It's also worth noting that sources such as this article from The Economist[1] show that Sweden endured waves of excess deaths of up to 6% that neither Norway nor Finland reported, and instead show only residual variations.
From the article:
> Countries in northern Europe have generally experienced much lower mortality rates throughout the pandemic. Some Nordic nations have experienced almost no excess deaths at all. The exception is Sweden, which imposed some of the continent’s least restrictive social-distancing measures during the first wave.
Looking only at excess mortality is pretty shallow. Being European and knowing the differences in health care systems across countries, the excess mortality chart also reflects the quality of healthcare systems in these countries. It isn’t much surprise to see nordic countries being the best here.
Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries. Three of the four Peaks of high mortality in Spain coincided with holiday season: April 2020 (Holy Week, first big holiday after the first case registered 31-jan), June (Start of the holidays) and August (peak of Summer holidays).
After seen how each government reacted in the pandemic, I just assume that everybody lied in the statistics.
> Is an incomplete picture that forget most relevant factors. For example that France and Spain receive more than 80 millions of international tourists each year and this factor have to be corrected to compare countries.
The probability of being hit by a pandemic originated on a different country is proportional to the number of travelers moving in and out of the country (each one with a small probability of carrying the virus). Put the same amount of people visiting Swedden without any mask and the result would had been very different so "our plan: good and the other's: bad" is just too simplistic.
The variable excess deaths in a country depends also of how much people lives there. To have 100000 people killed by Covid is a different situation if your population is 9 millions or 60 millions. If millions of people visit a touristic location you will unavoidably have an increase in the people that died there just by accident. And accidents happen more often when there is alcohol and party involved. If a German died by heart attack while sunbathing in Marseille or another English commit balconing after drinking booze for all day in Valencia; those will be computed in the list of France/Spain deaths or is a +1 in the Germany/UK excess death?. Is unclear here. There was a lot of creative management of the info by everybody in the Covid years.
And there are a lot of other factors that must be taken in mind, like healthcare, but the main problem still is a question of trust. We don't have tools to verify if this data is real or not.
The interesting part is mostly comparing the nordic countries against each other. Sweden seemed to be doing much much worse early on due to the chosen strategy, but that no longer seems to be the case.
I don't know enough about Sweden, but while the overall quality of our healthcare is high, its capacity is tailored very tightly to normal situations and we have very little slack for an epidemic like this. So Dutch ICs overflowed while Germany still had space (and a lot of people were in fact transferred there).
It was media and bureaucrats who handled the Swedish pandemic approach too, by putting the so called "expert agency" on a pedestal, worshiping it, abstaining from any form of critical questioning while branding the few critics that made their voices heard as saboteurs, and taking all of the mostly incorrect statements and claims that the agency spread during the initial waves, at face value.
Swedish columnist Viktor Barth-Kron recently described the outcome of Sweden's pandemic approach the following way, which I find quite fitting: "Tegnell (state epidemiologist at that time) and Löfven (prime minister at that time) were wrong about almost everything during the pandemic, but they turned out to be right when it comes to the big picture."
Excess mortality still looks substantially higher in Sweden than in Norway and Denmark (though not Finland) in this OWID data set, I wonder why the difference?
Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor.
On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities that were taken advantage of by others. So from that perspective there are many politicians that are laughing their way to the bank.
Lock downs became a political tool early on, and any place that still forces lock downs or masking is because politics. Which makes comparing them to another country an apple-and-oranges comparison.
> Only focusing on mortality from COVID ignores the very real detrimental health, mental-health, business and societal effects of lock-downs, so the long term benefits to the common man are very much more in their favor.
Are they? This reads as petty reasoning of someone who refuses to admit they were wrong even though that data screams in their face, and instead try to grab hold of nonexistent data to justify their personal beliefs.
It's like the "COVID vaccines kill more than the disease" crowd, who keep on moving their "the end is near" calendar date to avoid admitting they were simply pathologically wrong.
> On the other hand they totally blew the power grab opportunities (...)
This reads like a rebranding of the whole "Fauci wants to take over as dictator" conspiracy theory.
Anyway, can you point out exactly a single country ever where enforcing lockdowns had a positive impact on public perception and elections?
If anything, conspiracy theorists who tried to push anti-science rhetoric failed to capitalize from it, specially as their electorate ended up dying disproportionately.
It also didn't helped their cause that politicians who were radically against basic public health measures ended up being caught double- and triple-vaccinating themselves while preaching the opposite.
> Lock downs became a political tool early on, (...)
Anti-establishment politicians tried to attack basic public health measures to turn them into political battles, primarily because they knew that supporting them was a political liability. Thankfully, they failed, and now all they have left is nitpicking about Sweden while the people most vulnerable to their propaganda are now disproportionately hit by the disease.
It saddens me that society learned nothing and these sociopaths still have traction in some circles.
> Are they? This reads as petty reasoning of someone who refuses to admit they were wrong even though that data screams in their face, and instead try to grab hold of nonexistent data to justify their personal beliefs.
Oh, absolutely. In fact, I am rather confused which of the items in the list are even in question by you. Health issues - does anyone deny that many other health issues were not dealt with over lock-down [eg. our dentist refused to deal with anything not emergency level for over a year], or that elderly were left unattended because of lock down? Mental Heath issues - this has been discussed recently on HN, but it is pretty obvious, IMO. Business effects - China sets a perfect example, but why do you think all these relief bills were set up? Societal effects - also alot on HN, people are interacting less, and it is reflected in multiple ways.
The data is literally in your face on this, though I am always happy to see if there is something I am missing. Do you have links?
> This reads like a rebranding of the whole "Fauci wants to take over as dictator" conspiracy theory.
Wibber, wat? I don't mean Fauci. And hypocrites in politics exists on all sides of the spectrum.
Many are the country and county where the one in charge used lock-downs as a way of getting the subjects be much further under their thumb. China is a great example.
> the people most vulnerable to their propaganda are now disproportionately hit by the disease
Nope. I actually happen to have facts. In one heavily tracked city [Jerusalem], the community that was most lax about lock-downs also had the least deaths per age overall.
Vaccines are a whole other story [my family was vaccinated, and for better or worse, one got sick from it] - not directly related to the article.
Throughout the lockdown Sweden had consistently worse death statistics than Denmark, Norway and Finland, which make the most sense to compare to geographically and culturally.
And it's still true Sweden's approach was worse than theirs:
> However, Sweden did much worse than its Nordic neighbours, with Denmark registering just 1.5% excess mortality and Finland 1.0%. Norway had no excess mortality at all in 2020.
Looking at the numbers in retrospect we see that the approach taken by Sweden was a good one. Just picking this one statistic out of many possible is dishonest though.
It should also be said that there wasn't one approach since it changed from week to week. It began very hands off with no restrictions about travelling to hot zones or even recommendations about face masks but morphed into banning all public gatherings of more than eight people.
And this article compares figures from various sources, which aren't all in agreement: https://www.thelocal.dk/20230310/fact-check-did-sweden-have-...