In April 2020 Sweden had 40% excess deaths. This is compared to the 2015–2019 average.

> None of these places ran out of hospital capacity.

My wife is a hospital consultant in East London, she was working volunteer overnight shifts on Sunday nights as a nurse, back in January - working to turn over ventilated patients and run paperwork about. The hospital had 4 floor filled with Covid patients needing intensive treatment or ventilation.

Patients were being sent over 100 miles to find empty beds.

We didn't run out of hospital capacity. We came this || close to doing so.

The same thing occurs each season for influenza.

We don't build hospitals to have excess capacity sitting around unused.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572116

"Hospital bosses said they had run out of beds as they battle with "very high" rates of flu."

Article from 2018. You can find the same articles from cities all around the world during regular yearly flu seasons.

What you're saying is technically true, but it's incredibly misleading.

COVID redefined what "running out of hospital beds" in western Europe means. So you can go on looking for articles before 2020, if you ask any professional in a hard hit area if Covid is "the same thing" as a bad season of Influenza they will tell you no.

Here's an example: in 2019 Portugal had around 500 ICU beds in the public hospital network. In February 2021 there were 900 people in ICU in Portugal just for COVID.

Its not relevant to look at lockdown countries like Portugal and examine temporary ICU statistics, because it is too difficult to tease out the impacts of COVID vs the impact of lockdown.

The point is - were lockdowns actually useful, or was it all just theatre?

Given that Sweden and Ukraine have lower COVID deaths per capita than lockdown countries, it would suggest that lockdown worsened the situation:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

Portugal pursued measures like limiting opening hours which seem to have no purpose apart from concentrating people into stores at the same time.

> and examine temporary ICU statistics, because it is too difficult to tease out the impacts of COVID vs the impact of lockdown.

It's actually quite easy.

If you look at the outbreak in the UK that started in November, you can see cases and hospital admissions rising rapidly before lockdown is imposed. Then in February, you can see cases falling rapidly while lockdown is still imposed.

The cases and hospitalisations are related to Covid - they don't map well onto lockdown. In fact excess deaths became negative for a while a the end of the spike, with lockdown still in effect.

Deaths per million of Sweden and it's surrounding countries, from your page:

Sweden 1,399.65

Denmark 431.21

Finland 170.64

Norway 146.23

> Given that Sweden and Ukraine have lower COVID deaths per capita than lockdown countries

That's simply wrong, by your own data.

There's running out of beds, and then there is running out of ITU beds when you have already stopped elective treatments and converted a large proportion of your general wards to ITU

> None of these places ran out of hospital capacity.

You would know this to be nonsense if you knew almost anyone who works in healthcare.

I know retired health workers who were temporarily re-commissioned to deal with the total lack of staffing capacity.

Don’t underestimate how old and unhealthy the UK population is. They are at significantly higher risk.

I said this at the start (last year). The UK with its obesity crisis would suffer massively from the pandemic.

Of course we can't criticise the overweight because it hurts feelings, but let's not kid ourselves it's a huge problem.

I work with Ukrainians. They reported more than superficial lockdowns (e.g. public transport shut down), multiple times, in Kiev. Also, death count numbers from an event like this are not likely to be stable for several years. That being said, I recall there were some pretty different mortality rates, by country, early in the pandemic (France, for instance)

I am Ukrainian. There were some superficial lockdowns for a few weeks across 2020. Supermarkets and hardware stores still operated during that time without limits.

People still held private parties and you could attend bars and restaurants in speakeasy mode. I know because I did all of these things, as did many politicians.

The statistics are already available, in Ukrainian:

https://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/features-56260505

2020: 616,000 died. 2019: 581,000. 6% increase. This mortality rate is still actually lower than in 2014 - 2010.

Sweden has life expectancy of 82. Ukraine - 71. Most of the deaths happens are in 60+ age group. You can't compare stats like that.