Age-Adjusted Excess Mortality During the Pandemic in Sweden
One of the most startling facts of the pandemic is that, between January of 2020 and June of 2021, Sweden had negative excess mortality – the country’s age-standardised mortality rate was below the five-year average.
Despite all the warnings about “disaster” and “folly”, Sweden actually saw fewer deaths than usual over this eighteen month period. (The ONS data on which this conclusion is based only go up to June of 2021. But it’s a good bet the picture hasn’t changed much since then.)
Even lockdown sceptics might find this difficult to believe. Sure, Sweden didn’t turn out to be the disaster that lockdown proponents claimed it would be. But can it really be true that there were fewer deaths than usual? What about those reports of Swedish hospitals “filling up with patients” in the winter of 2020?
It can really be true. And those reports are easy to reconcile with the mortality data. You just have to remember two phenomena: the ‘dry tinder’ effect, and mortality displacement.
For those who’ve forgotten, here’s a brief reminder. The ‘dry tinder’ effect refers to the tendency for mortality to increase following a period of unusually low mortality, due to the presence of large numbers of very frail elderly people, who ended up living longer than expected.
Mortality displacement is just the opposite. It refers to the tendency for mortality to decrease following a period of unusually high mortality – for deaths to be ‘brought forward’ by some deadly event, such as a pandemic, heat wave or unusually cold winter.
Once you’re familiar with these two phenomena, you realise it’s perfectly possible for hospitals to fill up temporarily without the mortality rate going up at all in the medium term (over a period of several months or a year, say.)
The chart below shows the weekly age-standardised mortality rate in Sweden as a percentage of the five-year average, from January of 2020 to June of 2021. (I made the chart using data published by the ONS.)
In the winter of 2020, mortality was below average, leading to the build up of ‘dry tinder’. When the pandemic hit in March, mortality increased substantially. It then fell back below average during the summer of 2020, giving rise to mortality displacement. This pattern then repeated itself over the subsequent 12 months.
Aside from the obvious fact that Sweden’s approach didn’t lead to disaster (far from it), what’s the major lesson here? It’s that you won’t get a reliable picture of the pandemic if you only follow the news. After all, ‘Hospitals Fill Up With Patients’ grabs your attention, whereas ‘Another Week of Below-Average Admissions’ doesn’t pack the same punch.
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Horrific excess mortality, in the US, 2020-21. So my question is, why did the effects of panic/despair, add in jabs, kill multitudes in US, but not in Sweden ?
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. If you are told there is a deadly pandemic stalking the land and if you get it you are likely to die (people in the US and the UK overestimated the death rate by 100X or so) then the nocebo effect is going to be very strong. I think when the dust settles this will be seen as a very important factor.
It all seems to suggest that “they” wanted the death rate to be as high as possible ….but surely all those decent, caring, honest, professional, objective Institutions , concerned with ‘doing no harm’ and protecting all valued human life couldn’t possibly want that now ……could they?
I certainly do believe that mass-psychogenic illness is a large part of this.
Because there was no panic/despair in Sweden, its Government did not wage psychological warfare on its citizens like USA and nearly every other country.
Since Sweden did not shut its medical care system down just for CoVid patients, sick people were still able to be diagnosed and treated.
Perhaps not to the same extent. But Sweden did consider ‘Covid’ an unprecedented threat. Why else would they have closed schools above age 15, ban mass-gatherings, institute social distancing, encourage citizens to take extended country vacations and pay people to work from their homes ?
The initial death spike – primarily derived from care homes after a couple of benign flu seasons – was enough to attract massive condemnation and lies from MSM which may have forced a political response.
Yes, it would appear that Tegnell was sidelined a bit.
US population generally less healthy. Much more obesity, diabetes and generally poor diet. The dark skinned portion of the population will also be Vitamin D deficient. Sweden also has a large dark skinned population (prob. c 20%), but the food in the supermarket is fortified (Vitamin D, Iodine etc., don’t know the entire list). (Don’t know if that is also the case in the US.) I would be very interested to see what excess mortality was like for the ethnically Swedish population in isolation. Publishing these kind of stats is verboten unfortunately.
In fact all four of the Nordic countries plus Canada fortify their food (flour, bread, etc.) with Vitamin D. The UK does not, most other countries do not, and the USA only fortifies milk and nothing else.
It’s also a disease of the elderly. The US has a full range of ages among It’s non-caucasion population. The dark-skinned Swedes are generally much younger than the age of the typical covid casualty.
Sweden had one big advantage:
They didn’t have a criminal called Fauci calling the shots.
NY and neighbouring states and to some extent CA, did an ‘Italian job’. Put sick old folk from hospitals in care homes.
Indeed, Cuomo, Murphy, Newsom, Whitmer, and Wolfe all have a major and indelible stain on their honor in that regard. As does the head of the NHS in the UK as well. DeSantis, however famously did the opposite and banned that homicidal practice. And we know who won that debate long ago!
I think they flat out abandoned them and they died from dehydration.
How many YOUNG people got jabbed in Sweden? And which kind of jabs? That would explain a lot right there.
Remdesevir, ventilators, systems collapse because of panic, stress, social isolation, economic hopelessness as businesses were forced to close etc.
See the work of Denis Rancourt
Another one????
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/hailey-bieber-hospitalized-suffering-stroke-173002421.html
The Independent September 2020
’Sweden’s handling of coronavirus has been “ineffective” and its controversial approach to the pandemic should not be given credence in the UK, a group of scientists have warned.’
Got that?
“The Independent” an oxymoronic ‘non-news, non paper’
One of the Swedish advisors – I forget his name – said in March 2020 that the effect of Sweden’s policy would be seen in the annual excess mortality rates. He said he did not think they would be higher than usual, although he didn’t predict a decrease.
it looks like if you follow the true science, not the ersatz stuff peddled by Governments and tame experts, outcomes are much better.
It was Anders Tegnell. He said it would be about 2 years before you could make meaningful comparisons between countries. This is because all of the NPIs just shift the date of death around a bit; none prevent it.
He did also say in late 2020 that Sweden did not adequately protect care home residents. Something like 40% of Sweden’s first wave deaths were in care homes.
Yes people were always comparing Sweden to its Nordic neighbours when the best thing to do it to compare it to itself, going on a five to ten year average. ‘Dry tinder’, how lovely!
Indeed, the proverbial ferryman wants his money, and he always gets it one way or the other.
“But can it really be true that there were fewer deaths than usual? What about those reports of Swedish hospitals “filling up with patients” in the winter of 2020?
Simple answer.. it was all bulsh*t.. there never was a pandemic.
It was scamdemic of fraudulent PCR testing and 24hr propaganda.. nothing less..
No that was the TIK TOK dancers. I do recall a really good Rap track video with all the Nurses dancing, something along the lines of ‘prison of the mind’ and Babylonian Whore!
Here’s your NHS nurses hard at work during The Deadly Pandemic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM9PRY82zng
Yes but the MSM are saying that there have been millions of excess deaths globally and the WHO puts the toll from COVID at several million.
That is what people are going to hear.
He who controls the media controls the public.
True, but not all the public, we know they’re lying, and they know that we know they’re lying..
If the graph shows percentages of the overall five-year average, it would be better to screen out seasonal fluctuation by taking as denominators five-year averages for week 1, week 2, etc. (or perhaps running ones for 4 weeks). There might be graphs of that shape every year and you’d have missed them.
In any case, the first half might be normal, or at least to be expected when either there’s abnormally high seasonal flu (at say p=0.2) (or similar respiratory infection affecting mostly the elderly) or a murderous cull in care homes, followed of course by a “lag”. In short, perturbation followed by bounce. You might even get a second bounce after a policy of decreased socialisation during the first trough.
…
“Sweden actually saw fewer deaths than usual over this eighteen month period.“
Yes, but what is really important is that everyone who did die during this 18 month period died of Covid!!
Everybody dies. Mortality is always 100%.
The real question is how many months or years do we want to try and temporarily loan to the very aged, at the cost of stealing years or decades from the young through despotism, lost productivity, and health services still in manufactured-crisis mode.
It seems that almost no regimes considered the second half of that equation, and just cried “at any cost!”
Kween Krankie is still spaffing on about no coofs death being acceptable. Extremists love their absolutism.
Extremists love their absolutism.
Indeed they do. And because they sound so “definite”, the unwary regard them as knowledgeable.
Those who argue for nuance and indicate areas where more knowledge is required are portrayed as dimwitted and ignorant.
Breaking News: “Hospitals Running Smoothly. Admissions Dip to Easily Manageable Levels!”
Sweden got it right.
‘Heat waves’ in Sweden?
They do happen. I was in Sweden in Feb 2018 at a location 50km from the Arctic Circle. Daytime temps were +5C; they should have been -20C.
Search ‘moroccan plume weather’
Warm weather continues as a plume of hot air from Morocco brings 66F https://mol.im/a/6742087 via https://dailym.ai/android
Also note that there was some impact on the usual slightly-hazardous activities undertaken by people during the covid period. This will likely have reduced deaths from car accidents, etc.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4tzAUQX0AIOvWv?format=jpg&name=4096×4096
At the link you can see that in all age-groups the death rate in Germany in 2020 was also lower than the 5 year average, despite 3 million ‘covid cases’.
In Spain, the elderly died of dehydration because staff were too afraid to go near them. It’s almost certain the same happened in the UK.
When I first read this article I was flabbergasted. I have seen so much, both around me and on the internet, that gives a different picture, that I could not fathom how reality could be that different, how I could be under such a great illusion! Finally I visited the link that is given as the source of the graph’s data. What I saw at that page is that there are all sorts of graphs for different countries. One particular graph, relating to the nordic countries, reads: (“Figure 6: While many central European countries have been hardest hit by the pandemic to date, most Nordic countries escaped with lower than expected relative cumulative excess mortality despite the pandemic” (and the caption reads) “Cyprus and Nordic countries except Sweden, escaped with much lower than normal mortality rates.” In the graph we see the lines of five countries evermore distancing themselves from the line of the average of the last five years (marked as 0%), reaching approximately the -10% mark. That is, up to 10% fewer deaths between January 2020 (beginning at the 0% mark) and Sept. 2021 (approximately minus 10%) relative to the previous five years. So, it is interesting to… Read more »