back

by josephcsible·5y ago·view on hn ↗
> That's higher than 5 of the shown previous 10 years

So in other words, it's basically exactly the median of the last 10 years? That seems to reinforce the title's claim.

2 comments
It's nonsense, you can't just take the average for the year so far and fill it in for December when there are substantially higher deaths in December typically.
Point is, that even assuming winter deaths, Sweden's excess mortality for the year can't at this point get high enough that it'd have been noticed in any normal year. Normality+some winter deaths does not make for a disaster. Yet we see posts here saying it's too early to tell if Sweden is a COVID success or "disaster". That looks like motivated reasoning: under what plausible scenario could Sweden end up a disaster for 2020 with these stats? There'd have to be an actual natural disaster for deaths to become high enough to be noticeable.
Unsure why motivated reasoning in someone else's comments is relevant to this discussion. It's just about facts.

Look up Sweden excess deaths by month rather than analyzing an overall year number that compares up to November with the full year of data for the previous years.

https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid

Scaling up to Sweden's population and the excess deaths that they're looking to have will probably be comparable per capita with the 200k from the US so far. Nevermind that Sweden's economy has done worse than its peers that did lockdown, with -5 GDP growth since q4 2019 vs. Denmark -3.9.

So really, no world in which Sweden's approach was successful.

What's your point? That there was a wave of excess deaths? That happens in most countries in Europe, most years, just due to flu and other winter issues. Not every year: Sweden was running 10% lower excess deaths than the 5 year average until the first wave hit, so some of those excess deaths were over-due according to historical trends. That's why it's misleading to point to month-by-month graphs and say for example, look, April is never normally that high, there's a crisis. No, normally a wave much like that one happens a few months earlier. But so what? The exact timing of a normal-sized wave of excess death is no crisis.

the excess deaths that they're looking to have will probably be...

Will probably be normal. That's what this thread is about. There is no evidence of mass death of any kind of Sweden despite that this was supposedly guaranteed without lockdowns. September was one of the least deadly months on record in Sweden. They are on track to experience a basically normal year in terms of deaths.

As for motivated reasoning, it's relevant to this discussion because the thread is full of it. Many of the talking points are absurd. There are people arguing that the Swedes are naturally anti-social and don't meet each other (!), that they're incomparable to other countries due to population density (Stockholm has similar density to London), that they should have locked down because their economy only did a bit better vs other countries (compare against the UK or France and their GDP looks good), and all manner of other things that are either wrong or irrelevant to the reason their death stats are interesting: they didn't lock down and their total, all cause deaths are nothing remarkable. The implication is obvious: lockdowns were pointless, the damage they caused was avoidable, the academic advisors to governments were wrong (except in Sweden), and other countries should unlock ASAP.

But the projection is already for excess deaths over half of the years. (And especially: last year.) That's not fairly-described as "no excess deaths".

And, for the other reasons I listed:

* the projection is highly likely to be an underestimate of the actual 2020 deaths

* an apples-to-apples comparison of the deaths through November 6 in past years would be quite likely to show a notable excess in 2020, given the seasonal nature of the data left out (higher rates of deaths late-November and December) even in normal years

So only a naive interpretation, or tendentious interpretation, of the 2020 year-to-date numbers supports the headline assurance.

So basically we just need to wait until after the years end to know.

What do you think? A month or two into 2021?

https://i.imgur.com/E1M8eMj.png

The fact the prior "spikes" during April-June, which were way smaller than the current November spike (1678 june peak vs 5764 nov peak) didn't already caused a notable increase is mildly interesting. But really Sweden did great overall until recently when the had the first major spike.

Maybe 1000/day extra covid positive cases really isnt enough to move the fatality needle much compared to the average normal deaths... and in many countries recent spikes (Sept-Nov) have also had much lower fatality rates vs positive rates as well.