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COVID-19

Coronavirus pandemic opens up divide between cities and countryside across Europe

From Norway to France and Spain, the coronavirus lockdown in much of Europe has pitted rural people against city-dwellers flocking to the countryside to wait out the pandemic sweeping the continent.

Published: 21 March 2020 10:15 CET

Coronavirus pandemic opens up divide between cities and countryside across Europe

AFP

“Parigo home, virus!” proclaimed graffiti pictured in the local newspaper in Cap-Ferret, a small town in southeastern France, employing the derogatory epithet for people from the French capital — many of whom have a second home there.

The image summed up the sentiment of many in an isolated region little affected by the epidemic so far, but now fearing an explosion of imported cases.

Monday night saw Parisians leaving the capital in droves on the eve of a nationwide home confinement announced by President Emmanuel Macron in a bid to halt the virus's spread.

“We knew when the temporary residents arrived because there were so many people in the supermarkets,” said Patrick Rayton, mayor of La Couarde-sur-Mer, a village on the Ile de Re, a bucolic island off France's western coast.

The bridge connecting the village to the mainland was crammed with cars on Tuesday morning in scenes reminiscent of the summer holidays.

The police had to step in at the local supermarket to remind clients of the new health safety rules, which require people to keep a distance of one metre (3.3 feet) from each other, Rayton said.

According to the commune president Lionel Quillet, “the new arrivals were making a run on the groceries, there were tensions with the locals.”

“Later, the weather was nice so they went out for bike rides, or were playing watersports” despite the ban on group activities, he said.

'Pure madness'

Further up the coast in Brittany, authorities in the region of Morbihan banned all accommodation rentals on four islands, including the popular Belle-Ile.

“The habitation of furnished lodgings that are not primary residences is restricted to the owner, and in their presence, their children and parents,” according to a government decree.

One major fear is overrunning emergency services and hospitals in rural communities that often are already under-serviced.

“We have a very limited safety net in terms of supplies,” said Denis Pallua, the mayor of Ouessant, one of the islands. “There is only one doctor, we would be very quickly overwhelmed.”

Similar concerns exist in Italy, the European country hit hardest by the coronavirus epidemic to date.

Thousands of people fled Italy's north in the wake of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte's decree on March 8th to lock down all Lombardy and other affected regions.

Only people with legitimate reasons are allowed to travel, and then on presentation of sworn statements to authorities at train stations.

Faced with the prospect of weeks of quarantine, many people originally from the south who work in the north filled trains to return home, causing alarm bells to ring.

Last week, the president of the southern Puglia region, Michele Emiliano, said people from the north continued to arrive, “and with them come thousands more chances of contagion.”

Virology professor Roberto Brioni of Milan's Vita-Salute San Raffaello university noted the risks from the exodus to the countryside, home to large numbers of older people most vulnerable to coronavirus infection and the severe health problems it can cause.

Such a large-scale displacement was “pure madness,” he said, since the travellers “bring infection with them.”

Norway bans cabin stays

Norway said on Thursday it would ban people from going to their country houses in order to prevent healthcare services in small rural communities from being submerged by the new coronavirus pandemic.

Those who violate the ban could face a fine of up to 15,000 kroner ($1,320) or, failing payment, 10 days in prison, prosecution authorities said.

Many Norwegians have in recent weeks fled to their country houses, often chalets in the mountains, in the hopes of escaping the virus thanks to their relative isolation. Some have defied authorities' recent appeals to return to their primary residences.

Randi Hausken/flickr

The government had for several days been threatening to introduce a ban if people did not heed authorities' calls, and finally made good on its threat on Thursday.

“It's a decision that, in the end, I had hoped we wouldn't have to take but we will ban stays outside (people's) residential municipality,” Health Minister Bent Hoie said.

Spanish region up in arms

In Spain, the southeastern region of Murcia, renowned for its beaches and agricultural hinterland, is confronting a mass influx from Madrid.

Furious, regional president Fernando Lopez Miras lamented that an infection-prevention lockdown has instead been “converted into a sort of holiday on the coast.”

Last Friday, he decreed the immediate lockdown of all tourist zones in the region.

Meanwhile, the rural Perigord region in western France saw its first coronavirus case diagnosed on Wednesday: a Parisian, according to health professionals, who is hoped will remain an isolated case.

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FACT CHECK: Did Sweden have lower pandemic mortality than Denmark and Norway?

At one point in May 2020, Sweden had the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, spurring newspapers like the New York Times and Time Magazine to present the country as a cautionary tale, a warning of how much more Covid-19 could ravage populations if strict enough measures were not applied.

“Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark,” the New York Times reported in July 2020.

An article in Time in October 2020 declared Sweden’s Covid response “a disaster”, citing figures from Johns Hopkins University ranking Sweden’s per capita death rate as the 12th highest in the world.

So there was undisguised glee among lockdown sceptics when Svenska Dagbladet published data last week showing that in the pandemic years 2020, 2021 and 2022 Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest, not only in the European Union, but also of all the Nordic countries, beating even global Covid-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.

Versions of the graph or links to the story were tweeted out by international anti-lockdown figures such as Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish sceptic of climate action, and Fraser Nelson, editor of Britain’s Spectator Magazine, while in Sweden columnists like Dagens Nyheter’s Alex Schulman and Svenska Dagbladet’s opinion editor Peter Wennblad showed that Anders Tegnell, the state epidemiologist who led Sweden’s strategy, had been “right all along”.

Excess mortality — the number of people who die in a year compared to the number expected to die based on previous years — is seen by some statisticians as a better measure for comparing countries’ Covid-19 responses, as it is less vulnerable to differences in how Covid-19 deaths are reported.

But are these figures legitimate, where do they come from, and do they show what they purport to show?

Here are the numbers used by SvD in its chart:

Where do the numbers come from?

Örjan Hemström, a statistician specialising in births and deaths at Sweden’s state statistics agency Statistics Sweden (SCB), put together the figures at the request of Svenska Dagbladet.

He told The Local that the numbers published in the newspaper came from him and had not been doctored in any way by the journalists.

He did, however, point out that he had produced an alternative set of figures for the Nordic countries, which the newspaper chose not to use, in which Sweden had exactly the same excess mortality as Denmark and Norway.

“I think they also could have published the computation I did for the Nordic countries of what was expected from the population predictions,” he said of the way SvD had used his numbers. “It takes into consideration trends in mortality by age and sex. The excess deaths were more similar for Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Almost the same.”

Here are Hemström’s alternative numbers:

There are two basic ways of measuring excess mortality. The simplest, and the one used by SvD/SCB, is to simply compare the death rates in the relevant period with the mean of previous years, normally five years.

More sophisticated measures attempt to estimate the expected number of deaths by extending mortality trends seen in a certain country, adjusting for the age of the population and other factors. But this can lead to results to vary significantly depending on how mortality trends and expected mortality are calculated.

The issue with the analysis in the SvD graph is that compares deaths in the pandemic years to deaths over just three years, a mean of 2017-2019, and does not properly take into account Sweden’s longstanding declining mortality trend, or the gently rising mortality trend in some other countries where mortality is creeping upwards due to an ageing population, such as Finland.

“It’s very difficult to compare countries and the longer the pandemic goes on for the harder it is, because you need a proper baseline, and that baseline depends on what happened before,” Karin Modig, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute whose research focuses on ageing populations, told The Local.

“As soon as you compare between countries, it’s more difficult because countries have different trends of mortality, they have different age structures, and in the pandemic they might have had different seasonal variations.”

She described analyses such as Hemström’s as “quite crude”.

In an interview with SvD to accompany the graph, Tegnell also pushed back against giving the numbers too much weight.

“Mortality doesn’t tell the whole story about what effect a pandemic has had on different countries,” he said. “The excess mortality measure has its weaknesses and depends a lot on the demographic structures of countries, but anyway, when it comes to that measure, it looks like Sweden managed to do quite well.”

Do the numbers match those provided by other international experts and media?

Sweden’s excess mortality over the three years of the pandemic is certainly below average worldwide, but in most other analyses it remains higher than those of Norway and Denmark.

A ranking of excess mortality put together by Our World in Data for the same period as the SvD/SCB table estimates Sweden’s excess mortality between the start of 2020 and the end of 2022 at 5.62 percent, considerably more than the 4.4 percent SvD claims, and above that of Norway on 5.08 percent and Denmark on 2.52 percent.

The Economist newspaper also put together an estimate, using their own method based on projected deaths. In this estimate, Sweden also has a higher rate of excess deaths than Denmark and Norway (but not than Finland).

Our World in Data uses the estimate produced by Ariel Karlinsky and Dmitry Kobak, who manage the World Mortality Dataset (WMD). To produce the estimate, they fit a regression model for each region using historical deaths data from 2015–2019, so a time period of five years rather than the three used by SCB.

What’s clear, is that, whatever method you use, Sweden and the other Nordic countries are among the countries with the lowest excess mortality over the pandemic.

“Most methods seem to put Sweden and the other Nordic countries among the countries in Europe with the lowest cumulative excess deaths for 2020-2022,” Preben Aavitsland, the Director for Surveillance and the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, told The Local.

So if Sweden had similar excess mortality to those of the other Nordics over the period, does that mean it had a similar Covid-19 death rate?

No. Sweden’s per capita death rate from Covid-19 over the period covered by the SvD/SCB figures, at 2,249 per million people, is still more than double Norway’s 959 per million, 60 percent more than the 1,409 per million who died in Denmark, and more than 50 percent more than the 1,612 per million who died in Finland.

Sweden’s death rate is now much closer to those of the other Nordic countries than it was at the end of 2020, however, something Aavitsland put down to the higher number of Covid-19 deaths seen in his country in the later years of the pandemic.

“The most striking difference between Sweden and the other Nordic countries is that only Sweden had large excess mortality in 2020 and the winter of 2020-21,” Aavitsland explained. “In 2022, the field levelled out as the other countries also had excess mortality when most of the population was infected by the omicron variant after all measures had been lifted.”

So why, if the Covid-19 death rates are still so different, are the excess mortality rates so similar?

This largely reflects the fact that many of those who died in Sweden in the first year of the pandemic were elderly people in care homes who would have died anyway by the end of 2022.

About 90 percent of Covid-19 deaths were in people above 70, Aavitsland pointed out, adding that this is the same age group where you find around 80 percent of all deaths, regardless of cause, in a Scandinavian country.

“My interpretation is that in the first year of the pandemic, say March 2020 – February 2021, Sweden had several thousand excess deaths among the elderly, including nursing home residents,” he said. “Most of this was caused by Covid-19. In the other [Nordic] countries, more people like these survived, but they died in 2022. The other countries managed to delay some deaths, but now, three years after, we end up at around the same place.”

So does that mean Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was right all along?

It depends on how you view the years lost by the several thousand elderly people who caught Covid-19 and died in Sweden in the first wave because Sweden did not follow the example of Denmark, Norway, and Finland and bring in a short three-week lockdown in March and April 2020. Were those two years worth the greater restrictions imposed in Sweden’s neighbours?

Tegnell himself probably said it best in the SvD interview.

“You’ve got to remember that a lot of people died in the pandemic, which is of course terrible in many ways, not least for their many loved ones who were affected, so you need to be a bit humble when presented with these kinds of figures.”

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