density might not be that relevant at all). Looking at this map of population density, my conclusion is that every country is different, so using Scadinavia without Denmark as a reference class is probably unfair cherry-picking. Still, Sweden has more than 2.6 times as many covid deaths per million as any other Scandinavian country.
My prior for this is that the population-level differences are probably almost entirely centered around care-homes, and questions related to care-homes (or, more generally, very old people). Since my knowledge on comparisons between care-homes in scandinavian countries is close to zero, I cannot really provide any insight here. But something as banal as “did people who are sick stop going to work in care-homes” will probably bias the results far more than population density.
Edit: regarding population density: I don’t think there’s no effect, I just don’t know what the effect is or if it is even monotone. Almost all the people I know who got covid either (a) live in a village and don’t trust the government or (b) are highly-connected even for big-city standards. So it could be that there is a sweet spot local-minimum where people in cities feel super at risk because of all the strangers around them and isolate, but the effects of the additional density don’t meaningfully lead to more covid.
Population density is entirely the wrong metric to look at here. You could fudge the denmark “population density” count by just including Greenland, and including the empty swathes of land in the nordic countries has the same effect.
Well said. Eyeballing the chart shows no correlation between population density and covid death rate. Looking strictly at Europe, CSPI has a good chart (halfway down the long detailed post) showing minimal correlation. My take on population density is that the pro-lockdown media in March and April 2020 were predicting bodies piled high in the streets and the total collapse of healthcare systems without lockdowns. Because back then populations hadn’t normalised extreme losses of freedom so you needed to predict Armageddon in order to sell the lockdowns. Sweden, and later the US red states, proved that Armageddon was factually false. So the journalists needed some rationalisations for why Sweden hadn’t turned into a hell-hole and population density was the first thing they thought of.
If you still want to control for population density, compare Stockholm against European cities likeParis with similar population density. I’m pretty sure I read a good report finding that Stockholm was average again, but I seem to have lost the link.
Fair point. The relevant metric might be something like average population density around an average person (or density might not be that relevant at all). Looking at this map of population density, my conclusion is that every country is different, so using Scadinavia without Denmark as a reference class is probably unfair cherry-picking. Still, Sweden has more than 2.6 times as many covid deaths per million as any other Scandinavian country.
My prior for this is that the population-level differences are probably almost entirely centered around care-homes, and questions related to care-homes (or, more generally, very old people). Since my knowledge on comparisons between care-homes in scandinavian countries is close to zero, I cannot really provide any insight here. But something as banal as “did people who are sick stop going to work in care-homes” will probably bias the results far more than population density.
Edit: regarding population density: I don’t think there’s no effect, I just don’t know what the effect is or if it is even monotone. Almost all the people I know who got covid either (a) live in a village and don’t trust the government or (b) are highly-connected even for big-city standards. So it could be that there is a sweet spot local-minimum where people in cities feel super at risk because of all the strangers around them and isolate, but the effects of the additional density don’t meaningfully lead to more covid.