sweden eschewed lockdown

some have claimed it is a disaster and the horror of scandanavia

others that this was wise and that it's mostly the more aggressive swedish counting for COV that has driven result divergence

all cause deaths can give us insight into which is correct.

when last i did this analysis, we only had data thru week 18. we can now update to week 23.

sweden is 3.6% below historical pop adjusted baseline for this point in the flu season vs -4.5% at week 18.

so, they have lost a little ground, but are still well below historical avg

and they are still doing better on a historical basis than either denmark or finland (who is having a bad year despite reporting low covid deaths)

we can see how this stacks up historically here.

there is nothing alarming in the sweden data overall.

and this gets very interesting. sweden uses a very inclusive definition of "COV death". others use less inclusive ones. finland was not even counting deaths in nursing homes early on (75% of swedish deaths were in NH).

finland seem to have partially remedied this, but folks i spoke to there say it's haphazard and is clearly missing a lot of cases.

FIN is the outlier with high excess deaths. no other nordic is above normal.

this is suggestive that much of the variance in COV is definitional

sweden has much higher reported cov deaths than other nordics, but their all cause deaths look better than all but norway.

all the added deaths from cov plus this year's flu still add to a below avg year.

that's telling.

covid is counted differently all over and countries often fail to meet their own standards. look at NY state in the US.

they refuse to follow CDC guidelines and under-count deaths by ~6600.

but all cause deaths are counted the same way and provide a check.

this is not to say that covid had no effect. it clearly seems to have done so.

you can see it here. this year was bending away from normal, then reverted towards it.

the typical flu season was extremely mild, then it appears that covid hit and caused deaths to mean revert.

there is a reason that flu season is measured from week 40 to week 39 of the next year. (it's CDC standard)

flu peaks around week 1 of the year. if you use calendar year, you risk looking only at half the flu that year and H2 of flu season is not an independent variable vs H1

using calendar year (and z scores etc) can be EXTREMELY misleading.

people die every year and they have an actuarial life expectancy.

if you'll forgive the metaphor, it works like a forest in a burn ecology.

it going to burn. it's just a question of when and how intensely.

if it's february in LA and you've had no small fires this year and none last year, the forest has lot of fuel and is set up for an intense burn when it catches.

this is what we see in sweden

2018-19 was the lowest year in the last 20. thru march, 2019-20 was on a similar pace

and this matters. life expectancy is not infinite. when many people live longer than was actuarially expected, it adds to death risk. you have a larger than normal cohort of the highly vulnerable.

so when the fires comes, it burns intensely.

we see that here.

what's important to internalize is that total deaths is the area under the curve (AUC) and AUC is notoriously hard to eyeball.

B looks bigger than A. but it's not. it's actually smaller and when one adds C as well, you get a total 3.6% below avg

actual cum AUC looks like this

and it's worth noting that excess deaths have been negative in sweden throughout june.

i suspect this will continue through the rest of the year. forests don't burn again after big fires.

the year as a whole is likely to wind up even further below avg than present.

and we can see a validation of this idea that people lived longer than expected for two years and then got hit hard by a new pathogen in the age of death data.

89% of swedish deaths were over 79 y/o

67% were over 80

the sum total of deaths under 60 was 219 (4%)

0 under 20.

75% of deaths were in nursing homes and elder care.

so ask yourself: "how much good could having locked all working age swedes inside possibly done on covid deaths even if lockdown were 100% effective?"

pretty much none. certainly not enough to justify the price.

there is no evidence that lockdowns affected the shape of anyone's disease curve.

as policy, it looks like a severe failure.

this all came down to elder care.

(and the swedes were only so/so on that) https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1266747365609750528?s=20

sweden looks to be getting pilloried for using very inclusive counting.

US all cause deaths are above avg.

so are UK, ireland, france, spain, italy, and belgium, all those countries locked down hard.

so why is sweden the one in for criticism?

this seems inapt.

they are having a mild year for overall deaths while most others are not. even compared to the scandinavian countries, they are in second place on lowest ACD.

and lockdowns clearly failed.

try to tell neth (light lockdown) from spain (heavy) https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1264656015267516421?s=20

food for thought.