3 ms·

Point is, that even assuming winter deaths, Sweden's excess mortality for the year can't at this point get high enough that it'd have been noticed in any normal

Point is, that even assuming winter deaths, Sweden's excess mortality for the year can't at this point get high enough that it'd have been noticed in any normal year. Normality+some winter deaths does not make for a disaster. Yet we see posts here saying it's too early to tell if Sweden is a COVID success or "disaster". That looks like motivated reasoning: under what plausible scenario could Sweden end up a disaster for 2020 with these stats? There'd have to be an actual natural disaster for deaths to become high enough to be noticeable.

whimsicalism 6y ago
Unsure why motivated reasoning in someone else's comments is relevant to this discussion. It's just about facts. Look up Sweden excess deaths by month rather than analyzing an overall year number that compares up to November with the full year of data for the previous years. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid Scaling up to Sweden's population and the excess deaths that they're looking to have will probably be comparable per capita with the 200k from the US so far. Nevermind that Sweden's economy has done worse than its peers that did lockdown, with -5 GDP growth since q4 2019 vs. Denmark -3.9. So really, no world in which Sweden's approach was successful.
- thu2111 6y ago
  What's your point? That there was a wave of excess deaths? That happens in most countries in Europe, most years, just due to flu and other winter issues. Not every year: Sweden was running 10% lower excess deaths than the 5 year average until the first wave hit, so some of those excess deaths were over-due according to historical trends. That's why it's misleading to point to month-by-month graphs and say for example, look, April is never normally that high, there's a crisis. No, normally a wave much like that one happens a few months earlier. But so what? The exact timing of a normal-sized wave of excess death is no crisis. the excess deaths that they're looking to have will probably be... Will probably be normal. That's what this thread is about. There is no evidence of mass death of any kind of Sweden despite that this was supposedly guaranteed without lockdowns. September was one of the least deadly months on record in Sweden. They are on track to experience a basically normal year in terms of deaths. As for motivated reasoning, it's relevant to this discussion because the thread is full of it. Many of the talking points are absurd. There are people arguing that the Swedes are naturally anti-social and don't meet each other (!), that they're incomparable to other countries due to population density (Stockholm has similar density to London), that they should have locked down because their economy only did a bit better vs other countries (compare against the UK or France and their GDP looks good), and all manner of other things that are either wrong or irrelevant to the reason their death stats are interesting: they didn't lock down and their total, all cause deaths are nothing remarkable. The implication is obvious: lockdowns were pointless, the damage they caused was avoidable, the academic advisors to governments were wrong (except in Sweden), and other countries should unlock ASAP.

whimsicalism 6y ago

Unsure why motivated reasoning in someone else's comments is relevant to this discussion. It's just about facts. Look up Sweden excess deaths by month rather than analyzing an overall year number that compares up to November with the full year of data for the previous years. https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid Scaling up to Sweden's population and the excess deaths that they're looking to have will probably be comparable per capita with the 200k from the US so far. Nevermind that Sweden's economy has done worse than its peers that did lockdown, with -5 GDP growth since q4 2019 vs. Denmark -3.9. So really, no world in which Sweden's approach was successful.

thu2111 6y ago
What's your point? That there was a wave of excess deaths? That happens in most countries in Europe, most years, just due to flu and other winter issues. Not every year: Sweden was running 10% lower excess deaths than the 5 year average until the first wave hit, so some of those excess deaths were over-due according to historical trends. That's why it's misleading to point to month-by-month graphs and say for example, look, April is never normally that high, there's a crisis. No, normally a wave much like that one happens a few months earlier. But so what? The exact timing of a normal-sized wave of excess death is no crisis. the excess deaths that they're looking to have will probably be... Will probably be normal. That's what this thread is about. There is no evidence of mass death of any kind of Sweden despite that this was supposedly guaranteed without lockdowns. September was one of the least deadly months on record in Sweden. They are on track to experience a basically normal year in terms of deaths. As for motivated reasoning, it's relevant to this discussion because the thread is full of it. Many of the talking points are absurd. There are people arguing that the Swedes are naturally anti-social and don't meet each other (!), that they're incomparable to other countries due to population density (Stockholm has similar density to London), that they should have locked down because their economy only did a bit better vs other countries (compare against the UK or France and their GDP looks good), and all manner of other things that are either wrong or irrelevant to the reason their death stats are interesting: they didn't lock down and their total, all cause deaths are nothing remarkable. The implication is obvious: lockdowns were pointless, the damage they caused was avoidable, the academic advisors to governments were wrong (except in Sweden), and other countries should unlock ASAP.