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Comment by sweettea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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-explor...

Data as of October 17th (the latest date that Sweden has data for).

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/mannisk...

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-explor...

Note how Sweden has the is the sixth lowest of all the countries in the graph.

Rather it's the list of countries that Sweden borders on, that are culturally and geographically most similar to Sweden...

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_cap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#/media/File...

Source: 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.

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