No-Lockdown Sweden Seemingly Tied for Lowest All-Causes Mortality in OECD Since COVID Arrived
COVID lockdowns could have saved lives, by decreasing COVID deaths (and also incidentally decreasing some other deaths, for instance from auto accidents, from other communicable diseases, and the like). They also could have cost lives—for instance, through drug abuse deaths or suicides or homicides stemming from people being cooped up for months, drug abuse deaths or suicides or homicides stemming from economic damage and unemployment caused by the lockdown, cancers not caught early as people delayed early screening (even if such early screening would have been officially excluded from the lockdown), and so on.
What was the likely aggregate of all these effects? In particular, to look at just one data point (recognizing that it’s indeed just one data point), how did Sweden, which basically didn’t lock down, fare compared to other prosperous countries?
Sweden did have a higher COVID mortality rate than many other European countries, including the neighboring Norway, Denmark, and Finland. But what about what is sometimes called “all-cause excess mortality,” which is to say total mortality in the country compared, on a percentage basis, to the pre-COVID mortality? Moreover, some of the effects of lockdowns (positive and negative) could have lasted well after the lockdowns, indeed for years past them. What then about the all-causes excess mortality from 2020 to the present, rather than just based on the 2020 data or the 2020-21 data?
A recent UK Office of National Statistics report says that Sweden and Norway were essentially tied for the lowest “[p]roportional all-cause excess-mortality scores” (which “measure[] the percentage change in the number of deaths compared to the expected number of deaths (based on the five-year average [from 2015 to 2019])” among the listed European countries, looking at data from Jan. 2020 to June 2022: Their excess mortality was up 2.7%, compared to, say, 5.2% for Denmark, 7.1% for Finland, and 11.8% for the Netherlands.
Nor is Sweden’s success likely caused by Sweden’s age distribution, as measured by the percentage of the population that’s at least 65 and the percentage that’s at least 80, is in the middle to high middle among the OECD countries). The UK report provides information on “cumulative age-standardised mortality rates” as well, and Norway just barely inches ahe
Article from Reason.com
