Sweden saw lower 2020 death spike than much of Europe

reuters.com

3 points·ArkanExplorer··3 comments

This is an awful clickbait article. Both the headline and most of the article itself reads as if Sweden did a good job. It didn't. It did a horrendous job! One should compare apples to apples and doing so shows that compared to other Nordic countries Sweden totally screwed up. This is shown in the numbers in the article but it does not read like this otherwise. 7% compared to zero in neighbouring country Norway on one side and 1% in Finland on the other shows that Anders Tegnell's strategy both failed miserably and killed 1-7%.

>Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years.

>However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.

Sweden failed in its peer group countries that have comparable circumstances.

It's going to be interesting trying to sort out "comparable circumstances" when all this is over.

Density and culture appear to have played a significant role. In the early days there were huge outbreaks that were controlled by distancing and lockdowns (or at least, so it seems). Those days were especially harrowing, since that's what we expected from elsewhere.

It didn't turn out that way -- probably in part because of the way people are naturally kept distant from each other, depending on the place. It was still plenty bad, but not New-York-March-2020 bad.

It's going to take an army of statisticians to look at all of the confounding factors and see if they can plot out a lesson we can learn for the future.

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