I know there are some MR readers in Iceland, and presumably they read the Icelandic press. Can anyone shed light on why the death rate is not higher in Iceland? Is it that the death rate is about to burst a week from now? Alternatively, you might think the Icelanders have kept their hospitals up and running — important for sure — but that doesn’t explain what seems to be a quite low rate of reported cases. Or is it that Iceland’s second largest city is so tiny — Akureyri at 18,925 inhabitants — that the virus doesn’t have many easy chances to recirculate once cut off for a while?

Similarly, Sweden hasn’t restricted public life very much and they do not seem to be falling apart?

How much better is Staten Island (less dense) doing than Manhattan (more dense)?

Some reports indicate that in hard-hit Westchester County,. NY, the rate of hospitalization is about one percent (8-10 percent in some other places). Alternatively, here is serious talk that the death toll in Wuhan is 20x official figures.

How much of the heterogeneity results from the kind of mixing you get? One account of the low German death rate is the young and the old were never pushed together so much by the policy response. One account of the high Italian death and hospitalization rate is that the initial quarantine was only regional and thus it spread very dangerous forms of mixing throughout the larger country.