Rightly, Sweden decided it was a bad idea to do go about business as usual at nursing homes. After this, their relative difference to other Scandinavian countries is much smaller.
Almost ~3200 people died in nursing homes in a couple of months at the beginning of the pandemic. There's ~95k people in nursing homes. That's 3.3%...
These deaths still account for ~1/5th of all Sweden's covid deaths.
Hence, when people say 5x as many people died in Sweden - a full 1x of that is from the early nursing home no-strategy.
Everyone knows death rate was high in peak covid. As it always is in peak flu season, so what, the year was well within standard deviation
https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/17/eu-excess-deaths-in-2020...
The comparison with neighbours is to gleam the effects of their differing mitigation strategies.
Also it looks like they are doing the comparison month by month which doesn't make much sense since this will vary a lot of course...
Deaths aren't evenly distributed throughout the year. High-traffic seasons will cause a spike, very cold or hot weather, etc. So month-by-month comparison is reasonable. Doing that also shows in the graphs when the waves hit various countries.
I agree, it's missing the standard deviation though. (But again, look at the graphs, you'll see a difference of 10, perhaps 20% fluctuating around zero, and then suddenly a wave of 60,80,100% more deaths. It's unlikely a coincidence.
Just seeing that the temperature is below average outside doesn't say anything about the question: do we have abnormal weather? Is there a crisis? And even if this years winter is colder than the last three years, still doesn't mean that it's abnormal.
It needs to be a statistical outlier to be abnormal, it needs to be statistically significant. Why are they not showing previous years? Why are sample sizes deliberately small when we have more data? Why don't we see basic required numbers such as standard deviation, median, percentiles? It's all clickbait bullshit
You don't even need to make any calculations really, just take a quick look at the table to see that the death rate was unusually low 2019 and only slightly high in 2020 (Edit: sorry, almost compensated by 2019's low numbers, not completely). And if you go back in time, you can see that in fact every single year between 1999-2012 had a higher mortality rate than 2020.
Yes, I see that. I calculated the mortality rate for all years, then the average and standard deviation for the last 10 years preceding 2020.
The average is 0.92%, standard deviation is 0.03%. The mortality rate in 2020 was 0.95% or exactly one standard deviation above the average for the last 10 years.
There is also another clear trend from the data which is slowly but steadily declining mortality rates. Obviously since 1749, but this trend is especially noteworthy during this century (since 2000). Then only one year has increased mortality (by more than one least significant digit) which is 2020.
2020 saw 10% higher mortality than 2019.
So to conclude: I'm by no means a statistician but I'd say this is probably not a random fluke.
Yes, it did. The statistics are pretty obvious: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm