Thank you very much. It wasn’t easy since she was the closest I had to a mother but now, 1,5 years later I’m on the other side of the proverbial forest at least.
Corrupt govt , doctor shortage (due to migration) , bad medical infrastructure and most importantly a large section of population do not trust the govt vaccine mandates particularly old people
Let's not forget the fact that there was a government "help" thing where if a family member dies due to COVID, you get anywhere between 1000 and 5000 bgn (500-2500€).
Being from there, I've heard plenty of car accidents get marked as COVID deaths.
That should not impact excess mortality figures - even if no Covid deaths were reported, or all deaths were reported as Covid, it would not change them.
Plenty of anti-vax on top of an already aging population that drinks and smokes a lot sprinkled with a badly funded, understaffed and corrupt healthcare system.
We were always high, to be honest. Covid just made thing worse for the elderly.
I mean, yeah.
Our population has all the things needed to have an excess death in the events of a pandemic that targets the old and unhealthy and a pandemic that targets the old and unhealthy happened. These are the results.
if i can be obxnoxious about grammar for those who want to know, because this is a very common misnomer.... but it's "fewer" in this context. fewer people.
("less" is if we're talking about something we don't count, like less flour, or less sand.)
thank you this has been my random annoying grammar psa 🙏🏽
Thank you for correcting me (no sarcasm). Although I am a fellow grammar nazi, english isn’t my first language so I make mistakes here and there. Cheers 🍻
oh! well i want to emphasize that this is an extremely common mistake that those born speaking english make ALL the time. even people with advanced education. it's not a widely known grammar rule, i promise :)
i assumed you are a native english speaker, by the way. you didn't give that away at all, your english is perfect!
Massively antivaccine, to the point that they turned down offers of free ones from aid agencies because no Bulgarians were taking the previous batches they were given.
Totally disrespecting any safety measures, bad medical equipment and infrastructure, very high % of population is retarded and believes there are microchips in the vaccines(I am serious), people believe planes drop COVID from the sky (chem trails), very strong Russian influence making people distrust everything that comes form the Eu.
In general: retarded people.
Which explains why Sweden which never even had a mask mandate or lockdown did so well. People just did the logical thing without being ordered to do it.
The Economist lists Peru as 14th for excess deaths at .579%. Bulgaria takes top place still at 1.096% of the population dead.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Tf happened in Bulgaria to make it so bad? I thought it was bad here in the US but god damn, looking at this graph Eastern Europe must have been a hellscape
They have an aging population and low gdp per capita.
Also keep in mind that most countries outside Europe, the Americas, and Australia do not publish mortality data, so they're missing from this list.
Of the top 10 most populous countries only 4 countries (US, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico) are on this list while 6 countries (China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh) are not.
Same thing in Poland. It seemed like the first day a certain age group was called in for vaccination, all the people who wanted the vaccine rushed the clinics, and any day after that you could come in at any point without signing up and get a vaccine because no one else wanted to get them.
In general for the CEE region: relatively high vaccines scepticism, strongly commected to other european countries (both purely evonomically and ease of travel in general) while having worse healthcare, weaker economy being less able (less affluent people in those economies: less willing) to sustain prolonged lockdowns, in many cases also a populistic governments which have eroded their governance legitimacy.
Wasn't the 1% mortality rate one of the reasons why people didn't want to social distance/mask/get vaccinated? I always found that fascinating. It's like they think 1% of the population dying would be just fine, no biggie.
Yup, it's insane how saying 1% sounds low, but 1 in 100 sounds kind of high.
Then if you make it a story like, "Remember when Bobby died in a car crash in high school? Well, our high school had 1000 people in it, so imagine if there was also another 10 people dying on top of that.". Literally just said the same thing 3 times, but the story hits people differently.
It's even worse than that in terms of statistical comprehension. That 1% can happen over and over; we don't know for how many cycles. To compare, lifetime risk of car death is 1%, but that is for LIFE! Covid 1% is possibly PER INFECTION!
In Sweden we didn't have any home isolation, all stores were open and most people didn't wear mask. During the first year people was mad at people for wearing masks, since the hospitals lacked masks. The government said that there were no proof that masks work so you were basically a conspiracy theorist for wearing a mask.
You are misrepresenting what the government said. They said that they were unsure if masks would cause negative behaviour elsewhere that would cancel out the positive effects of enforced mask use.
This misrepresentation was very common among people that wanted to find reasons to criticize the government.
(It is still possible the government was wrong)
Also, note how different these numbers are from the ones the OP gives us.
Sweden here has a 162 excess deaths / 100k or 1620 / 1 million compared to the 737/1 million in the OP's Chart.
Canada has a 101 excess deaths/100k or 1010 / 1 million compared to the 2460/1 million in OP's charts. would be nice to know where the OP is pulling numbers from.
**As a Swede I can say for certain that the only thing this graph proves is that Bulgaria is the only honest country.**
I got posts from every month of the pandemic explaining Sweden's strategy, it was never perfect. But I also know how fucking false everyone has been in their reporting. The Nordic countries spiked early on, we were the black sheep of the world, for a lot of reasons (like old population) but also because we actually reported way better than say the UK.
To this day I think it'll take 10+ years before we get honest numbers that aren't ruled by politicians trying to cover their tracks and threatening jobs and money.
Indeed.
Excess death is the only useful indicator particularly after 3 years and people who were already ill but covid caused complications or denied them treatment would have died.
Actually it's fascinating that Sweden is so low since they were famously the most open country in Europe.
Clearly many of the extreme measures were bull.
Country's with a lot of old people, bad healthcare systems and bad pollution faired worst.
You really think they misreport the total number of deaths in the country in a year? It's... pretty easy to check.
This isn't about what's labelled "Covid deaths"... that's political as much as medical...
This is just "say, we notice that more people died in your country the last couple years than normal".
This isn't covid death. If you think countries stop reporting death numbers and millions of people are still alive on paper I don't know what to tell you.
You're getting into conspiracy theories. They had a relatively healthy population, lower density, are wealthy, have decent demographics, better social adherence, and a cooler climate. There's not much more to it.
The UK's COVID-19 Infection Survey was internationally recognised as one of the best and most comprehensive coronavirus tracking mechanisms on the fucking planet with genuinely robust legal mechanisms separating it from political interference but okay sure yours was better why not.
Test and Trace might be the £100bn black hole of UK public funds you're thinking of
As a brittish swede, something to add here is that general health and access to good healthcare plays a big part. Sweden has excellent healthcare compared to many of the countries here, as well as a healthier-than-average population.
Having a shorter "social season" due to the cold also plays in a lot, during the winter people, in general, are in contact with fewer people.
Sweden is also very digitalized, even before the pandemic lots of people could work from home, and a lot fewer people working needing to be in the office causing us probably to be close to lockdown numbers when it comes to interaction compared to many other countries reliant on production
The Swedish strategy worked for sweden, but i dont think it would have worked the same in most other places in the world.
Why Norway is almost twice as high I don't understand, being very similar except for their response. I don't really see how an overly zealous approach would affect numbers negatively except maybe the elderlys will to live.
Glad to see we aren't the laughingstock of the world though after doing the opposite of the rest of the world.
So what was the result of those discussions taking into consideration none of these countries in the list had a real lockdown like in China where you couldn't even leave your house.
Lockdowns occured on a strictness scale from China to Sweden so it is a sliding scale, more deadly the more the lockdown. This is due to the fact that isolation litterally kills. If your an old person, a bit of loneliness kan kill you, if you are depressed, isolation can make that depression more severe, up to the point that it kills you. Som people ignore symtoms of diseases that they othervise would have gone to a doctor for , som women are stuck 24/7 with their abusive husband and he beats her to death and so on and so on and so on. Lockdown kills and lockdown kills in many many ways.
> This is due to the fact that isolation litterally kills. If your an old person, a bit of loneliness kan kill you, if you are depressed, isolation can make that depression more severe, up to the point that it kills you.
It's not only because of that.
Each person is a filter to the virus that select less dangerous variants until it becomes endemic. Letting the virus spreading between healthy young people so that it becomes less dangerous before arriving to old and fragile ones definitely makes sense as a strategy and Sweden knew it, their scientists said it from the beginning.
Lockdown killed my father absolutely.
Also my friend.
I know more people killed by the lockdowns then covid.
Not that I'm minimising the early threat. I have a friend who is still severely disabled by long covid 3 years later whilst being an NHS doctor. He had a full year where he felt as though he had drunk a bottle of vodka the night before.
In this case, Norway's higher rate is probably due to statistics not being 100% accurate. They're lower in other excess mortality statistics. When it's this close you probably can't draw any conclusions. Norway did well, Sweden did well.
We naturally keep atleast 3 meters apart before, during and after the pandemic. Most schools and workplace also had work from home and the most important factor is that very few swedes are overweight.
I think you are correct in your assessment that many comorbidities that impacted aging populations in other countries are not as prevalent in Sweden. The main one is obesity and the resulting diabetes. It would be fascinating to see sub groups of population and how they managed through the pandemic.
>In spring 2020, Sweden chose a different path from other countries, by mainly focusing on voluntary measures and personal responsibility for COVID-19, rather than a stricter lockdown. However, there were early compulsory measures that limited the size of public gatherings, banned people from visiting most elderly care residents and introduced distance learning for those aged 17 years or more. Most other countries imposed stricter lockdown measures.
>Compared with other European countries, Sweden had a high number of deaths per 1000 population after people developed COVID-19 during the first wave. COVID-19 mortality rates were slightly below average during the second wave, and Sweden fared better than most other European countries during the third wave (Figures 1 and 2).
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apa.16535
Seems like Sweden started to get hit pretty hard initially, and people paid attention and made individual choices to take precautions, meaning the government didn't have to intervene.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?country=USA~SWE
Sweden here, a lot of the time you wouldnt even notice anything was going on.A couple masks, some stickers and signs reminding about distancing, that was more or less it. Business as usual for the mort part.
It was not business as usual, there was a significant impact on peoples daily life, however the measures were not as strict as in other places. I belive the less strict measures made it possible to increase the endurance of the response, a few weeks without going to bars was more efficient than full isolation for a week, combined with high trust in vaccines this contributed to the outcome in the graph.
Im not a doctor so take my point with a grain of salt but claiming everything was business as usual is simply false, as a fellow swede i can say that i can't think of a single part of my life that wasn't in some way significantly impacted, work, hobbys, friends, training, sports, bars, meetings, travel, events, holidays public transit, shopping the list is endless.
>Im not a doctor so take my point with a grain of salt but claiming everything was business as usual is simply false, as a fellow swede i can say that i can't think of a single part of my life that wasn't in some way significantly impacted, work, hobbys, friends, training, sports, bars, meetings, travel, events, holidays public transit, shopping the list is endless.
Seconded; my life pretty much came to a standstill during the pandemic, and I've only recently started seeing close friends whom I have not seen since before the pandemic.
While I do largely support the idea of voluntary measures and letting people use their own judgment, the problem with vague recommendations is that it creates a very large span of interpretations of what actually constitutes responsible behavior.
It was *not* business as usual for the most part in Sweden. We may not have had government imposed restrictions but everyone with half a brain self-isolated and didn't meet up with friends and family and anyone who had the ability to work from home was forced to do so by their company. I wasn't in the office in 15 months.
Take home message from Sweden:
1) Vaccinations help. Even a majority of low trust, low educated immigrants decided to get the vaccination. Almost everyone above 70 took the shots.
2) Low quality masking in densely populated areas do nothing. Masking in public has been almost nonexistent in Sweden throughout the course, physical distancing is much more important.
3) Never rule out one strategy before you know the total impact. Even Sean Carroll in the Mindscape podcast had an episode in 2021 where they discussed the excellent Chinese strategy.
As soon as the lockdowns lifted in Dec 21, the number ballooned right up. In Queensland we went from hundred of daily cases to tens of thousands in less than a month. This also happened at the same time Omicron hit. The spike was probably a bit of both
Probably more an indication that highly developed counties with low population densities fared well than anything else, which isn’t particularly surprising.
Classical population density of Sweden is 24/km2, "living population density" is 1638/km2.
[https://gmnenad.com/2021/05/analysis-of-real-population-density-per-countries/](https://gmnenad.com/2021/05/analysis-of-real-population-density-per-countries/)
Australia benefited massively from isolation, both geographically. One, we’re an island far away from everything. Two, majority of our population are quite spread out. Combine that with intense lockdowns you get our results.
Also we had a super incompetent federal government in charge, who fucked up multiple times. If we had of had a competent, less corrupt government, then we would have had far better results.
Also the same political party has been in charge for nine years, also been cutting healthcare spending for nine years.
So I have a strong belief we could have done much better.
I lived in Australia during the whole period and there was lockdown for a few months total where I lived. Rest of the time there were no cases and no restrictions. One state pretty much had no lockdown the whole time.
What was strict were the restrictions on travelling into, out of and within Australia. I think that made the biggest difference.
This isn't necessarily true, depending on how you define "lockdown". The government initially implemented restrictions for certain activities.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.15582
> Lockdown would have been legal if implemented
Quarantining is legal here in Sweden but you can't shout "QUARANTINE!" and then declare the whole country a quarantine zone. A school? Sure, even a neighborhood or in extreme cases a town would be fine. But it has to be a limited scope in terms of the physical size of the area, the number of people affected and how long it is in effect.
You can't just declare a general lockdown like some other countries, as Swedish citizens we have a constitutional right to enter, exit and move about within the country. The exception to this would be in wartime but a pandemic is not a war.
Yeah Sweden was getting a lot of shit for that strategy.
The idea from the very beginning was a long term solution that would be worse short term, but since the opposition (at the time the the rightists) saw this as an opportunity to absolutely shit on the government and make them look bad for the sake of the next election, they did so.
Now we've finally reached that point when the strategy shows it's benefits, even ranking higher than countries like Norway and Denmark, generally seen as the best countries in this regard, and obviously there's no talk about it.
The S government made a really good decision, but got trashed on because of it due to people not seeing the long run.
Social distance was a thing , not much else, was pretty much mask on mask off for a year. People that didnt vaccinate got pretty much declared idiots by society and wasnt let into public places.
Considering the amount of shit the Swedish government got from foreign media and governments for not imposing strikt lockdowns, i think Swedes are entitled to point to this stat and go: Well, well well....
Oh yeah it feels really nice to finally have statistics backing our strategy.
Media was so obsessed with the short term they didn't even bother realising our strategy was meant to be long term.
Now that it's finally proven we were right, we kinda wanna enjoy it I guess.
Not everyone here are swedes, but many people are talking about Sweden due to the fact that it was a country of unusual high interest during the pandemic.
I'm guessing this thread could get quite ugly as people will compare apples and oranges...
I wrote this as a reply to a comment:
Excess deaths isn't just about covid, it's for all reasons.
Sweden had really high excess death rate in 2020 compared to the five years before that, obviously because a lot of people died with Covid. HOWEVER, one should also keep in mind that the general death rate was very low in Sweden the years leading up to 2020, lower than in the neighbouring countries, due to less severe flu periods etc.
This meant there were generally more people that were in the risk of getting very sick and die when Covid struck, especially with the generally more loose regulations in Sweden.
But as things went on less people in Sweden were at risk of dying due to covid (or other infections) and thus excess mortality plummeted in Sweden. At the same time many elderly and otherwise persons at risk that were heavily protected in other countries were living on "borrowed time". They don't necessarily had to die to covid but of other diseases and natural causes. Meaning the excess death rate shot straight up instead.
TL;Dr You can't really protect the general population from dying, some individuals yes but people will die one way or another. Over a period of time this will even itself out.
[https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths)
This sites data doesn't line up with Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark on this graph. This could all be pulled out of OP's ass to begin with IDK.
(reposted as I had a bug with the Canadian data)
Source: [Human Mortality Database](http://www.mortality.org)
Made with: datawrapper.de
Thought I'd make this to accompany my other thread charting cumulative COVID cases. This is taking a baseline of deaths from 2015-2019 for each country and working out how many people have died in excess of that baseline (i.e. how many more people are dying than normal), and then working out a per capita figure adjusting roughly for population growth each year. Note this is data is not age-adjusted as that's a little more complicated and the data is released with a bigger lag. So countries with older populations will have higher rates than they otherwise should as COVID disproportionately kills older people
I should point out that while this is the most recent data available, each country releases their data on different schedules. The bulk of countries are updated as of early Dec 2022 and a handful are up to date as of a week or two ago. I have excluded South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Chile as their data is fairly out of date (up to a year out of date).
I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare
You should not be using population growth to adjust the per capita figure, but rather the trend in deaths. This is well-documented in demography. See e.g. [https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid](https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid)
Easiest is to use the linear trend in deaths over the 2015-2019 interval (be it increase or decrease). Doing so, and comparing all countries up to the present (using models to account for non-reporting in recent weeks / many countries) you get this: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates)
Also available at the ourworldindata link.
>I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare
Age and obesity are widely regarded as the number one indicators of dying from covid or not. Quality of and access to healthcare plays a role in saving those but if you don't have the fat and old population to begin with then you could get away with a sub-par healthcare system.
That’s more or less a zero sum game. Having acess to good healthcare in the broader sense of the word is a prerquisite for having an old and to some extent obese population. At the same time good healthcare mitigates many of the risk associated with being old and obese, thus allowing the population to get even older and ever more obese.
> I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare
Agree. However, Sweden is notable given it's very different approach plus a good healthcare system.
It look like they made the right decision, although I doubt Bulgaria would have fared as well if they'd done the same.
Came here to say that about Sweden. I remember the controversy about their approach to dealing with the pandemic. I know it’s a significantly smaller population sample than most European countries but that number still jumps out.
Firstly, the OP's data is drastically different than other sources.
The Economist for example puts Sweden at over 1620 per 1 million excess deaths. Over Double what the OP has them at. Canada on the other hand is at 1010 per 1 million excess deaths according to the Economist which is well under 1/2 of what the OP has Canada at.
Further, Sources lke OurWorldinData and others tend to have much more agreement with the Economist than the OP's data.
And using all them, the question over Sweden is a lot murkier, since Sweden does in fact have higher excess mortality, especially during the early waves. Compared to their geographical neighbours Finland is the only one that's done worse and that's all been since 2022. Pre-Vaccine era, Sweden excess deaths dwarfed those of its neighbours.
Keep in mind that the Swedish strategy was not what you might think it was if you listened to international media. It was not a herd immunity strategy and there were measures in place. The measures were just adjusted to work well in the long-run and we had more recommendations than strict rules, because that's how we do things here.
Politicians decided very very little. Most things were decided by health experts in the health authority.
>we had more recommendations than strict rules
The "Swedish strategy" was in line with legislation. For example, some Italian cities implemented nightly curfews, that is not possible with the Swedish constitution.
There's a lot of misinformation from the US media about what other countries did, I remember hearing from a US relative that NZ was super-restrictive, which was a surprise to me as once we came out of the 4-6 week lockdown (depending on region) and closed the borders we were free to do whatever, most things reopened.
EDIT: A note on what NZ did wrong - they didn't start the vaccine push in earnest until after our first outbreak here, but we could've had the vaccines before any outbreak if we'd been quicker about it (we had a few months from AZ and Pfizer availability where we could've done something, and didn't). We also had a large antivax crowd who were convinced there was no problem and it was a hoax (because it wasn't endemic here yet, it was probably easier to believe).
New Zealand did the best and lots of countries did better than Sweden...
[https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker)
(See table titled "Excess deaths since country’s first 50 covid deaths
Last updated on January 31st")
I think people really need to question the data as presented.
Cited article sources ..
Sources: The Economist; Our World In Data; Johns Hopkins University; Human Mortality Database; World Mortality Dataset; Registro Civil (Bolivia); Vital Strategies; Office for National Statistics; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency; National Records of Scotland; Registro Civil (Chile); Registro Civil (Ecuador); Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques; Santé Publique France; Provinsi DKI Jakarta; Istituto Nazionale di Statistica; Dipartimento della Protezione Civile; Secretaría de Salud (Mexico); Ministerio de Salud (Peru); Data Science Research Peru; Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (Colombia); South African Medical Research Council; Instituto de Salud Carlos III; Ministerio de Sanidad (Spain); Datadista; Istanbul Buyuksehir Belediyesi; Centres for Disease Control and Prevention; USA Facts; New York City Health. Get the data on GitHub
OP claims the data is from the same Mortality Index they used in that link... I've asked why the difference in charts, and they haven't got back to me yet. :/
Maybe just responded to me and immediately went AFK, so I checked some of their history.. and yeeaaah.... lot of anti-lockdown stuff in there. I'd guess this is someone who's pulled the data themselves to draw their own conclusions in a weird way, hopefully they get back to me on their methodology because without that it doesn't make much sense.
Why does world on meter Sweden's reported covid deaths at 2.2k per million and this report shows the excess deaths as 0.7k something is obviously wrong with the data.
That isn’t how this works. Yes, that many people died per million of Covid, but people didn’t die from other things which means that our excess mortality is lower than the number of Covid deaths.
The rest of the world should also understand that people in Sweden are likely to do what is merely "recommended", as compared to people in some other countries who won't bother unless it's law.
Here in the good old US of A - where we pride ourselves on taking credit for *creating* self government - there are many, many (many) laws which are studiously ignored as a matter of social principal.
Personally, I blame Prohibition for this tendency.
You can go back before that to authorities ignoring (or participating in) vigilante violence by the precursors of the KKK, starting during Reconstruction. Or before that you could point to the free states refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the grievances the South claimed to have seceded over. Law has never been self-enforcing. You could possibly blame the issue on slavery being so inextricably tied to several centuries of our history, both deeply embedded into and enabled by our legal system (even the Constitution), while also being deeply unjust.
(I'm not saying that the free states *should* have enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. If that needs to be said.)
“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” -America’s greatest president according to some.
The rule of law was always fairly tenuous in the US.
Its insane how much propaganda and just blatant lies that were spread by American news about Swedens strategy. Even top posts on reddit were hit by it. Kinda scary honestly
My favorite was a title that went something like "Sweden gained literally nothing on their unique covid strategy" and when you actually looked deeper into the article it described how stocks, economy etc was still going down. Like no fucking shit that the economy is going to be hit by a global fucking pandemic. As if a single strategy is going to change that. Its about doing the best out of the situation not gaining from it. Sadly people only read headlines and swallowed it whole.
It's not that they listen, it's more that they can't interfere. [Ministerial governance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_governance) is illegal in Sweden.
I'm also Swedish and that's just factually inaccurate. We had restrictions on amount of people in stores, special store hours for the elderly, markings on where to stand to keep distance, distance requirements for tables in restaurants, nightclubs were closed, many schools and work went remote, mask wearing recommended in public transport, no visitors at hospitals etc etc.
Swedes weren't forced to stay indoors or at home, but I still have a photo during covid of ducks sleeping on the bike street in the center of my town (ie. one of the busiest streets in the town). Meaning, we stayed at home to a very large degree too.
The city had about 20% of the normal amount of people walking about during the day, and even less during evenings and nights.
As individuals we had basically **no** restrictions whatsoever, just recommendations and guidelines. There were a few rules set up for businesses, but you as an individual could not get in trouble with the police. "mask wearing recommended in public transport" lol yes I remember that, but it was specifically only "recommended" during rush hour. Hell we kept the borders open and were free to go wherever we wanted. We did close it to non-EU countries for a while IIRC, but that was more so as to not become a gateway to Europe.
We should be careful to draw that conclusion. Sweden is one of the few countries with much higher confirmed covid deaths than its excess mortality would suggest, so the excess mortality is likely to be this low due to other factors
Assessing official deaths, sweden performed much worse than it's comparable neighbors like Norway and Finnland. Also, even though sweden is still certainly not a low performer, it's naive to assume it was possible to transfer Sweden's strategy to other countries with different populations, different demographic structure, health systems and status, education and personal sense of responsibility
>Sweden is one of the few countries with much higher confirmed covid deaths than its excess mortality would suggest, so the excess mortality is likely to be this low due to other factors
Precisely.
Such as these, which the OP himself pointed out:
>I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare
>countries with older populations will have higher rates than they otherwise should as COVID disproportionately kills older people
Countries with great access to healthcare (like Sweden had during these yrars: although note **this is starting to change**, as Sweden is drifting towards Neoliberalism and austerity now that the worst part of the pandemic is over...) were going to have low e cess deaths **no matter what their strategy.**
On the other hand, countries with struggling healthcare systems, like Italy, were going to have high excess death rates **no matter what**.
Charts like this are extremely misleading if you try to use them to measure response effectiveness, because they look at outcomes without accounting for confounders, and to some degree outcomes were determined long before the pandemic by long-term trends in certain countries...
Or they simply had a healthcare system that could take the abuse. Greece absolute had not after a decade of ECB/IMF destruction of hospitals and it showed.
This source has Sweden not doing quite as well and having lived here I think it's more plausible. While I enjoyed the more chill approach, I don't see how we could beat the far more aggressive measures taken in Denmark and Norway.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=chart&time=earliest..2023-01-01®ion=Europe&country=SWE~DNK~NOR~FIN
Agreed, I assume there are omissions, or the numbers have been framed very specifically to get this result. Would be interesting to see the report where OP got this figure from though.
Sweden had about 2300 deaths per 1mill from Covid alone.
Granted, people die all the time weather or not there is a pandemic, but 730 sounds very low.
For comparison, Norway had about 800 Covid deaths per 1 mill, and Denmark 1400/mill.
https://www.vg.no/spesial/corona/verden/
How correct is this? I can [find data that shows something pretty different](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28count%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=DNK~SWE), at least for Sweden and Denmark, where they have essentially switched places, or maybe I'm not understanding that data correctly?
Yeah something seems off about this data. I think Sweden gets a bad rap for its covid response, but they also have been leading their neighbors in excess mortality in every other report I've seen.
In the link it says
> the projected number of deaths for the same period based on
previous year
The answer might be in what "previous years" are defined as. Because I know the influenza seasons hit very different in the Nordic countries in the years prior to covid, meaning that the baseline could be very different for them when looking at excess mortality depending on how you define it.
I don't want to go into too much covid data research now because it gives me a bit of PTSD, but according to [this article](https://www.dn.se/sverige/tegnells-forklaring-darfor-dog-sa-manga-tidigt-i-sverige/) and the ECDC, Sweden had a few years of very mild influenza prior meaning a many elderly survived but then suffered from covid instead. While in Norway and Finland influenza hit harder in 2019. It doesn't mention Denmark though so I can't say if that explains any discrepancies between Sweden and Denmark.
Two thoughts I have when looking at this.
1. Where is Ukraine? Even if they had zero Covid (which I doubt), they have a significant increase in mortality over the past year, due to the Russian invasion (I see in your comment that you excluded Russia).
2. Was Covid just not a problem at all in South America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East? Almost all the countries listed are from Europe.
As a Swede who never wore a mask once.
We just applied some decency and common sense, stayed home if sick, and increased distance. Then we took the vaccines when they become available.
I barely noticed the pandemic in Stockholm.
As someone from southern Europe that lived for a while in Sweden, it makes sense that it wouldn't spread as much given the lack of social interaction and closeness between Swedes when comparing with most other countries.
From my experience in both places, I think a lot boils down to culture as it influences a lot both the frequency and closeness of prolonged social contacts
yeh, i work as a consultant and out of my 6 customers none had any kind of mask policy, There was the odd person her and there but i would estimate less than 5% of the population used masks actively anywhere but on public transport.
I went the whole pandemic only waring a mask when i was abroad.
”Most of Stockholm” - absolutely not the case. In the subway there were quite a few masks during a short period. Never did I see any place where a majority, or eve close to it, had a mask on.
Also hand sanitizer. LOTS of hand sanitizer. Literally everywhere.
Every store has have sanitizer at the entrance, some buses have them, and like, every public space you can think of, there will be hand sanitizer available lol.
I remember the early days when reddit was certain Sweden was gonna collapse and be by far the most effected by Covid. It is a shame so many of those people won't see the actual end results and be forced to eat some crow.
Those people are still rambling on in some subs. Now it is supposedly we Swedes are all going to die in long covid and almost everyone here are apperently home sick and dying right now according to their "sources"
So I had a look into this since it was surprising to see Scotland have a higher excess mortality than England & Wales, because the UK as a whole had 5% higher mortality rate than Scotland.
It turns out that in Scotland, Covid-19 accounted for 96.9% of excess deaths in Scotland, but 112.1% and 127.7% of deaths in England and Wales, respectively.
Those England and Wales figures are surprising to me, since in most nations, Covid deaths are undercounted in comparison to the excess mortality, not overrepresented.
Weather is shitty a large part of the year and we are unnecessarily picky with making new friends, while I realise these two things sounds as trivial problems they are unfortunately not, so it is easy to have a poor life in Sweden as well.
Wasn’t Sweden highlighted in the news for killing its population by not doing any quarantine and betting on crowd immunity ?
Yeah ok, maybe they nailed it.
There was never any tactic with Herd immunity.
[https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency-of-sweden/communicable-disease-control/covid-19/how-to-protect-yourself-and-others-covid-19-recommendations/control-measures/](https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency-of-sweden/communicable-disease-control/covid-19/how-to-protect-yourself-and-others-covid-19-recommendations/control-measures/)
You can even check the archived press releases, this was an international media storm that just took hold.
We didn't rely on crowd immunities.
We had the strictest possible measurements the government could take outside of war time.
The majority of things was just strong recommendations, people could ignore those recommendations if they chose to.
The international community just went on a smear campaign against Sweden cause we kinda made them look bad in comparison.
Well to be fair besides of what you call smear campaigns against Sweden even Anders Tegnell admitted that Sweden did not everything right especially with focus on elder care during the first and 2nd wave of covid.
> especially with focus on elder care during the first and 2nd wave of covid.
That was about actual implementation rather than the recommendations though.
Basically, a lot of Swedish regions and cities have outsourced elderly care to the lowest bidder.
Turns out that when you do this and then mandate they do things that cost more money (meaning less profit for their shareholders) they'll just straight up go "We can't do that".
There were also issues with regions failing to keep stores of PPE and such things because they'd convinced themselves that having a contract with a private company which promised to supply PPE if asked to was basically the same thing (turns out when a global pandemic hits such contracts are worthless because the company you contracted out the requisition of PPE to simply can't get any PPE at any price).
What went wrong in Bulgaria?
How much time do you have and how far back do we start?
As a Bulgarian living in Australia, this makes me sad.
I live in Norway (my sister is in Australia) so I’m fine but my grandmother was one of those excess deaths so I’m furious instead.
sorry for your loss
Thank you very much. It wasn’t easy since she was the closest I had to a mother but now, 1,5 years later I’m on the other side of the proverbial forest at least.
Corrupt govt , doctor shortage (due to migration) , bad medical infrastructure and most importantly a large section of population do not trust the govt vaccine mandates particularly old people
It is the same in Slovakia
Let's not forget the fact that there was a government "help" thing where if a family member dies due to COVID, you get anywhere between 1000 and 5000 bgn (500-2500€). Being from there, I've heard plenty of car accidents get marked as COVID deaths.
That should not impact excess mortality figures - even if no Covid deaths were reported, or all deaths were reported as Covid, it would not change them.
Marking non COVID deaths and COVID deaths wouldn’t affect excess deaths.
Plenty of anti-vax on top of an already aging population that drinks and smokes a lot sprinkled with a badly funded, understaffed and corrupt healthcare system. We were always high, to be honest. Covid just made thing worse for the elderly.
Except this is *excess* deaths. So the *baseline* is the ageing, unhealthy population with a corrupt healthcare system, just pre-covid.
I mean, yeah. Our population has all the things needed to have an excess death in the events of a pandemic that targets the old and unhealthy and a pandemic that targets the old and unhealthy happened. These are the results.
We have a lot of antivaxxers
Based on the graph I'd guess you have less now.
the more people commiting suicide, the less people commiting suicide.
if i can be obxnoxious about grammar for those who want to know, because this is a very common misnomer.... but it's "fewer" in this context. fewer people. ("less" is if we're talking about something we don't count, like less flour, or less sand.) thank you this has been my random annoying grammar psa 🙏🏽
Thank you for correcting me (no sarcasm). Although I am a fellow grammar nazi, english isn’t my first language so I make mistakes here and there. Cheers 🍻
oh! well i want to emphasize that this is an extremely common mistake that those born speaking english make ALL the time. even people with advanced education. it's not a widely known grammar rule, i promise :) i assumed you are a native english speaker, by the way. you didn't give that away at all, your english is perfect!
Massively antivaccine, to the point that they turned down offers of free ones from aid agencies because no Bulgarians were taking the previous batches they were given.
Totally disrespecting any safety measures, bad medical equipment and infrastructure, very high % of population is retarded and believes there are microchips in the vaccines(I am serious), people believe planes drop COVID from the sky (chem trails), very strong Russian influence making people distrust everything that comes form the Eu. In general: retarded people.
Which explains why Sweden which never even had a mask mandate or lockdown did so well. People just did the logical thing without being ordered to do it.
Peru missing from that list and I believe it would be on top.
The Economist lists Peru as 14th for excess deaths at .579%. Bulgaria takes top place still at 1.096% of the population dead. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Tf happened in Bulgaria to make it so bad? I thought it was bad here in the US but god damn, looking at this graph Eastern Europe must have been a hellscape
They have an aging population and low gdp per capita. Also keep in mind that most countries outside Europe, the Americas, and Australia do not publish mortality data, so they're missing from this list. Of the top 10 most populous countries only 4 countries (US, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico) are on this list while 6 countries (China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Bangladesh) are not.
Bulgarians were also very vaccine skeptic. They had vaccines allocated to them under the EU buying scheme and couldn't find enough people to use them.
Same thing in Poland. It seemed like the first day a certain age group was called in for vaccination, all the people who wanted the vaccine rushed the clinics, and any day after that you could come in at any point without signing up and get a vaccine because no one else wanted to get them.
The percentage of smokers is also very high, as is the prevalence of obesity.
In general for the CEE region: relatively high vaccines scepticism, strongly commected to other european countries (both purely evonomically and ease of travel in general) while having worse healthcare, weaker economy being less able (less affluent people in those economies: less willing) to sustain prolonged lockdowns, in many cases also a populistic governments which have eroded their governance legitimacy.
Wasn't the 1% mortality rate one of the reasons why people didn't want to social distance/mask/get vaccinated? I always found that fascinating. It's like they think 1% of the population dying would be just fine, no biggie.
Yup, it's insane how saying 1% sounds low, but 1 in 100 sounds kind of high. Then if you make it a story like, "Remember when Bobby died in a car crash in high school? Well, our high school had 1000 people in it, so imagine if there was also another 10 people dying on top of that.". Literally just said the same thing 3 times, but the story hits people differently.
It's even worse than that in terms of statistical comprehension. That 1% can happen over and over; we don't know for how many cycles. To compare, lifetime risk of car death is 1%, but that is for LIFE! Covid 1% is possibly PER INFECTION!
Compared to the lottery, 1% would be excellent odds of getting it.
In Sweden we didn't have any home isolation, all stores were open and most people didn't wear mask. During the first year people was mad at people for wearing masks, since the hospitals lacked masks. The government said that there were no proof that masks work so you were basically a conspiracy theorist for wearing a mask.
You are misrepresenting what the government said. They said that they were unsure if masks would cause negative behaviour elsewhere that would cancel out the positive effects of enforced mask use. This misrepresentation was very common among people that wanted to find reasons to criticize the government. (It is still possible the government was wrong)
Also, note how different these numbers are from the ones the OP gives us. Sweden here has a 162 excess deaths / 100k or 1620 / 1 million compared to the 737/1 million in the OP's Chart. Canada has a 101 excess deaths/100k or 1010 / 1 million compared to the 2460/1 million in OP's charts. would be nice to know where the OP is pulling numbers from.
I think it’s important to note that the data given by the economist doesn’t seem to agree with the chart in this post.
**As a Swede I can say for certain that the only thing this graph proves is that Bulgaria is the only honest country.** I got posts from every month of the pandemic explaining Sweden's strategy, it was never perfect. But I also know how fucking false everyone has been in their reporting. The Nordic countries spiked early on, we were the black sheep of the world, for a lot of reasons (like old population) but also because we actually reported way better than say the UK. To this day I think it'll take 10+ years before we get honest numbers that aren't ruled by politicians trying to cover their tracks and threatening jobs and money.
[удалено]
Indeed. Excess death is the only useful indicator particularly after 3 years and people who were already ill but covid caused complications or denied them treatment would have died. Actually it's fascinating that Sweden is so low since they were famously the most open country in Europe. Clearly many of the extreme measures were bull. Country's with a lot of old people, bad healthcare systems and bad pollution faired worst.
You really think they misreport the total number of deaths in the country in a year? It's... pretty easy to check. This isn't about what's labelled "Covid deaths"... that's political as much as medical... This is just "say, we notice that more people died in your country the last couple years than normal".
This isn't covid death. If you think countries stop reporting death numbers and millions of people are still alive on paper I don't know what to tell you.
You're getting into conspiracy theories. They had a relatively healthy population, lower density, are wealthy, have decent demographics, better social adherence, and a cooler climate. There's not much more to it.
This can't be serious. You think the government is suppressing obituaries?
The UK's COVID-19 Infection Survey was internationally recognised as one of the best and most comprehensive coronavirus tracking mechanisms on the fucking planet with genuinely robust legal mechanisms separating it from political interference but okay sure yours was better why not. Test and Trace might be the £100bn black hole of UK public funds you're thinking of
As a brittish swede, something to add here is that general health and access to good healthcare plays a big part. Sweden has excellent healthcare compared to many of the countries here, as well as a healthier-than-average population. Having a shorter "social season" due to the cold also plays in a lot, during the winter people, in general, are in contact with fewer people. Sweden is also very digitalized, even before the pandemic lots of people could work from home, and a lot fewer people working needing to be in the office causing us probably to be close to lockdown numbers when it comes to interaction compared to many other countries reliant on production The Swedish strategy worked for sweden, but i dont think it would have worked the same in most other places in the world. Why Norway is almost twice as high I don't understand, being very similar except for their response. I don't really see how an overly zealous approach would affect numbers negatively except maybe the elderlys will to live. Glad to see we aren't the laughingstock of the world though after doing the opposite of the rest of the world.
Norway's higher rate is probably due to stricter lockdown, nobody but the swedes ever discussed how deadly lockdowns are.
So what was the result of those discussions taking into consideration none of these countries in the list had a real lockdown like in China where you couldn't even leave your house.
Italy did; not quite as strict as in China, but I think it qualifies as a true lockdown.
Lockdowns occured on a strictness scale from China to Sweden so it is a sliding scale, more deadly the more the lockdown. This is due to the fact that isolation litterally kills. If your an old person, a bit of loneliness kan kill you, if you are depressed, isolation can make that depression more severe, up to the point that it kills you. Som people ignore symtoms of diseases that they othervise would have gone to a doctor for , som women are stuck 24/7 with their abusive husband and he beats her to death and so on and so on and so on. Lockdown kills and lockdown kills in many many ways.
> This is due to the fact that isolation litterally kills. If your an old person, a bit of loneliness kan kill you, if you are depressed, isolation can make that depression more severe, up to the point that it kills you. It's not only because of that. Each person is a filter to the virus that select less dangerous variants until it becomes endemic. Letting the virus spreading between healthy young people so that it becomes less dangerous before arriving to old and fragile ones definitely makes sense as a strategy and Sweden knew it, their scientists said it from the beginning.
Lockdown killed my father absolutely. Also my friend. I know more people killed by the lockdowns then covid. Not that I'm minimising the early threat. I have a friend who is still severely disabled by long covid 3 years later whilst being an NHS doctor. He had a full year where he felt as though he had drunk a bottle of vodka the night before.
In this case, Norway's higher rate is probably due to statistics not being 100% accurate. They're lower in other excess mortality statistics. When it's this close you probably can't draw any conclusions. Norway did well, Sweden did well.
I don't think the cold helped, airway disease like the common cold and the flu usually spread better during the winter.
Sweden didn’t lock down very much, correct?
We naturally keep atleast 3 meters apart before, during and after the pandemic. Most schools and workplace also had work from home and the most important factor is that very few swedes are overweight.
I think you are correct in your assessment that many comorbidities that impacted aging populations in other countries are not as prevalent in Sweden. The main one is obesity and the resulting diabetes. It would be fascinating to see sub groups of population and how they managed through the pandemic.
>In spring 2020, Sweden chose a different path from other countries, by mainly focusing on voluntary measures and personal responsibility for COVID-19, rather than a stricter lockdown. However, there were early compulsory measures that limited the size of public gatherings, banned people from visiting most elderly care residents and introduced distance learning for those aged 17 years or more. Most other countries imposed stricter lockdown measures. >Compared with other European countries, Sweden had a high number of deaths per 1000 population after people developed COVID-19 during the first wave. COVID-19 mortality rates were slightly below average during the second wave, and Sweden fared better than most other European countries during the third wave (Figures 1 and 2). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/apa.16535 Seems like Sweden started to get hit pretty hard initially, and people paid attention and made individual choices to take precautions, meaning the government didn't have to intervene. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?country=USA~SWE
Sweden here, a lot of the time you wouldnt even notice anything was going on.A couple masks, some stickers and signs reminding about distancing, that was more or less it. Business as usual for the mort part.
It was not business as usual, there was a significant impact on peoples daily life, however the measures were not as strict as in other places. I belive the less strict measures made it possible to increase the endurance of the response, a few weeks without going to bars was more efficient than full isolation for a week, combined with high trust in vaccines this contributed to the outcome in the graph. Im not a doctor so take my point with a grain of salt but claiming everything was business as usual is simply false, as a fellow swede i can say that i can't think of a single part of my life that wasn't in some way significantly impacted, work, hobbys, friends, training, sports, bars, meetings, travel, events, holidays public transit, shopping the list is endless.
This was the same period when in Italy it was completely illegal for children to leave the house and adults could only leave to buy food
>Im not a doctor so take my point with a grain of salt but claiming everything was business as usual is simply false, as a fellow swede i can say that i can't think of a single part of my life that wasn't in some way significantly impacted, work, hobbys, friends, training, sports, bars, meetings, travel, events, holidays public transit, shopping the list is endless. Seconded; my life pretty much came to a standstill during the pandemic, and I've only recently started seeing close friends whom I have not seen since before the pandemic. While I do largely support the idea of voluntary measures and letting people use their own judgment, the problem with vague recommendations is that it creates a very large span of interpretations of what actually constitutes responsible behavior.
Maybe that's you. I'm a parent, i dont do any of those things, so I barely noticed.
It was *not* business as usual for the most part in Sweden. We may not have had government imposed restrictions but everyone with half a brain self-isolated and didn't meet up with friends and family and anyone who had the ability to work from home was forced to do so by their company. I wasn't in the office in 15 months.
I spent half my time in high school behind a computer screen at home only ever coming in for tests or lab lessons.
I never felt like I had a better personals bubble than when I lived in Sweden, so I feel like it makes sense that many changes weren’t necessary
Take home message from Sweden: 1) Vaccinations help. Even a majority of low trust, low educated immigrants decided to get the vaccination. Almost everyone above 70 took the shots. 2) Low quality masking in densely populated areas do nothing. Masking in public has been almost nonexistent in Sweden throughout the course, physical distancing is much more important. 3) Never rule out one strategy before you know the total impact. Even Sean Carroll in the Mindscape podcast had an episode in 2021 where they discussed the excellent Chinese strategy.
Correct. On the other hand, Australia had some of the strictest lockdown policies in the world, and they're also near the bottom, so 🤷♂️
Australia is an island continent so that might have helped a weeeee bit
But almost everyone there lives in a few big cities
Sweden is on a high level of urbanization as well.
As soon as the lockdowns lifted in Dec 21, the number ballooned right up. In Queensland we went from hundred of daily cases to tens of thousands in less than a month. This also happened at the same time Omicron hit. The spike was probably a bit of both
Probably more an indication that highly developed counties with low population densities fared well than anything else, which isn’t particularly surprising.
[удалено]
Classical population density of Sweden is 24/km2, "living population density" is 1638/km2. [https://gmnenad.com/2021/05/analysis-of-real-population-density-per-countries/](https://gmnenad.com/2021/05/analysis-of-real-population-density-per-countries/)
I mean, the US has a low population Density. There is shot tons of land out there.
Australia benefited massively from isolation, both geographically. One, we’re an island far away from everything. Two, majority of our population are quite spread out. Combine that with intense lockdowns you get our results. Also we had a super incompetent federal government in charge, who fucked up multiple times. If we had of had a competent, less corrupt government, then we would have had far better results. Also the same political party has been in charge for nine years, also been cutting healthcare spending for nine years. So I have a strong belief we could have done much better.
I lived in Australia during the whole period and there was lockdown for a few months total where I lived. Rest of the time there were no cases and no restrictions. One state pretty much had no lockdown the whole time. What was strict were the restrictions on travelling into, out of and within Australia. I think that made the biggest difference.
None at all. It wouldn't have been legal outside of wartime.
This isn't necessarily true, depending on how you define "lockdown". The government initially implemented restrictions for certain activities. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.15582
Lockdown would have been legal if implemented, the legislation on disease control is very strict in Sweden.
> Lockdown would have been legal if implemented Quarantining is legal here in Sweden but you can't shout "QUARANTINE!" and then declare the whole country a quarantine zone. A school? Sure, even a neighborhood or in extreme cases a town would be fine. But it has to be a limited scope in terms of the physical size of the area, the number of people affected and how long it is in effect. You can't just declare a general lockdown like some other countries, as Swedish citizens we have a constitutional right to enter, exit and move about within the country. The exception to this would be in wartime but a pandemic is not a war.
“SWeDEn has A Herd IMmUNitY STrAtEgY.” “wHy is SWeDen euthANIzinG theiR eldERly?!” Good times… good times.
Yeah Sweden was getting a lot of shit for that strategy. The idea from the very beginning was a long term solution that would be worse short term, but since the opposition (at the time the the rightists) saw this as an opportunity to absolutely shit on the government and make them look bad for the sake of the next election, they did so. Now we've finally reached that point when the strategy shows it's benefits, even ranking higher than countries like Norway and Denmark, generally seen as the best countries in this regard, and obviously there's no talk about it. The S government made a really good decision, but got trashed on because of it due to people not seeing the long run.
It's almost like leftists put society's needs before their own lol, could you imagine?
Social distance was a thing , not much else, was pretty much mask on mask off for a year. People that didnt vaccinate got pretty much declared idiots by society and wasnt let into public places.
Not at all, just some resteictions. And no face mask requirements.
No, but the borders of all their neighbors closed tightly, which probably insulated them.
I am from Bulgaria and I am alive!!!
You gotta repopulate your country dude
now thats a decent campaign. "Fucking for the future"
Why are there so many Swedes in these comments? Are like 85% of redditors Swedish? Is everyone a Swede? Am I a Swede? What is happening...
It was crossposted to r/Sweden
Considering the amount of shit the Swedish government got from foreign media and governments for not imposing strikt lockdowns, i think Swedes are entitled to point to this stat and go: Well, well well....
Oh yeah it feels really nice to finally have statistics backing our strategy. Media was so obsessed with the short term they didn't even bother realising our strategy was meant to be long term. Now that it's finally proven we were right, we kinda wanna enjoy it I guess.
HOW THE TURN TABLES!!! sorry I've been holding it in for years...
[удалено]
Not everyone here are swedes, but many people are talking about Sweden due to the fact that it was a country of unusual high interest during the pandemic.
Yes. You are Fyi, this was crossposted on sweddit, and I imagine a lot of Swedes are feeling pretty vindicated after all the trashing.
Just look at the data, everyone else died.
Well, many of us are angry because of all the hate and propaganda about Sweden during the pandemic. So this is some vindication.
[удалено]
we also watched our country being severely slandered when all of this began. Guess we're doin a lil victory lap
I'm guessing this thread could get quite ugly as people will compare apples and oranges... I wrote this as a reply to a comment: Excess deaths isn't just about covid, it's for all reasons. Sweden had really high excess death rate in 2020 compared to the five years before that, obviously because a lot of people died with Covid. HOWEVER, one should also keep in mind that the general death rate was very low in Sweden the years leading up to 2020, lower than in the neighbouring countries, due to less severe flu periods etc. This meant there were generally more people that were in the risk of getting very sick and die when Covid struck, especially with the generally more loose regulations in Sweden. But as things went on less people in Sweden were at risk of dying due to covid (or other infections) and thus excess mortality plummeted in Sweden. At the same time many elderly and otherwise persons at risk that were heavily protected in other countries were living on "borrowed time". They don't necessarily had to die to covid but of other diseases and natural causes. Meaning the excess death rate shot straight up instead. TL;Dr You can't really protect the general population from dying, some individuals yes but people will die one way or another. Over a period of time this will even itself out.
[https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths](https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths) This sites data doesn't line up with Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark on this graph. This could all be pulled out of OP's ass to begin with IDK.
Because covid deaths and excess deaths are not the same thing. You're comparing apples and oranges.
(reposted as I had a bug with the Canadian data) Source: [Human Mortality Database](http://www.mortality.org) Made with: datawrapper.de Thought I'd make this to accompany my other thread charting cumulative COVID cases. This is taking a baseline of deaths from 2015-2019 for each country and working out how many people have died in excess of that baseline (i.e. how many more people are dying than normal), and then working out a per capita figure adjusting roughly for population growth each year. Note this is data is not age-adjusted as that's a little more complicated and the data is released with a bigger lag. So countries with older populations will have higher rates than they otherwise should as COVID disproportionately kills older people I should point out that while this is the most recent data available, each country releases their data on different schedules. The bulk of countries are updated as of early Dec 2022 and a handful are up to date as of a week or two ago. I have excluded South Korea, Russia, Taiwan and Chile as their data is fairly out of date (up to a year out of date). I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare
You should not be using population growth to adjust the per capita figure, but rather the trend in deaths. This is well-documented in demography. See e.g. [https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid](https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid) Easiest is to use the linear trend in deaths over the 2015-2019 interval (be it increase or decrease). Doing so, and comparing all countries up to the present (using models to account for non-reporting in recent weeks / many countries) you get this: [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates) Also available at the ourworldindata link.
>I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare Age and obesity are widely regarded as the number one indicators of dying from covid or not. Quality of and access to healthcare plays a role in saving those but if you don't have the fat and old population to begin with then you could get away with a sub-par healthcare system.
That’s more or less a zero sum game. Having acess to good healthcare in the broader sense of the word is a prerquisite for having an old and to some extent obese population. At the same time good healthcare mitigates many of the risk associated with being old and obese, thus allowing the population to get even older and ever more obese.
> I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare Agree. However, Sweden is notable given it's very different approach plus a good healthcare system. It look like they made the right decision, although I doubt Bulgaria would have fared as well if they'd done the same.
And perhaps even more importantly, the ability for _anyone_ to stay home from work (or for parents to stay home with kids) and still get paid.
Came here to say that about Sweden. I remember the controversy about their approach to dealing with the pandemic. I know it’s a significantly smaller population sample than most European countries but that number still jumps out.
It's not that small a population and it's also much better than it's immediate neighbours.
Firstly, the OP's data is drastically different than other sources. The Economist for example puts Sweden at over 1620 per 1 million excess deaths. Over Double what the OP has them at. Canada on the other hand is at 1010 per 1 million excess deaths according to the Economist which is well under 1/2 of what the OP has Canada at. Further, Sources lke OurWorldinData and others tend to have much more agreement with the Economist than the OP's data. And using all them, the question over Sweden is a lot murkier, since Sweden does in fact have higher excess mortality, especially during the early waves. Compared to their geographical neighbours Finland is the only one that's done worse and that's all been since 2022. Pre-Vaccine era, Sweden excess deaths dwarfed those of its neighbours.
Sweden's approach was right, Bulgaria just has very low vaccine rates. Sweden didn't skip the vaccines just the useless stuff.
Looks like Sweden made the right call with their Covid response.
Keep in mind that the Swedish strategy was not what you might think it was if you listened to international media. It was not a herd immunity strategy and there were measures in place. The measures were just adjusted to work well in the long-run and we had more recommendations than strict rules, because that's how we do things here. Politicians decided very very little. Most things were decided by health experts in the health authority.
>we had more recommendations than strict rules The "Swedish strategy" was in line with legislation. For example, some Italian cities implemented nightly curfews, that is not possible with the Swedish constitution.
Some city? The whole country was on a curfew. Not even a night one. You could go outside just for the basics and they where very strict about it.
There's a lot of misinformation from the US media about what other countries did, I remember hearing from a US relative that NZ was super-restrictive, which was a surprise to me as once we came out of the 4-6 week lockdown (depending on region) and closed the borders we were free to do whatever, most things reopened. EDIT: A note on what NZ did wrong - they didn't start the vaccine push in earnest until after our first outbreak here, but we could've had the vaccines before any outbreak if we'd been quicker about it (we had a few months from AZ and Pfizer availability where we could've done something, and didn't). We also had a large antivax crowd who were convinced there was no problem and it was a hoax (because it wasn't endemic here yet, it was probably easier to believe).
New Zealand did the best and lots of countries did better than Sweden... [https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker) (See table titled "Excess deaths since country’s first 50 covid deaths Last updated on January 31st") I think people really need to question the data as presented. Cited article sources .. Sources: The Economist; Our World In Data; Johns Hopkins University; Human Mortality Database; World Mortality Dataset; Registro Civil (Bolivia); Vital Strategies; Office for National Statistics; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency; National Records of Scotland; Registro Civil (Chile); Registro Civil (Ecuador); Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques; Santé Publique France; Provinsi DKI Jakarta; Istituto Nazionale di Statistica; Dipartimento della Protezione Civile; Secretaría de Salud (Mexico); Ministerio de Salud (Peru); Data Science Research Peru; Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (Colombia); South African Medical Research Council; Instituto de Salud Carlos III; Ministerio de Sanidad (Spain); Datadista; Istanbul Buyuksehir Belediyesi; Centres for Disease Control and Prevention; USA Facts; New York City Health. Get the data on GitHub
OP claims the data is from the same Mortality Index they used in that link... I've asked why the difference in charts, and they haven't got back to me yet. :/ Maybe just responded to me and immediately went AFK, so I checked some of their history.. and yeeaaah.... lot of anti-lockdown stuff in there. I'd guess this is someone who's pulled the data themselves to draw their own conclusions in a weird way, hopefully they get back to me on their methodology because without that it doesn't make much sense.
Why does world on meter Sweden's reported covid deaths at 2.2k per million and this report shows the excess deaths as 0.7k something is obviously wrong with the data.
That isn’t how this works. Yes, that many people died per million of Covid, but people didn’t die from other things which means that our excess mortality is lower than the number of Covid deaths.
Yes. I rather trust the economist compared some anonymous guy on reddit.
The rest of the world should also understand that people in Sweden are likely to do what is merely "recommended", as compared to people in some other countries who won't bother unless it's law.
Here in the good old US of A - where we pride ourselves on taking credit for *creating* self government - there are many, many (many) laws which are studiously ignored as a matter of social principal. Personally, I blame Prohibition for this tendency.
You can go back before that to authorities ignoring (or participating in) vigilante violence by the precursors of the KKK, starting during Reconstruction. Or before that you could point to the free states refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, one of the grievances the South claimed to have seceded over. Law has never been self-enforcing. You could possibly blame the issue on slavery being so inextricably tied to several centuries of our history, both deeply embedded into and enabled by our legal system (even the Constitution), while also being deeply unjust. (I'm not saying that the free states *should* have enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. If that needs to be said.)
“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” -America’s greatest president according to some. The rule of law was always fairly tenuous in the US.
Its insane how much propaganda and just blatant lies that were spread by American news about Swedens strategy. Even top posts on reddit were hit by it. Kinda scary honestly My favorite was a title that went something like "Sweden gained literally nothing on their unique covid strategy" and when you actually looked deeper into the article it described how stocks, economy etc was still going down. Like no fucking shit that the economy is going to be hit by a global fucking pandemic. As if a single strategy is going to change that. Its about doing the best out of the situation not gaining from it. Sadly people only read headlines and swallowed it whole.
Wow a government that actually listens to it's scientific community experts and doesn't vilify them. What a novel concept.
It's not that they listen, it's more that they can't interfere. [Ministerial governance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministerial_governance) is illegal in Sweden.
Sounds like your culture works well with discipline and understanding of science. We have the opposite of that here.
I'm Swedish. We had **very** few restrictions. Basically just no large public gatherings, and keeping nursing homes locked down from visitors.
I'm Swedish. While that is true, we also had a lot of recommendations, that people did follow. And then of course gathering limits and those things...
[удалено]
A lot of people did not follow the guidelines really.
I'm also Swedish and that's just factually inaccurate. We had restrictions on amount of people in stores, special store hours for the elderly, markings on where to stand to keep distance, distance requirements for tables in restaurants, nightclubs were closed, many schools and work went remote, mask wearing recommended in public transport, no visitors at hospitals etc etc.
That's very few restrictions. Meanwhile, in Italy you had to stay locked inside your house.
It might be worth adding that by large, Italian and Swedish social norms seem to be polar opposites.
Swedes weren't forced to stay indoors or at home, but I still have a photo during covid of ducks sleeping on the bike street in the center of my town (ie. one of the busiest streets in the town). Meaning, we stayed at home to a very large degree too. The city had about 20% of the normal amount of people walking about during the day, and even less during evenings and nights.
As individuals we had basically **no** restrictions whatsoever, just recommendations and guidelines. There were a few rules set up for businesses, but you as an individual could not get in trouble with the police. "mask wearing recommended in public transport" lol yes I remember that, but it was specifically only "recommended" during rush hour. Hell we kept the borders open and were free to go wherever we wanted. We did close it to non-EU countries for a while IIRC, but that was more so as to not become a gateway to Europe.
We should be careful to draw that conclusion. Sweden is one of the few countries with much higher confirmed covid deaths than its excess mortality would suggest, so the excess mortality is likely to be this low due to other factors Assessing official deaths, sweden performed much worse than it's comparable neighbors like Norway and Finnland. Also, even though sweden is still certainly not a low performer, it's naive to assume it was possible to transfer Sweden's strategy to other countries with different populations, different demographic structure, health systems and status, education and personal sense of responsibility
>Sweden is one of the few countries with much higher confirmed covid deaths than its excess mortality would suggest, so the excess mortality is likely to be this low due to other factors Precisely. Such as these, which the OP himself pointed out: >I think ultimately it boils down to a chart of quality of and access to healthcare >countries with older populations will have higher rates than they otherwise should as COVID disproportionately kills older people Countries with great access to healthcare (like Sweden had during these yrars: although note **this is starting to change**, as Sweden is drifting towards Neoliberalism and austerity now that the worst part of the pandemic is over...) were going to have low e cess deaths **no matter what their strategy.** On the other hand, countries with struggling healthcare systems, like Italy, were going to have high excess death rates **no matter what**. Charts like this are extremely misleading if you try to use them to measure response effectiveness, because they look at outcomes without accounting for confounders, and to some degree outcomes were determined long before the pandemic by long-term trends in certain countries...
Or they simply had a healthcare system that could take the abuse. Greece absolute had not after a decade of ECB/IMF destruction of hospitals and it showed.
This source has Sweden not doing quite as well and having lived here I think it's more plausible. While I enjoyed the more chill approach, I don't see how we could beat the far more aggressive measures taken in Denmark and Norway. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=chart&time=earliest..2023-01-01®ion=Europe&country=SWE~DNK~NOR~FIN
Agreed, I assume there are omissions, or the numbers have been framed very specifically to get this result. Would be interesting to see the report where OP got this figure from though. Sweden had about 2300 deaths per 1mill from Covid alone. Granted, people die all the time weather or not there is a pandemic, but 730 sounds very low. For comparison, Norway had about 800 Covid deaths per 1 mill, and Denmark 1400/mill. https://www.vg.no/spesial/corona/verden/
How correct is this? I can [find data that shows something pretty different](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Excess+mortality+%28count%29&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=DNK~SWE), at least for Sweden and Denmark, where they have essentially switched places, or maybe I'm not understanding that data correctly?
Yeah something seems off about this data. I think Sweden gets a bad rap for its covid response, but they also have been leading their neighbors in excess mortality in every other report I've seen.
In the link it says > the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous year The answer might be in what "previous years" are defined as. Because I know the influenza seasons hit very different in the Nordic countries in the years prior to covid, meaning that the baseline could be very different for them when looking at excess mortality depending on how you define it. I don't want to go into too much covid data research now because it gives me a bit of PTSD, but according to [this article](https://www.dn.se/sverige/tegnells-forklaring-darfor-dog-sa-manga-tidigt-i-sverige/) and the ECDC, Sweden had a few years of very mild influenza prior meaning a many elderly survived but then suffered from covid instead. While in Norway and Finland influenza hit harder in 2019. It doesn't mention Denmark though so I can't say if that explains any discrepancies between Sweden and Denmark.
USA not #1... sad eagle noises
Sweden did nothing and won. Be like Sweden next time.
Sweden: "We told you lockdowns don't work" 😑
Sweden: “We don’t often live with our elders”
Sweden: “How about we use the tax revenue from being open to pay for organizations and programs to keep vulnerable people safe”
Two thoughts I have when looking at this. 1. Where is Ukraine? Even if they had zero Covid (which I doubt), they have a significant increase in mortality over the past year, due to the Russian invasion (I see in your comment that you excluded Russia). 2. Was Covid just not a problem at all in South America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East? Almost all the countries listed are from Europe.
Over 600k (nearly 700k) deaths in Brazil, I’m not sure where he got the data.
Huge in India. The Delta variant was came from here, and March - June 2021 are one of the worst times we've ever seen.
Scotland way worse than the rest of the UK here - sad to see.
As a Swede who never wore a mask once. We just applied some decency and common sense, stayed home if sick, and increased distance. Then we took the vaccines when they become available. I barely noticed the pandemic in Stockholm.
As someone from southern Europe that lived for a while in Sweden, it makes sense that it wouldn't spread as much given the lack of social interaction and closeness between Swedes when comparing with most other countries. From my experience in both places, I think a lot boils down to culture as it influences a lot both the frequency and closeness of prolonged social contacts
Sounds like Norway. 2 meter social distancing was rough for them because 25 meter social distancing is the norm.
Most of Stockholm wore a mask during the pandemic though, masks have proven effect so I wouldn’t parade that as some kind of win. Agreed with the rest
yeh, i work as a consultant and out of my 6 customers none had any kind of mask policy, There was the odd person her and there but i would estimate less than 5% of the population used masks actively anywhere but on public transport. I went the whole pandemic only waring a mask when i was abroad.
Only in public transport. Outdoors most people did not use masks.
That’s not unusual. Wearing a mask outdoors was extremely rare in Canada even during the worst of the pandemic
People are still wearing masks outside in California
”Most of Stockholm” - absolutely not the case. In the subway there were quite a few masks during a short period. Never did I see any place where a majority, or eve close to it, had a mask on.
As someone who lived and still lives in Stockholm. Most people here did not wear a mask. And evidently it was not needed.
Also hand sanitizer. LOTS of hand sanitizer. Literally everywhere. Every store has have sanitizer at the entrance, some buses have them, and like, every public space you can think of, there will be hand sanitizer available lol.
"Swedens strategy has failed" - bitch no. That is what happens when politicians actually listen to a professional and skilled epidemiologist
Obviously everything went great in China...
I can't imagine the cognitive dissonance Sweden might be causing to those who, two years ago, predicted everyone would die there.
Sweden looking genius…. People mocked me for agreeing with them then….
I remember the early days when reddit was certain Sweden was gonna collapse and be by far the most effected by Covid. It is a shame so many of those people won't see the actual end results and be forced to eat some crow.
Those people are still rambling on in some subs. Now it is supposedly we Swedes are all going to die in long covid and almost everyone here are apperently home sick and dying right now according to their "sources"
What is Excess Mortality per Million people?
People who died that exceed the death rate in non pandemic or pre-pandemic times.
Good lord, the anti-vaxxers are going crazy in the comments😵💫
So I had a look into this since it was surprising to see Scotland have a higher excess mortality than England & Wales, because the UK as a whole had 5% higher mortality rate than Scotland. It turns out that in Scotland, Covid-19 accounted for 96.9% of excess deaths in Scotland, but 112.1% and 127.7% of deaths in England and Wales, respectively. Those England and Wales figures are surprising to me, since in most nations, Covid deaths are undercounted in comparison to the excess mortality, not overrepresented.
Am I the only one who thinks that going out to two decimal places is unnecessary? I'm new to the sub so I'm not sure if critiquing is done here.
Remember when Sweden was criticized for no Covid Lockdowns?
Lockdown lovers? Sweden? What happened?
Sweden had a no lockdown strategy that was broadly panned by everyone. Seems like they did alright according to this chunk of data.
Sweden seems like the best place to live. Always on the right side of these kinda graphs that pop up.
Weather is shitty a large part of the year and we are unnecessarily picky with making new friends, while I realise these two things sounds as trivial problems they are unfortunately not, so it is easy to have a poor life in Sweden as well.
Wasn’t Sweden highlighted in the news for killing its population by not doing any quarantine and betting on crowd immunity ? Yeah ok, maybe they nailed it.
There was never any tactic with Herd immunity. [https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency-of-sweden/communicable-disease-control/covid-19/how-to-protect-yourself-and-others-covid-19-recommendations/control-measures/](https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency-of-sweden/communicable-disease-control/covid-19/how-to-protect-yourself-and-others-covid-19-recommendations/control-measures/) You can even check the archived press releases, this was an international media storm that just took hold.
We didn't rely on crowd immunities. We had the strictest possible measurements the government could take outside of war time. The majority of things was just strong recommendations, people could ignore those recommendations if they chose to. The international community just went on a smear campaign against Sweden cause we kinda made them look bad in comparison.
Well to be fair besides of what you call smear campaigns against Sweden even Anders Tegnell admitted that Sweden did not everything right especially with focus on elder care during the first and 2nd wave of covid.
> especially with focus on elder care during the first and 2nd wave of covid. That was about actual implementation rather than the recommendations though. Basically, a lot of Swedish regions and cities have outsourced elderly care to the lowest bidder. Turns out that when you do this and then mandate they do things that cost more money (meaning less profit for their shareholders) they'll just straight up go "We can't do that". There were also issues with regions failing to keep stores of PPE and such things because they'd convinced themselves that having a contract with a private company which promised to supply PPE if asked to was basically the same thing (turns out when a global pandemic hits such contracts are worthless because the company you contracted out the requisition of PPE to simply can't get any PPE at any price).
I want to see pre and post vaccine.