It's certainly more than last year, or the year before that, but it's not an outlier for the last two decades.
Yes, the world has become a safer place to live in over the years.
Given the downward trend in age adjusted deaths per million over time, it makes a lot of sense to compare only the most recent years to 2020.
See here to compare monthly mortality rates for every country in 2020 to the the prior 5 year period: https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
If the data only looks bad when you look at 5 year window, and not 20 year window, that seems like a pretty fragile argument.
I'm not sure, with the speed of technological improvements in the last decade, that 20 years is appropriate.
Aside from 2018, this year does not even look like much of an outlier: https://mobile.twitter.com/TLennhamn/status/1295269505984344... . 2012 seems to have been deadlier, for Sweden, than 2020, which was 8 years ago.
If you look at the mobility data [1], you'll see that Sweden followed a very similar trend to its neighbors, and actually maintained lower mobility after other state-mandated lockdowns let up.
[1] https://www.teliacompany.com/sv/om-foretaget/uppdatering/mob...
Seems appropriate to me.
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/average-age-of-coronaviru...
Covid deaths are practically concentrated on age groups over 65 years old.
People dying from other causes aggregate multiple causes which, due to the aggregation, are spread out over the whole age range.
Due to the pyramid shape of the population distribution (they call it population pyramid for a reason) then the median and the mean are shifted towards the base/younger age groups.
Hell, if a disease affected mankind in a way that killed everyone uniformly, the average age of people dying would be around 30 years old.
The way you presented your conclusion implies that dying from covid actually extends your life, which is absurd.
Instead, it just reads that it kills older people disproportionately, and the older you are the more likely you are of dying from it.
Directly comparing 2000 to 2020 makes little sense given the consistent downward trend and magnitude of difference between 2001-2005 and 2015-2019.
Given the downward trend in adjusted deaths per million over time, a more reasonable approach is to average the last 5 years and compare it to 2020. Doing so, you will find that 2020 has ~750 more deaths per million in Sweden than prior periods. (Keep in mind this approach likely understates the affect of COVID on mortality rate due to the aforementioned trend).
For example, before we decide that the last 5 years are a good average we should look at what the trend of the last 5 years looked like. If for example there was an upwards trend (which it was for many countries around the world) then even without COVID you'd expect that 2020 would have continued on that trend for whatever reason it was going that way. In that case it would be fairly unexciting to say that 2020 was above the 5 year average in the context of COVID.
In my opinion the fairest comparison would be to check if 2020 continued the trend of the last 5 years, or if it had a non linear jump upwards from that trend, but looking at figures such as "above average" doesn't mean anything if every year in the last 5 years was "above average" because it started to trend upwards again.
https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...
Looking at one county's stats and ignoring all others is making a fragile counter-argument on worldwide death rates.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/death-rate
If you compare it with 1666, this is paradise.
The twitter thread linked above is from August, so definitely does not account for these rapidly changing numbers.
(Recent data is available all over the place--here's one source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/ )
[Edit]
And what is "Age Adjusted + Population Adjusted Deaths"? (Yes, I get "population adjusted".)
[As of 2019, Sweden's population has increased 16% since 2000, 13% in the 0-17 yrs and 35% in 65+ yrs groups. The population of "Foreign Born" is up 97% (!) vs 11% growth in Swedish citizens. In that time, life expectancy has gone from 77.4 to 81.3 for men, 82.0 to 84.7 for women. "Crude death rate" has gone from 10.5 to 8.6 (per 1000). Source: https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje... As a bottom line, I'd suggest Sweden's demographics changes in the last 20 years have been crazy pants.]
These rates change in 2020, but the proportion of the population in these age groups changes, too. So you set a baseline proportion (maybe equal to 2019), compute the per-age-group death rates in 2020, and rescale the total death rate so that the age proportions are the same as the 2019 baseline.
The ultimate goal is to correct for the effects of changing age demographics in computing the death rate. You'd use it if want to look at changes that are corrected for, for example, the population as a whole aging.
Looking at the outliers Norway, Denmark on one side and Peru and Ecuador is so much more interesting: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
Even at that take a look at the last few columns, more particularly the slope from month to month in the last couple years. Note how from July 2019 through March 2020 the levels were at or below the previous years, however in the last few months the slope accelerates to an increasing upward monthly trend. I would be quite curious to see this chart with August, Sept, and Oct 2020 data included to see if that acceleration continued. Consider this is what Sweden's case count has looked like: https://i.imgur.com/ofUhXvK.png
In essence this chart is really showing only about 4 months of pandemic influence, and at a time when Sweden was doing pretty well. But in those last 4 months there is a clear accelerating trend in relation to the previous years. I won't say this was cherry picked to be misleading, but at the least it is an incomplete representation of what is happening now.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/07/10/more-people-die-winter-...
However, it's interesting to note that during the first ten weeks of 2020, 8% fewer people died in Sweden compared to the average of 2015-2019, and 2020 had in fact the lowest number of deaths of the last six years[1] during the first ten weeks of each year.
[1] https://scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/befolkni... (Excel file, Tabell 5, fairly easy to translate)