September 2020 least deadly month ever in Sweden

Two comments from me:<p>1) From the comments of the blog post: &quot;todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20.&quot;<p>So one theory is that people are less likely to engage in risky behavior such as surgery this year. I am sure that people are driving less, flying less, working less, and in general, doing less that can increase the risk of death.<p>2) There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I am always wary of some totally random fact. &quot;Least deadliest September on record.&quot; There&#x27;s no implied causation there. Just a random fact. &quot;Draw your own conclusions&quot; is not helpful.

&quot;During the 15th week of the year, we saw the highest death rate in Sweden this millenium. &quot; [0]<p>Statistics are just so hard to interpret and translate into a narrative that headlining a single data point is often misleading. I&#x27;m not interested enough to dive into this particular issue so I&#x27;m still not sure which claim is &quot;true&quot;.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emanuelkarlsten.se&#x2F;number-of-deaths-in-sweden-during-the-pandemic-compared-to-previous-years-mortality&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;emanuelkarlsten.se&#x2F;number-of-deaths-in-sweden-during...</a>

The biggest misunderstanding for the media and politicians in this pandemic is that individual citizens are making their own response decisions rather than solely relying on government policy. So, Sweden was more lax from government policy perspective, but that doesn&#x27;t mean Swedes were completely unafraid and behaving recklessly. They&#x27;re not out recreating their own version of the Sturgis rally daily.

I live in the outer suburbs of Stockholm and (normally) commute into town by train every day. Every year around midsummer (20 June), the trains start getting noticeably less crowded, as people start going on their summer holidays. Then it takes until late August before the rush-hour crowds are back to normal. Is seems an extraordinary coincidence that it was during this period that Covid-19 essentially petered out in Sweden. Since the beginning of September, the number of positive tests has been climbing again, more or less exponentially. The number of deaths is lagging behind, but there is a definite uptake the last couple of weeks. As usual, deaths seem to be going down during the last week because of lagging statistics. My guess is that the final number for friday 23 october will end around 7, and 30 October around 10 (but I hope I am wrong!). At least this seems to indicate that you do not need a full-blown lockdown to stamp out Covid-19 — &quot;Swedish summer&quot; is a sufficiently low level of activity!

Most likely this is due to a rapidly changing age distribution in Sweden.<p>It seems, probably mainly due to immigration, that the population of ages 20-60 have increased significantly since 2010, while the population of ages 60+ have increased less.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se&#x2F;pxweb&#x2F;en&#x2F;ssd&#x2F;START__BE__BE0101__BE0101A&#x2F;BefolkningR1860&#x2F;table&#x2F;tableViewLayout1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se&#x2F;pxweb&#x2F;en&#x2F;ssd&#x2F;START__BE_...</a><p>This won&#x27;t skew the average age very much, but will definitely reduce deaths per capita.<p>If mortality was calculated as a function of age distribution september would likely be average and april would have had a high excess mortality.

Early in the pandemic I wondered if all of the isolation would have the same effect here - fewer deaths due to driving, flying, flu, etc. But the CDC says we’ve had 300000 excess deaths this year: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;mmwr&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;69&#x2F;wr&#x2F;mm6942e2.htm?s_cid=mm6942e2_w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;mmwr&#x2F;volumes&#x2F;69&#x2F;wr&#x2F;mm6942e2.htm?s_cid=mm...</a><p>Really makes one wonder about differences in the US and Swedish population, especially regarding widespread obesity and diabetes.

From the comments:<p>&quot;One forgotten contribution could possibly be the large number of canceled surgeries.<p>The last number I saw was appx 30k canceled surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20. Historical data from Argentina, Israel and Denmark show significant reductions in death rates when doctors go on strike. The last strike was in the 1960&#x27;s and I have been repeatedly promised (by doctors) that &quot;..it is different now..&quot;<p>We have also noted a quite dramatic reduction of cancer diagnoses because of reduced screening for breast- and gyn cancer. The common wisdom among &quot;experts&quot; is that there is a large number of undiscovered cases which will show up later and with much more severe and deadly cancer in the months and years ahead. I doubt this. I have read a couple of the research papers defining guidelines for interpretation of pathological finds and they state explicitly that it is better to &quot;overdiagnose&quot; by at least a factor of 10 (and in reality up to a factor of 50) in order to not miss any &quot;real&quot; cases of cancer. Better to cut nine healthy breasts or prostates than to have one undiagnosed case.<p>Well, in just a couple of years we will have clear and unambigous evidence for or against the efficency of the cancer screening programs. This is a form of full scale clinical trial happening in front of our eyes.&quot;<p>And<p>&quot;Oh, todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20.&quot;

The Economist has a quite detailed set of graphs showing &quot;excess deaths&quot; during 2020 for a host of countries. Contrast Sweden to Norway: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;graphic-detail&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;15&#x2F;tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;graphic-detail&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;15&#x2F;tracking...</a>

The 20th century was the least deadly century ever, but we shouldn&#x27;t conclude poison gas or misinformation are safe.<p>If you&#x27;re summing all effects, you&#x27;re looking at all data at once, and probably are doomed not to learn anything particularly actionable. Its in the breakdown that we kind find meaningful bits for future reference.

People are making all kinds of assumptions about the pandemic but the data point is only that, one month.<p>And I think it is related to the pandemic but in 2 ways:<p>- As people said, less activity in general and it was one of the better months in Europe in terms of deaths.<p>- The mortality in the initial months has probably anticipated possible deaths that would occur later in the year

You can find a very informative chart of Sweden&#x27;s weekly deaths here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1115707&#x2F;sweden-number-of-deaths-per-week&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;1115707&#x2F;sweden-number-of...</a><p>It shows 2020 weekly deaths in comparison with a 2015-2019 average which is a good indication of the normal - precovid rate. You can see how there was a massive spike around week 12 to week 21, which is exactly when the initial covid outbreak hit and Sweden&#x27;s disastrous &quot;herd immunity&quot; policy failed.<p>Now Swedes have been scared and changed their behavior and covid deaths are less. Furthermore, the defensive behavior of covid prevents other deaths. People, do not drive, do not party, do not engage in sports, do not take drugs, or over-drink or over-eat at parties, so that other causes of death go down.<p>So it is possible that covid isolation reduces death rate more than the deaths caused by the virus itself. But that is not a solution, people cannot live in covid isolation forever.

&gt; [...] with the October 19 updated <i>Excel</i> sheet.<p>First thing I would do is to check whether they are lost some rows (or columns).

Would love to see charts of mortality over the years for other countries. If you guys know such, please post!<p>Here is one for Germany:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.destatis.de&#x2F;DE&#x2F;Themen&#x2F;Querschnitt&#x2F;Corona&#x2F;Gesellschaft&#x2F;bevoelkerung-sterbefaelle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.destatis.de&#x2F;DE&#x2F;Themen&#x2F;Querschnitt&#x2F;Corona&#x2F;Gesells...</a>

For week 15 of 2020 Sweden has excess deaths that were 12 standard deviations above the baseline.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.euromomo.eu&#x2F;graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.euromomo.eu&#x2F;graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality</a>

It’s probably worth all of us with different views about lockdowns and restrictions bearing in mind that Sweden is not a control group for the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is not a control group for Sweden.<p>The Swedish authorities never suggested that lockdowns wouldn’t work in controlling the pandemic, in fact they acknowledged that they definitely <i>would</i> work in the short term; their core assertions were that the Swedish population would not be able to sustain involuntary restrictions until better treatments or a vaccine arrived, and that the harms caused by restrictions would be a net negative for their society. The jury is still out on those decisions, but they are rational.<p>In fact we’ll probably never know who chose the optimal policy mix to cope with the pandemic, and as a result we should give those with differing views an awful lot of slack as they try and negotiate it with limited resources and foresight (i.e. as humans).<p>For now, let’s just enjoy this good news about the people in Sweden at face value–we need it!

What is it about Sweden that makes people like cherry-picking facts from it? There&#x27;s a whole right-wing conspiracy meme about muslim no-go areas that doesn&#x27;t match the reality observed by Swedes.<p>Similarly, Sweden didn&#x27;t have <i>no</i> restrictions in response to coronavirus.

Harvesting effect.

I wonder what caused growth of mortality from ca 1960 to ca 1990?

This is forbidden knowledge