Belgium and South Dakota
Latest worldometer numbers:
South Dakota - one more death
Belgium - 347 more deaths.
Still not convinced, I'm afraid. Will try and keep an eye on it.
Hugh, you've either wildly misread or misrepresented the figures. The number you quoted for Belgium there is for two days. They had 199 deaths yesterday and 148 today which presumably is where you got your 347 from. The figure for South Dakota isn't "one" and it doesn't say that on Worldometer anywhere. Indeed, the latest daily death tolls it gives are both 13 for November 7th and 8th. They haven't even released today's numbers so you can't compare them. Belgium does indeed have a slightly higher death rate in recent days, although it's not nearly the difference you indicate above.
You talked about cherry picking numbers earlier but you put a lot of stock in figures from very short time frame and compare random countries to one another. Statisticians don't work this way. They look at as much data as possible to get an idea of things. I'm not actually arguing with any of your other points RE economy, personal freedoms, projections. I'm just pointing out that your numbers are dead wrong and the areas you're promoting as doing well are objectively not.
That's why I've been doing this weekly.
South Dakota as of now is 540 deaths total. Let's check again next week.
South Dakota now reading 644 total deaths, an increase of 104 since a week ago. Still a lower rate than Belgium, just. For what it's worth.
Of course, high population density and interconnectivity could be a factor in Belgium's high IFR (though perhaps not in Peru, who also locked down hard, long and diastrously).
To be honest, I'm not particularly surprised if other people couldn't find the "one" figure for S Dakota deaths mentioned last week (and I will cheerfully retract it), the numbers seem to jump about in odd ways occasionally, and the figure was given for illustrative purposes only, probably not particularly helpful, thinking about it, with the numbers involved. So far as I know, I did see the "one", but have no way of verifying it now. The only reason I referred to it is because some sort of a terrifying surge in cv deaths was mentioned in S Dakota, so I simply looked at the total and new additional deaths given by a Bing search, which usually corresponds to Worldometer figures (I mostly check Bing's figures against the Worldometer page but may not have done so in this instance). The above figures should hopefully give a better idea, and clearly shows that, whilst not particularly low, it is not any sort of "Professor Ferguson" disaster, which is one of the main points I've been trying to make about not locking down - that even disregarding all other considerations, it still works better than some countries. Finland was also addressed in another post, and, as stated, they have in any case handled this better than the UK.
And according to my source,Sweden's higher death rate is largely due to a run of mild flu seasons. See https://www.aier.org/article/swedens-dry-tinder-accounts-for-many-covid-19-deaths/Something I probably should clear up is, I said "see below for more on Finland" last week, whereas "see previous page" would have been more accurate, where I had just posted a long post, which, among other things, made the point that locking down so long into Summer was stupid, that Finland had had a (soft) lockdown at the right time and finishing before Summer, and that this was a better approach than some other countries.
The point about demography is, many developing world countries with a much smaller elderly population have, as a result, a lower IFR (and some, of course, have more sunshine and therefore more vitamin d). It is worth repeating, the average age of death globally from cv is over 80 - 82.4 years, the last I heard.
And I would certainly encourage fact checking in general, that is how we arrive at (hopefully) accurate information. And I would welcome a few more facts from the authorities as well, who, along with sections of the media, have behaved disgracefully through this.
It is a legitimate point that I have not been covering countries with low IFR's, so to clarify, what I am attempting to do is:
1) Look at places which have not locked down (Sweden and Brazil). Quite frankly, the yardstick, and my starting point is the ICL computer model which informed the original lockdown (we had more dodgy data for this one apparently), which as I remember, had Sweden having about 85,000 cv deaths from the course they followed;
2) Look at places that have done the opposite and locked down too long and too hard (Belgium and Peru);
3) look at large European countries (France, Spain, the UK) for fairly obvious reasons. Spain and France had been said to be where the UK was headed (in terms of IFR) at the time I started discussing them.
Obviously any detailed information on other countries or other approaches would be welcome. The first thing is to find out how to deal with this bug. And then to establish if the price is worth it.
For my part, I haven't got time to cover endless countries and approaches, but will instead (hopefully) update later under the same format. At any rate, this rolling weekly approach should provide fairly accurate information. Whilst countries can update at different times or revise figures, hopefully it will average out over a number of weeks.