The triaging was so severe that «Only 13% of the elderly residents who died with COVID-19 during the spring received hospital care»You're seeing what you want to see. It is normal for elderly patients in nursing homes to die without being in a hospital. You're claiming that Swedish hospitals were so overloaded they turned away patients they would normally have seen, but there is no evidence of that and the paper TIME cited as support actually doesn't give any. Rather, it says:
"Swedish ICU use rates remained lower than predicted, but a large fraction of deaths occurred in non-ICU patients. This suggests that patient prognosis was considered in ICU admission, reducing healthcare load at a cost of decreased survival in patients not admitted."
The latter sentence doesn't follow logically from the first in any way. They are assuming that all COVID patients should have ended up in ICU and if they didn't, that can only be due to evil doctors turning them away at the door despite having spare beds (which Sweden always did have). That is an absurd assumption, unsupported by any direct evidence, which is why they have to rely on invalid statistical inferencing.
What happened is that PCR testing labelled a whole lot of people who were about to die anyway as "COVID deaths". COVID symptoms are so mild in virtually all cases that many patients will have simply got a little bit sick but not enough to rush them to hospital, which can at any rate be quite dangerous for the very elderly and frail, and then they died. Was it COVID that pushed them over the edge? Was it just old age? Who can really say when it gets right to the edge of a life - something has to give.
lockdowns are largely credited for overall having averted cases and deaths
By the people who recommended them in the first place. Many other people without obvious conflicts of interest have looked at this and concluded the opposite.
There isn't a single peer-reviewed study that suggests lockdowns are responsible for a "large chunk" of excess deaths. You are victim of misinformation.
The UK Government's own reports say otherwise. In fact here's an article on the BBC today: "Between March and September 2020, there were 24,387 more deaths in England than expected in private homes, and 1,644 in Wales. The large majority did not involve COVID-19."
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54598728
Lockdowns have obviously killed people in the UK. Hospital admissions halved at the start, do you really think that would have had no impact on mortality? There is now a massive cancer backlog. The death toll of COVID is a handful of people per day in the UK, but the death toll from telling people to avoid hospitals during 2020 is going to be racking up for years, perhaps decades.
Why do lockdown supporters so often believe other people are the victims of misinformation? I've read a lot of papers coming out of epidemiology and the academic research establishments this year, many of them are atrocious. They mis-use logic and statistics every third paragraph, scientists mis-represent their own papers in press releases, their code sometimes just doesn't work. The standards in academia are incredibly low and they pump out "misinformation" at a shocking rate. If you simply believe peer reviewed studies without double checking them, you're the one being misled, not me.
Germany and Switzerland have implemented particularly effective lockdowns, hence little to no excess deaths.
I live in Switzerland. It had a rather mild lockdown, quite incomparable to many other countries thank god. It's astonishing you believe these were "particularly effective". But if you get your information from TIME, well, it's less of a surprise.