"Better" in the sense that it makes them look worse, and some people prefer this version of events? Perhaps.

But if you compare across all of Europe by deaths per capita, they're near the best performers on the list (#13; #12 in continental Europe), and the only reason those specific countries look better is because they're the top three in continental Europe (they're also smaller countries; see below):

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

In particular, the UK, France, Spain, Belgium, Italy and Portugal all did worse, despite far more significant impositions on society.

It's also important to know that worldwide, there's a clear dependence of per-capita deaths on population (greater population -> greater deaths per capita):

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality (second plot; deaths per 100k population tab)

And that Denmark has a population of ~5.8M, Norway 5.4M, and Sweden 10.4M. This alone should make you question any simple narrative involving interventions and outcome.

Since I looked it up out of curiousity:

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

deaths per million inhabitants:

Sweden: 1,755.2

Denmark: 924.97

Finland: 521.89

Norway: 405.58

There's a recent large study in The Lancet, where they estimate 2020-2021 excess mortality, and compare these to reported Covid19 deaths. The study covers a large number of countries, but here I only look at your four.

              excess  excess/reported   excess/(1 million)
    Denmark:  10 400             308%                 1784
    Finland:    8780             503%                 1587
    Norway:      742              57%                  138
    Sweden:   18 100             118%                 1719

Either the study methodology to estimate excess mortality has some problems with Denmark and Finland. Or, if the study is correct, the official numbers from Finland and Denmark are bad in estimating their own Covid19 deaths: Denmark underestimating by 3x, Finland underestimating by 5x.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Direct link to results table:

https://www.thelancet.com/action/showFullTableHTML?isHtml=tr...

Denmark tested way more than any other country in the world. They most likely have the most accurate picture of how many people actually died with covid

I'd strongly question their method of calculating excess mortality, look at denmark on https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps and compare it to other countries

I would assume methodological flaws. Just by looking at the number of authors and the publication date, the authors simply did not have enough time to control for area-specific factors for 191 countries and 252 subnational units.

Finland reported 53949 deaths from all causes in 2019, 55488 deaths in 2020, and 57343 deaths in 2021. (The figure for 2021 is preliminary.) The total increase from the 2019 level in 2020-2021 is ~5000 deaths, and a large part of that is explained by aging population.

Agree on using excess deaths data.

Also, it'll be years before knockoff effects can be more fully assessed.

Maybe add Netherlands and Germany ...

And in DK we are now doing 20-50 corona dead pr. day - leaving us at 365*20-50 / 5.5 at 1,327 - 3.318 added for this year.

Societies and health care aren’t as similar as one might think in the Nordics. Sweden is surprisingly diverse, unequal, urbanized etc. It’s more “continental” than its neighbors in a lot of ways.