Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.
UPDATE: Sorry about that; I posted this from my phone, and the mobile version of the Hall didn't show me the formatting error.
6 comments:
Norway, Denmark, Finland are likely better comps, and had much less.
Perhaps; but it's strange all the same. Here in America, the difference between Florida and South Dakota (who followed similar limited lockdown policies, with very different results) is often said to be Vitamin D. Sweden is very far north and gets little sun, especially in winter. Vitamin D should be lush in Spain.
But then, I read that Sweden increased mandatory Vitamin D supplements in food items in 2015. This would make sense, given they would get less of it from sunlight. Perhaps there was an effect from that as well; and then, a more rapid achievement of herd immunity at least locally as people got mild cases and beat them off.
https://www.nutraingredients.com/Article/2015/05/28/Sweden-to-expand-mandatory-vitamin-D-fortification
Perhaps a workable course is Vitamin D, plus occasional exposure to low-concentrations of coronavirus. For the relatively less vulnerable, of course.
Link to article is now broken. Try this:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-mortality-idUSKBN2BG1R9
Here's an article that has some theories about why Sweden may have done worse than its Nordic neighbors, at least Norway and Finland: high international travel; large immigrant population; "dry tinder" from a less-deadly flu season last year. The article also claims that Norway and Finland were more similar to Sweden in terms of lockdown-type restrictions than they were to other European countries:
https://www.city-journal.org/death-and-lockdowns
It is, of course, very easy to make statistics says what one wants - my stats professor referred to this as torturing the data until they speak - but one very troubling claim in this article is this one:
The three Nordic countries have all done much better than the United States in preventing excess deaths, and there’s one especially troubling difference: the rate of excess mortality among younger people. That rate soared last year among Americans in lockdown, but not among the Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns, who kept going to school, working, and socializing without masks during the pandemic.
If true, this seems wrong - and I say that as someone in the age group being protected by the lockdown policy.
My son in Norway has been at work except for last March. They did reduce contact at his workplace. His girlfriend finished her degree, entirely remotely. They are not socialising at all, and neither is most of the rest of the area around Tromso, anyway.
I agree with the international and large immigrant population guesse, BTW. The Somalis believe this is a white persons disease and they won't get and they are following no precautions, generally. They have been meeting in their restaurants and in each other's homes, with no distancing and no masks. Because they area young population, they don't see themselves as dying often, even thought their rates are sky-high for their age groups. And thus, of course, they spread it to others early. The PC Swedes wouldn't say it out loud and would not try to be enforcers against another "perfectly valid" culture, but eventually they had enough. Schools, police and gov't officials are keeping their distance as much as possible, and they are quietly enforcing covid measures. But the initial effects were large.
This would be a solid enough explanation to explain it all, especially in comparison to the Finns, who admit very few immigrants. The problem is it's not that different from the Norwegians and Danes. It makes me wonder if their are threshold points which make a big difference that we cannot discern from out limited data.
I thought about the next line in the article I cited which says:
In fact, among people aged 15 to 64 in each of the Nordic countries, there have been fewer deaths than normal since the pandemic began.
Unless I'm missing something, the means all the excess mortality occurred among the elderly. Sweden has admitted they did a poor job protecting the elderly especially early on. I wonder if the other Nordic countries did better.
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