Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden

Re:Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic... by sampo on Saturday March 26, 2022 @07:50AM (#30811056)

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...

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Re:Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic... by Lewton on Saturday March 26, 2022 @08:16AM (#30811205)

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

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Re:Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic... by jltsiren on Saturday March 26, 2022 @09:14AM (#30811537)

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.

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Re:Evaluation of science advice during the Covid-19 pandemic... by specialist on Saturday March 26, 2022 @09:20AM (#30811567)

Agree on using excess deaths data.

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

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