Ideally, I would like a rolling average of monthly death per capita on a year to smooth out seasonal variation on a suffisently large time span to substract any

Ideally, I would like a rolling average of monthly death per capita on a year to smooth out seasonal variation on a suffisently large time span to substract any long-term trend. Sweden publishes enough data to do it actually [1] so I did [2]. There is a very strong downward trend in 2018, stability in 2019 then a literal a cliff in 03/2020 suddenly bringing you back to the 2017 figure. The average of deaths per capita (given per 10000) which was generally stable in 2019 jumps from 7.18 in february to 7.24 in march, 7.49 in april, 7.63 in may, 7.69 in june and then is more or less stable until september at which point I have no more data. So yes, the HN submission title is worthless and most likely intentionally misleading. The statistica data from 2020 are on 10 months. 2020 is going to be an outlier as soon as november and december are added. It's obvious even if you just multiply by 1.2 (december and november typically have more deaths than summer months). [1] https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subject-area/population/population-composition/population-statistics/ https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... [2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tovNw9RReZ-8eF8y-JbnkEEQotJtSe1tmxo6dd9bLIM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tovNw9RReZ-8eF8y-Jbn...