Coronavirus: Thread

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Without Lockdowns, Sweden Had Fewer Excess Deaths Than Most Of Europe

https://mises.org/wire/without-lockdowns-sweden-had-fewer-excess-deaths-most-europe
https://www.aier.org/article/what-they-said-about-lockdowns-before-2020/

https://time.com/5899432/sweden-coronovirus-disaster/
https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-strategy-failed-higher-death-rate-2021-8
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths#world-maps-confirmed-deaths-relative-to-the-size-of-the-population
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid?time=earliest..latest&country=FRA~GBR~DEU~ITA~ESP~SWE~NLD~USA
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-europe-mortality-idUSKBN2BG1R9
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210416-2

It’s now been more than eighteen months since governments began the
new social experiment now known as “lockdowns.”

Prior to 2020, forced “social distancing” was generally considered to
be too costly in societal terms to justify such a risky experiment.

Yet in 2020, led by health technocrats at the World Health
Organization, nearly all national governments in the world suddenly
and without precedent embraced the idea of lockdowns.

On the other hand, the Swedish regime rejected the idea.

For this act of iconoclasm, the Swedish government was pilloried by
media organizations and non-Swedish government officials worldwide.
The predictions of doom and of a widespread Swedish bloodbath were
ubiquitous. Months later, even when it became clear Sweden was not the
death-addled outlier many assumed it would be, it was common to see
articles declaring Swedish covid policy to be a “disaster.”

Even eighteen months later, as the Sweden-is-doomed narrative broke
down even more, critics of Sweden contort themselves to create an
anti-Swedish narrative. Consider this August 2021 article at Business
Insider, for example, which carefully slices and dices the data to
make Sweden’s outcomes look bad. The author slyly writes:

    Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100
people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4
out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also
recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around
three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and
nearly 10 times more than Norway.

Note the sleight of hand used here. In one sentence, the comparison
focuses on diagnoses compared to the UK and Italy. This is surely
because actual deaths from covid are fewer per million in Sweden than
in either of the UK or Italy. Indeed, the author with this comparison
only succeeds in showing us that covid is less fatal in Sweden where
there are more cases but fewer deaths. The author then quickly changes
the subject to comparisons in deaths so as to make sure Sweden
compares unfavorably to Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

These claims are becoming increasingly desperate, since in terms of
excess deaths Sweden is better off than most of Europe overall, and
also better off than most other northern European countries. (And much
better than southern European countries.) Moreover, "excess mortality"
is a better measure of deaths in a given country since it provides a
broader view of the actual effects of both covid and covid policy.

Certainly, one can find some European regimes that had fewer deaths
proportionally. Norway, Denmark, and Finland have remarkably low
numbers of covid deaths compared to all of Europe.

But this fails to explain why Sweden’s non-bloodbath compares
favorably to most EU member states, including France, Italy, Spain,
the Netherlands, and others.

For example, as of late August, excess mortality in Sweden was
approximately 785 per million people. In France, the total is 988 per
million, and in Spain, it is 1,917 per million. In EU nonmember the
United Kingdom, the total is 1,657 per million.

This trend was already becoming apparent months ago, and in March
Reuters reported,

    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…. Twenty-one of the 30
countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than
Sweden.

Other data, also according to Reuters, "which included an adjustment
to account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal
mortality patterns of countries analysed," Placed Sweden at eighteenth
out of twenty-six in terms of mortality. The "highest" ranked—that is,
the worst ranked—were Poland, Spain, and Belgium.

Another way of comparing Sweden to the rest of Europe is to look at
excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 compared to “average monthly deaths”
from 2016 to 2019.

In the time since February 2020, total deaths (measured as a
percentage of the 2016–19 average) were lower in Sweden than in the
"EU 27" in fourteen out of eighteen months.

Granting that Denmark, Norway, and Finland all compare favorably
against Sweden, most other European countries can't boast of such
things.

Compared to France, Sweden’s excess monthly deaths were lower in
thirteen out of eighteen months in that period. Comparisons were
similar when looking at the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy. Indeed,
among Europe’s large nations, only Germany fares better than Sweden.

So, yes, if we insist on cherry-picking exactly three countries to
which to compare Sweden—i.e., Finland, Denmark, and Norway—Sweden
looks like some kind of outlier. But with most other countries in
Europe, plus the UK, Sweden compares well. Moreover, even if Sweden
were only “about the same” as other European countries, this would
still contradict the prophecies of doom handed down by the public
health technocrats.

None of this "proves" of course that Sweden adopted the ideal response
to the spread of disease. But at the very least, the Sweden experience
betrays the solemn predictions of so many health "experts" who
predicted total disaster for Sweden. Moreover, even if Sweden did have
worse outcomes than most of Europe, that would not justify the
widespread destruction of human rights necessary to force people into
lockdowns, unemployment, and social isolation. The utilitarian
approach is a road to untrammeled state power. But even the
utilitarian approach doesn't work for the lockdown advocates who fail
even by their own metrics.