4 ms·

You're citing known COVID deaths, I think, while the epidemiologist points out in the article that a better metric is excess mortality: >Sweden had one of the

You're citing known COVID deaths, I think, while the epidemiologist points out in the article that a better metric is excess mortality: >Sweden had one of the lower excess mortality levels in Europe Presumably, excess mortality includes the effects of overloaded hospitals, delayed medical care, lockdown-related depression, and undiagnosed COVID, which are hard to measure any other way, and which seem logically much higher under lockdown.

tomp 5y ago
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SWE~DNK~FIN~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Looks like Sweden's (cumulative) excess mortality shot up at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since trended downwards, whereas other nordic countries have been fairly low but trending upwards. We'll see how this plays out. Could be that Sweden simply killed off larger percentage of the old and frail at the start, who are now dying in other countries. Or maybe Swedish population got infected more, and now has stronger protection than other countries.
gpm 5y ago
So the cumulative excess death since January 1st 2020 (in terms of percentage of expected) is Sweden: 5.21% Finland: 1.57% Denmark: -0.09% Norway: -0.85% And you think these numbers somehow argue that Sweden "no longer stands out"? Or tells a more positive story than the covid death numbers at least? Source (thanks tomp): https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SWE~DNK~FIN~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Data as of October 17th (the latest date that Sweden has data for).
- Y-bar 5y ago
  It is also worth noting that Sweden had negative excess mortality in 2019. Many elderly who would have normally died of the yearly flu survived. Mortality for the five years prior: [1] 2015: 90 907 2016: 90 982 2017: 91 972 2018: 92 185 2019: 88 766 And 2020: 98 124 Had 2019 been in line with the previous years the excess mortality would have been noticeably less pronounced. This does explain some (not all though) of the difference in excess mortality, especially the many elderly who died early on. [1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/manniskorna-i-sverige/doda-i-sverige/ https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk...
- tirpen 5y ago
  Well yes, if you deliberately chose to compare Sweden with only those countries that have better statistics, Sweden will indeed prove to have the worst statistics. Truling shocking how that works out. Here is the same graph of excess mortality with all 27 EU states included: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&hideControls=true&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SWE~AUT~BEL~BGR~HRV~CYP~CZE~DNK~EST~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HUN~IRL~ITA~LVA~LTU~LUX~MLT~NLD~POL~PRT~ROU~SVK~SVN~ESP https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Note how Sweden has the is the sixth lowest of all the countries in the graph.
  - gpm 5y ago
    Rather it's the list of countries that Sweden borders on, that are culturally and geographically most similar to Sweden...
    - angelzen 5y ago
      There is more (and less) to similarity than the shape of the flag. Taking in account economic, geographic and cultural factors, a fair comparison would also consider Germany and Netherlands, possibly also Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and UK. The 'rich germanic protestant NW Europe countries' block. For the nitpickers, Finnish is not germanic and Austria is Catholic, but the point stands. https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9jyxqt/gdp_per_capita_for_each_european_country https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9jyxqt/gdp_per_cap... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File:Germanic_languages.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File...

tomp 5y ago

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SWE~DNK~FIN~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Looks like Sweden's (cumulative) excess mortality shot up at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since trended downwards, whereas other nordic countries have been fairly low but trending upwards. We'll see how this plays out. Could be that Sweden simply killed off larger percentage of the old and frail at the start, who are now dying in other countries. Or maybe Swedish population got infected more, and now has stronger protection than other countries.

gpm 5y ago

So the cumulative excess death since January 1st 2020 (in terms of percentage of expected) is Sweden: 5.21% Finland: 1.57% Denmark: -0.09% Norway: -0.85% And you think these numbers somehow argue that Sweden "no longer stands out"? Or tells a more positive story than the covid death numbers at least? Source (thanks tomp): https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SWE~DNK~FIN~NOR https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Data as of October 17th (the latest date that Sweden has data for).

Y-bar 5y ago
It is also worth noting that Sweden had negative excess mortality in 2019. Many elderly who would have normally died of the yearly flu survived. Mortality for the five years prior: [1] 2015: 90 907 2016: 90 982 2017: 91 972 2018: 92 185 2019: 88 766 And 2020: 98 124 Had 2019 been in line with the previous years the excess mortality would have been noticeably less pronounced. This does explain some (not all though) of the difference in excess mortality, especially the many elderly who died early on. [1] https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/manniskorna-i-sverige/doda-i-sverige/ https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/sverige-i-siffror/mannisk...
tirpen 5y ago
Well yes, if you deliberately chose to compare Sweden with only those countries that have better statistics, Sweden will indeed prove to have the worst statistics. Truling shocking how that works out. Here is the same graph of excess mortality with all 27 EU states included: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&hideControls=true&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28%25%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Align+outbreaks=false&country=SWE~AUT~BEL~BGR~HRV~CYP~CZE~DNK~EST~FIN~FRA~DEU~GRC~HUN~IRL~ITA~LVA~LTU~LUX~MLT~NLD~POL~PRT~ROU~SVK~SVN~ESP https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... Note how Sweden has the is the sixth lowest of all the countries in the graph.
- gpm 5y ago
  Rather it's the list of countries that Sweden borders on, that are culturally and geographically most similar to Sweden...
  - angelzen 5y ago
    There is more (and less) to similarity than the shape of the flag. Taking in account economic, geographic and cultural factors, a fair comparison would also consider Germany and Netherlands, possibly also Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and UK. The 'rich germanic protestant NW Europe countries' block. For the nitpickers, Finnish is not germanic and Austria is Catholic, but the point stands. https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9jyxqt/gdp_per_capita_for_each_european_country https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/9jyxqt/gdp_per_cap... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File:Germanic_languages.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File...