Sweden was an outlier during the covid epidemic, in that its government did not order a nationwide shutdown. This policy did not please much of Sweden’s establishment, as represented by The Local, which has been pro-lockdown. So this Local article is notable, in that it recognizes a basic fact about covid mortality that should have been obvious all along:
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.
That was very early in the epidemic, obviously. And country to country comparisons of covid-classified deaths are questionable:
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.
Here in Minnesota, a guy who fell off a ladder and broke his neck was recorded as a covid death. Likewise a guy who had a car accident, was flung into a ditch, and died. And many others of that sort. Total mortality, on the other hand, is objectively measurable.
So there was undisguised glee among lockdown sceptics when Svenska Dagbladet published its 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 of all the Nordic countries, beating even global Covid-19 success stories, such as Norway, Denmark and Finland.
So if you forget about classifying covid deaths and look at how many people died in excess of demographic projections, Sweden’s results were the best in the European Union. How can that be? The answer is, or should have been, obvious:
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.”
An important fact here is that people who died from covid were overwhelmingly not just old, but old and already sick. So covid tipped them over sooner than would otherwise have happened, but not by a lot.
The bottom line is a point I have made more than once: covid shutdowns, at best–i.e., not in states like New York and Minnesota where infected old people were sent into nursing homes–delayed the inevitable for some of the already-sick elderly, at great cost to the rest of us, and especially at appalling cost to young people. It was a terrible bargain.
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