European mortality monitoring shows increase in excess mortality

Studies in developing countries have shown every extra month to significantly improve children's final IQ and lifetime earnings.

They're not top testers but definitely significant testers.

In part it helps that they're one of the least dense countries in the world at around 20 people per square kilometer, compared to say 400/500 for the Netherlands and South Korea. The difference is less pronounced in cities of course but still there (when will we ever get population density figures for the median person who is weighted towards living in proximity, rather than a country-wide average)

"To start with, it’s a myth that Sweden is doing nothing about the virus. Most Swedes have changed their habits a lot. Schools for older kids are closed, as are universities. People are working from home, when they can, and the elderly are being urged to keep to themselves. Gatherings of over 50 people are prohibited, and ski resorts are closed. Restaurants and bars are allowing table service only, and grocery stores are installing glass dividers between customers and cashiers."

"Second, contrary to the claims of John Fund and Joel Hay and many others, Sweden isn’t trying to develop “herd immunity,” meaning a state of affairs in which so many people get the virus that the virus runs out of kindling. (At least, Swedish officials claim they aren’t doing this, and they would have a lot to lose by lying about it.) Instead, Sweden intends to take as loose an approach as possible that still keeps case growth down to nonexponential numbers."

"With these premises in mind, Sweden has pumped the brakes instead of slamming on them. You close school for older kids, but you keep grade school going, because evidence so far suggests that younger children are not a major cause of transmission for the novel coronavirus."

I suspect that there is a strong wish for Sweden to fail among people in countries with severe lockdowns, because that would validate their decisions to lock down in the first place. Sweden must be "punished" for not following the herd, because if it isn't, it means that the herd was wrong, it means that suffering through a lockdown was for nothing. It means your local politicians over-reacted, and destroyed parts of the economy needlessly.

And then you get these hit pieces that says everyone in Sweden is out and about, hugging and licking each other, and everyone died of the zombie apocalypse Last Thursday.

My best guess is that the truth is a lot more complicated than that, and that there absolutely isn't any kind of simple linear relationship between the severity of lockdown measures and excess deaths. There are so many variables, so much random noise, and so much cultural difference between countries. If every country is doing 20-30-40-50 different measures at once, how can we even start to figure out which ones do something, and which ones don't? Is washing your hands more important than wearing a mask while you're outside? Is closing workplaces more efficient than closing schools? There's appearing evidence that kids actually are very bad transmitters of this particular virus - contrary to "common sense", which dictates that kids are filthy petri dishes that are always sick and always spreading disease.

We know so little right now. It's going to take years before we'll know which countries did the right thing and which countries did the wrong thing.

"Universities are closed, high schools are closed, elementary schools are half-empty, people that can work from home do so, a lot of employees have been furloughed, restaurants have switched to mostly take-out, bars are closed, large events are cancelled, grocery stores reserve hours in the morning for senior citizens, elder care homes don't accept visitors, travel is way down, and people generally self-isolate and self-quarantine. Field hospitals have been constructed, recently retired healthcare workers have been asked to come back to work, vodka producers have shifted to making hand sanitizer, and other companies have shifted to making PPEs, etc."

You can also check out for example Google's mobility reports: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-04-17_SE_Mobil...

And I agree with you, I can trivially think of death causes that could go up because of covid-19 + lockdown (heart attacks, suicide, medical neglect), down (influenza, traffic accidents, workplace accidents), and be unchanged (cancer, strokes).

So claims of non-covid-19 excess mortality have to be carefully examined. If the official covid-19 death count diverges sharply from the excess mortality of a country, the most rational explanation has to be that that country is underreporting covid-19 deaths.

Do these graphs change your mind?

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

This is attendances at emergency rooms in the UK.

Admissions to ER have halved. It breaks it down by reason for admittence to quite a granular level. Especially worrying: cardiac admissions halved at the lowest point. Fortunately it seems the messaging about how hospitals aren't overwhelmed and never were is getting through and they've started going up again. They're still far below normal for this time of year.

Unless you think people routinely go to ER with cardiac problems unnecessarily, it's hard to see how this won't translate into excess deaths that aren't COVID related. The UK sees about half of all excess death certificates right now not mention COVID, which makes sense.

Other crazy things about those graphs: pneumonia and other breathing related problems have also all collapsed. Not only are hospitals not overwhelmed but you can't even really see an uptick in admissions for COVID related problems, unless there's some odd data collection error like those cases not showing up in any of the graphs at all.