Local patriotism

[oakfarm]

Mom pointed out that two good things about this town might be related. One we have low spread of the novel coronavirus. Two, we are the largest town in Sweden without what the police calls “vulnerable areas”, or even “particularly vulnerable areas”. If you get your news from RT or that site on B who’s name I never will learn, that’s the neighborhoods they call: “no go zones”. The problem with a name like that is that someone like me might say: “While I admit it was a long time since I visit any of those, I have the last years met quite a lot of persons who lives or works in those areas, and none of them has been lynched for being Swedish - not even once”. The problem with that is that smart people might say something like this: “The important thing isn’t to debate what name we should call whose neighborhoods, the important thing is to debate how we can improve those neighborhoods. Most people living there don’t like having that much crime around them.”

Anyway, what mom said simply was that the fact we don’t have any poor neighborhood with high overcrowding might have helped us keep the covid-19 infections down. Now that can not be the only explanation, there are smaller towns without vulnerable areas, that have higher mortality than us. Maybe we’re just lucky.

Then, for what it’s worth, our largest morning paper - that in it’s editorial articles has been very “hawkish” against the pandemic and pro draconian laws - reported that Sweden last year had one of the lowest excess mortality in Europe. So having one of the lowest infection rates in Sweden, must also mean among the lowest in Europe. We’re so lucky.

Ps. about the last, I have no problem adding the caveat that the data might not be 100% correct. And sure the pandemic has lead to much suffering here, it's however looks like many places with harsher laws are doing even wrose.

Comments

[cactus_rs]

According to Our World in Data (measuring in percentage change from "normal" deaths values rather than raw numbers), our overall excess mortality has bounced around a bit from the lowest to the highest, at least out of Norway, Finland, and Denmark, and looks like it'd average out to be pretty high/the highest. Our performance during the spring and summer was *astronomically* bad, though. Probably
far exceeding whatever good performance we had in the winter or autumn.

Judging by a rough visual appraisal of the graph, Denmarks excess mortality figures seem to vary the least wildly and would likely average out to be the lowest. (From 5 January 2020 to 28 February 2021.)

The graphs are really fun to play with in a morbid way, haha.

[aoi_sora]

I think that as a nation you have a far better mentality (not just the Swedes, but people from northern parts of Europe in general) and that is probably also one of the reasons why you are faring pretty well in the pandemic. For instance, here in Croatia we had pretty restrictive regulations in lockdown, but people were still gathering around in parks and public outdoor spaces in huge crowds, while completely ignoring social distancing, no one was wearing masks, etc. I think that northern populations wouldn't necessarily do that because you are brought up very differently. In other words, I think that over here the population is more stupid and they generally have the 'oh, look at us, we are so badass for breaking the law!' mentality.

[oakfarm]

I do not think Croatia had such bad statistics? anyway Czech Republic it is so sad that I can not help but think that they have collectively given up?