If the data in the graph shared by kybernetikos is correct, the claim that 'it's all because of elder deaths in early 2020' seems to be misguided, given the 2021-01 peak, and the steady first-place position throughout the last ~18 months.
Realistically, most of the people live in a few cities and the density is similar to Ireland, Croatia, Bulgaria, or even Greece.
Sweden after its first wave doesn't look much different than any of those countries.
Is it because a lot of the susceptible people already died? Maybe. But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.
Okay then. Most of Australia is uninhabited, so let's compare those two (deaths per million).
> But it's not like you can A/B test this stuff.
You can try, and that's what this story (and similar) tries to do, factoring in variables as best they can.
FWIW the fixation on morbidity, at the exclusion of long term health effects, including the mental and physical health of a society's medical professionals by either being overwhelmed or burned out, is similarly bewildering to me as comparing two countries with similar geographies, climate, and effective population density is to you.
What really scares the willies out of me is that someone will eventually BigData this pandemic, and spit out a number that reflects how many people a nation state should sacrifice per month to maximise the wealth acquisition of the elites. This number will inform how governments will operate during the next pandemic.
This petrifies me because I'm living in Australia, where we've adopted an elimination strategy (well, up until a few weeks ago), and it's worked really well for me, given I have no wish to involuntarily sacrifice myself in the name of a poorly architected and grossly corrupted economic system.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
So I guess my point is - you can't factor out those 10x people. Because they are dead.
The idea is that since the first wave and them changing their stance slightly - Sweden is not performing an order of magnitude worse than Norway and Finland, and it's pretty average compared to the rest of Europe - and definitely doing better than Russia.
I think it still begs the question that those patients could have been saved, but it is not trying to say that old people don't count. More, that the full lockdowns didn't really protect them, by themselves. As seen in NYC, where it is fairly heavily believed that any good the lockdown did was more than offset by sending patients back into nursing homes.
As they learned more about the virus and adapted their death rate per capita dropped to be on par with Europe..while still maintaining looser restrictions.
They learned from this, and recommended different things for older people and nursing homes, specifically, was my understanding.
If you factor out all those deaths in the beginning - the difference in deaths is not 10x.
And 10x doesn't really matter. If 1 person died in Norway and 10 people died in Sweden, I don't think we'd be debating much. Even in Sweden, they did not have as many deaths as most other countries, and a lot of them were very early on.