According to new excess mortality data compiled by Eurostat and Reuters, Sweden emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries in spite of eschewing the lockdown policy. Reuters has more.
Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.
Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden. However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.
Sweden’s excess mortality also came out at the low end of the spectrum in a separate tally of Eurostat and other data released by the UK’s Office for National Statistics last week.
That analysis, which included an adjustment to account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal mortality patterns of countries analysed, placed Sweden 18th in a ranking of 26. Poland, Spain and Belgium were at the top.
Lockdown enthusiasts often point to the lower excess mortality in the other Nordic countries, implying that had Sweden locked down it would have had even lower excess mortality. Against this, two things can be said. The first is the point made by Dr Paul Yowell which is that if you include the Baltic states among Sweden’s neighbours – and there is no non-arbitrary reason for not doing so – Sweden’s excess mortality begins to look less atypical for the region. The second is the argument made by Dr Oliver Robinson which is that Finland itself didn’t lock down, so pointing to Finland’s lower excess mortality than Sweden’s is not an argument in favour of lockdown.
The Reuters piece is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: MailOnline has summarised the Reuters story here.
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I know I bang on about it – but this use of the modeller’s ‘excess’ mortality with its questionable and moveable baseline falls straight into the Covidiot trap – even when it appears to support the sceptic argument.
Just stick to population corrected analysis with transparent context over a credible timescale – it’s what can’t be contradicted by fucking about with short baselines and questionable transformations of the data.
As I recall, though please check the figures, Sweden doesn’t actually show any excess mortality for 2020 when population corrected figures are used (as per RickH’s comment) and a ten year average. This contrast rather starkly with countries that imposed lockdowns, where figures are generally in the 10,000s.
The issue is that ‘excess’ is shifting sand. Best to stick to actuality.
The analysis tool that I have been using is https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/ . Whilst Sweden compares favourably with the UK whatever reference time period you compare 2020 mortality against, the difference gets larger the longer the reference time period – no wonder lockdown proponents prefer shorter windows for calculating their averages. A particular interesting observation was also made by a Mr Jonathan Enlger a couple of months ago: restricting analysis to 15-64 year olds (those least likely to die from COVID-19), the UK consistently displays high ‘excess’ deaths during periods of lockdown whereas Sweden does not: https://twitter.com/jengleruk/status/1354129343975481344?s=20
The key was to close the borders before a significant number of cases were in. Sweden had no chance to do that, mainly due to the Stockholm area ski holidays. Sweden, and the Baltic, has far more international road traffic than Norway or Finland, the latter are in practice islands and can ose their land border(s) much easier and to a lesser harm than Sweden.
If the vaccine isn’t the panacea, Norway, Finland, NZ&co are in a terrible situation henceforth.
In the Reuters piece.. “Infectious disease experts cautioned that the results could not be interpreted as evidence that lockdowns were unnecessary but acknowledged they may indicate Sweden’s overall stance on fighting the pandemic had merits worth studying.”
Just 😖
Also why at the end do they feel the need to add a bonus DATA CAUTION bit 🤔 hmmmm….
A couple of weeks ago I did a few sums of ‘COVID policy stringency’ versus ‘COVID’ deaths (per million), using data from the Oxford Blavatnik School and Worldometers. This showed positive (!) and significant correlations of 0.35 and 0.38 between policy draconianism and ‘COVID’ cases and deaths respectively (for 70 countries). I can’t find the full Eurostat figures for excess deaths cited in the article, but have used similar ONS data of a few days ago to look at COVID policy stringency vs all-cause excess deaths. Only 26 countries, all Europe, but the correlation is again positive (!), at 0.28. Alas the sample size is too small for this to be strictly, statistically significant. And it’s not ‘causation’. But it’s not negative – as lockdown zealots surely have to maintain – and that’s not nothing.