In general, I think that @OurWorldInData is great, but this analysis is extremely misleading and doesn't show what its author and @MaxCRoser claim it does. 1/n https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/1305799189004247040

What the author did is basically plot the number of deaths per capita against GDP growth in Q2. Not only does this not show a trade-off between the economy and the number of deaths, but if anything, it shows the opposite. 2/n

The author concludes from this observation that adopting measures to minimize the impact of the pandemic on health with policies to limit the spread of the virus was also the best strategy to protect the economy. 3/n

However, you can only make this inference if you assume that the number of deaths per capita is a good measure of how much the policies adopted by each government were intended to prioritize health, which you obviously can't. 4/n

First, as I already explained before, the people who favor Sweden's approach would deny that it was less focused on saving lives than alternative policies like the various kinds of lockdown. 5/n https://twitter.com/phl43/status/1290278044943360001

Second, the relationship between the kind of policies adopted by each country, their intended aims and the number of deaths per capita is very complicated. In particular, many of the most badly affected countries, such as France, the UK and Italy, did pretty strict lockdowns. 6/n

Obviously, it doesn't mean that lockdowns don't limit the spread of the virus, it's likely that a huge part of the explanation is that causality went the other way, i. e. countries that were more badly affected resorted to stronger policies to contain the epidemic. 7/n

However, it goes to show that the number of deaths per capita is a very poor measure of whether a government's policy intended to make the protection of people's health a priority relative to the economy, despite what @OurWorldInData's analysis implicitly assumes. 8/n

Moreover, you also can't use the official data about GDP growth in Q2, because as @JobbingLeftieH recently explained, different countries use different accounting rules to include government's output into GDP. 9/n https://leftiehistorian.wordpress.com/2020/08/18/do-economists-really-understand-gdp-and-coronavirus-over-to-you-professor-krugman/

This means that straight comparisons are not possible and could actually be very misleading, but in effect that's exactly what @OurWorldInData's analysis does, so for all those reasons and more it doesn't show there was no trade-off between health and the economy. 10/n