In 2020 it clearly was higher. Denmark, Finland and Norway avoided the spring 2020 death wave, whereas in Sweden mortality was 20% to 50% (well, 48%) higher during the weeks of April and May 2020.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
After the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020, Sweden in fact 'locked-down' in some ways more restrictively than our nordic neighbors - all of which made timely interventions that meant their restrictions on meeting en-masse in public were for shorter periods and less intrusive on people's everyday lives.
The narrative that it was a 'free-for-all' in Sweden has been fostered retrospectively by neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives. In their eagerness to be 'proved right' after the fact, most Swedes now embrace this historical revisionism.
The statistics that show that Swedish "excess deaths" were low or even lower than other countries were cooked-up by a journalist from a right-wing newspaper in Sweden (SvD), who noticed that if one discounts the downward trend in excess death for the last 25 years in Sweden, together with dispensing with demographic weighting, and then averaging the 3 years from 2019 onwards (which includes the period after vaccination), then miraculously you can squeeze the numbers you want from the raw figures.
If you go to:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stringency-index
take away the default countries, and instead add Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Then make sure you also click "Align axis scales" you will see that Sweden only had fewer restrictions than its neighbors during a very short period at the beginning of the pandemic (during the first wave).
After that, Sweden had both more stringent restrictions than all its neighbors, and had those restrictions in place for a longer period of time.
The narrative - the historical revisionism, the myth that a very large number of people want to promote, and which has even become some sort of amnesiac 'reality' for many Swedes - should not be mistaken for what really happened.
/edit I actually found this in my bookmarks fyi: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01098-x
But Tegnell is the architect and main proponent of the historical revisionism that I'm talking about. He is the man at the center of the controversial policies.
Even while they were being enacted, Sweden was fed a narrative of exceptionalism by Tegnell and the mainstream media, who never mentioned the comparative liberality of the other Nordic states' policies, and maintained the fiction that we were still following the most liberal strategy (even to this day).
Tegnell is massively popular in Sweden. In fact, as deaths accumulated and it looked more and more like he was following a disastrous path, his popularity increased exponentially.
Criticism or even mildly questioning Tegnell was (and for a large part, still is) totally off-limits: there is absolutely no way I'd mention my doubts about him or his policies to my fellow Swedish colleagues or friends.
edit: Incidentally, for those who can read Swedish (or use Google Translate), this series of contemporary articles is a really great overview of the events in Sweden seen from a skeptical perspective:
https://floderochtekoppar.blogspot.com/2021/09/sveriges-hant...
And yes there is definitely a weird "Swedish exceptionalism", which interestingly Swedes from all sort of political persuasion exhibit.
None of the international discussions about restrictions has been about restrictions around elderly care. Sweden did actually issue some, which some described as prison-like for those impacted, but that was about a year into the pandemic. It was also seen as too late, with vaccine and proper staff/gear/protocols being more effective tools.
Sweden had negative excess mortality from Jan 2020 to Spring 2021, so fewer people died than expected in this period. These COVID waves just weren't devastating in any way, and yielded virtually no deaths "of" and not "with" COVID. It's strange that you are so convinced that Sweden's data doesn't disprove the effectiveness of lockdowns...
> neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives
Ah, I see.
According to this, Sweden had quite bad excess mortality in 2020 in April and May, and some in June. And then again from mid-November 2020 to mid-January 2021.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
There are many different ways different sources have tried to estimate cumulative excess mortality. Depending on the calculation methods, different sources have ended up with quite different results.
What is your source, and what method did they use?
It can be debated what model should be used and governments don't always have consistent methods of baselining. With different models you can compute some excess mortality in Sweden but those have their own flaws.
But it's worth calling out here that the reason you have to dive into the details of what precise baseline model you use is because the number of deaths was so very tiny on the scale of a country. A simple graph showing the absolute numbers puts it in perspective:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Alternatively, a graph of deaths per 100k people shows how surprisingly normal 2020 was in Sweden:
https://i0.wp.com/swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/swede...
It looks initially dramatic but that's only due to the massive drop in 2019. In reality 2020 had the same number of deaths per pop as in 2015! Nothing special happened in 2015.
Given that 2019 was an abnormally low year, 2020 would have been a bit higher than normal anyway even with no pandemic. But we're still looking at numbers pretty much within the realm of normal variance. If somehow you'd never heard of COVID, then someone had shown you that graph and asked "did something catastrophic happen in this decade" you'd probably have said no. Although 2020 is a bit higher, it's on the order of a few thousands of people, not something you could have noticed in a country of millions short of saturation-level media coverage.
That's why it's hard to say but important to hear: these levels of death simply do not matter. How do we know? Because some countries have had high and persistent levels of excess death since the end of the pandemic, but as COVID isn't the explanation hardly anyone cares. There's just no link between levels of death and severity of reaction, in our society.
Many European countries have an ageing population, and thus the number of yearly deaths increase year to year. For example Finland in 2010–2019 had about 0.8% increase in yearly deaths every year. If the deaths followed this model and thus there was absolutely no excess mortality (and no random variation), the simple method you cite would compare 2020, 2021 and 2022 to the average of 2015–2019, and would estimate 2.4%, 3.2% and 4.0% excess mortality for years 2020, 2021, 2022 for Finland.
Whereas Sweden doesn't have an ageing population structure, due to lots of immigration in the past 20 years. And Sweden didn't have an increasing trend in yearly deaths in 2010–2019.
This simple method overestimates the excess mortality for many countries, if they have an ageing population structure. Then you end up comparing overestimated values to Sweden's value that it not overestimated.
I'm happy to grant a different baseline though. It goes from being a really small number to a really small number. Remember that everything that happened was justified by claiming a 3.something% IFR and 100% infection rate in a single giant wave. That never came close to happening and the places that used very light touch approaches had no different outcomes to places that went full totalitarian. That's the important thing here.
Many factors: different demographics, population density, culture, what does "locked down" mean in different countries / areas, what does "significantly higher" mean...
One important point though is this probably confuses correlation and causation. Areas that were hit harder tended to lock down harder.
> Overall there's no evidence that lockdowns actually reduced mortality
People post this occasionally, and I'm going to keep calling bullshit. What happens is someone posts a fringe paper that supports their view whilst conveniently ignoring the large body of established scientific orthodoxy that supports the obvious conclusion: that restricting human interaction slows down transmission of a respiratory disease that transmits through human interaction.
I must admit this belief mostly comes from the claim Sweden did better, and the fact that where I live had almost no lockdowns and did better than the rest of my country.
Do you know of any good evidence that lockdowns were effective, or are you calling bullshit based on intuition?
Lockdowns were absolutely harmful - I don't think anyone is claiming otherwise. They were effective in stopping health systems collapsing, which is why pretty much everywhere implemented them when it looked like their health systems were about to be overwhelmed. (cf Italy in early 2020). That would have been catastrophic compared to the harms of lockdown.
In terms of suicides specifically, the evidence is not clear. I've seen studies that indicate suicide rates did not increase or actually fell during the pandemic, e.g. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... . There were also fewer deaths from road traffic accidents etc. However, there were lots of other harmful effects such as secondary effects from the economic impact.
> Do you know of any good evidence that lockdowns were effective, or are you calling bullshit based on intuition?
There have been a number of studies concluding that lockdowns were effective. I doubt digging them up will convince any of the sceptics in this thread.
But since you ask... how about this Royal Society report? https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/impact-non-p...
Are there any particular papers in the report that you think are evidence that lockdowns prevented health system collapse and were beneficial overall?
I had a preliminary skim of it and decided to check the first relevant citation for lockdown effectiveness. It has the same problems as most of the studies I have seen: it does not include any of the second order effects. Of course virus transmission is reduced by limiting interactions but this is only one part of the story. This may be answered in some of the other references but I need to put it aside for now.
It's three years later now and the numbers are in. There is plenty of high quality data from all Western countries.
However data driven policy decisions should be much more fine grained than that. We should instead identify specific situations where different type of lockdowns would make sense.
But the data is clear. Prolonged periods looks bad, at closing schools were clearly the wrong decision on every time scale.
What made a difference in Sweden was that vaccination rates were really high and they were administrated quickly.
Had the anti-vaccine ideas spread more Sweden would be much, much worse off.
I could cite the most objective sources and statistics, but if you haven't figured it out by now, you don't want to. You're on the level of flat-earthers. The only difference being there's way more of you than of those idiots. And if you think the number of people believing in something somehow gives it credibility, then you should start preparing yourself to meet Allah in the afterlife.
>Using an event study approach and data from 43 countries and all U.S. states, we measure changes in excess deaths following the implementation of COVID-19 shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. We do not find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier had lower excess deaths. We do not observe differences in excess deaths before and after the implementation of SIP policies, even when accounting for pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.