Look here[1] to see that Sweden is the only Nordic country with under-estimated deaths for this period.
Living in Sweden I must say I'm really tired of constantly hearing that other countries are just "cheating" by under-estimating their covid death-rates. The whole thing is seen as some type of bizarre competition.
When the supposed herd-immunity rate was re-calculated by the Swedish-resident statistician Tom Britton to possibly be around 40%[2] the news was widely discussed as though Swedes had won some sort of 'race' - one of my colleagues actually punched the air and said "I knew we'd be first!" (the actual rate of antibodies is around 7-10% in the worst-affected Stockholm area)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
[2] https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/coronaviruset/hoppfulla-teo...
Yes, it's somewhat ugly, but I feel that some confirmation bias is unavoidable. At this point, pretty much everybody has experienced substantial downsides of the epidemic (either restricted public life, or increased deaths around them), so it seems only natural to look for data implying that it was all worth it.
That doesn't make them poor at counting death, so long as those deaths do eventually get counted. Everyone knows there are lags in reporting and counting, and everyone should take those lags into account when using the data.
Compare that to Spain, which has recently changed their count method and ended up with a confusing and misleading set of data. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1268450736398098433?...
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/globalassets/statistik-u...
There have been a multitude of reports from other countries on how they fail to account for all deaths, let alone all deaths from the disease, for instance.
The death toll is severe though, no two ways about it, but therea are also a lot of factors to weigh in, such as:
- What could have been done instead? There are several countries with radically different measures that still face high numbers of reported deaths
- Would more severe restrictions have mitigated the most damaging vectors? A lot of the deaths come from elderly homes, for instance, and further lockdowns wouldn't naturally have prevented that (as much as, say, more personnel in elderly care)
- What will the secondary effects be? The effects of Covid-19 go beyond the deaths from the disease itself. How many will die from the economical impact of lesser, or more severe restrictions? For instance.
These are all difficult considerations and near-impossible to answer.