September 2020 least deadly month ever in Sweden

https://cornucopia.cornubot.se/2020/10/september-2020-least-deadly-month-ever.html?m=1

by ptr • 6 years ago

130 93 6 years ago

cornucopia.cornubot.se

Harvesting effect.

norswap• 6 years ago

The article also states "So far the year 2020 has been the third least deadly year per capita ever in the country, despite the tragic and global Covid-19 pandemic.", so no.

anovikov• 6 years ago

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

robin_reala• 6 years ago

At a guess, increased car usage.

iiv• 6 years ago

Definitely not. Very few people die of traffic accidents, and that number has been sinking steadily since 1970. (1950: 595, 1960: 1036, 1970: 1307, 1980: 848, 1990: 772, 2000: 591, 2010: 266)

nradov• 6 years ago

Lower population growth rate. As the median age increases, mortality rate will naturally increase. Also obesity has been increasing, which is a known killer.

unreal37• 6 years ago

Two comments from me:

1) From the comments of the blog post: "todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20."

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.

2) There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics. I am always wary of some totally random fact. "Least deadliest September on record." There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.

tomohawk3• 6 years ago

Current covid death statistics for some countries, including Sweden

https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToS...

Note that countries have different ways of counting.

Here are the excess mortality statistics for some countries. This statistic takes a while to gather, so it lags 1-2 months, depending.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores...

Sweden reached no excess mortality sometime in June, and is doing quite well.

nsonha• 6 years ago

There's no implied causation there. Just a random fact. "Draw your own conclusions" is not helpful.

Really? I can think of a narrative here about the virus being not as serious as people thought.

I can't relate to your complain at all. We want more straight fact not "helpful" opinions. If someone can't form an opinion on their own it's fine, just dont participate in the discussion. The last thing we want is some people joining some discussion just to magnify other people's thoughts.

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

You can imagine what kind of conclusions would be drawn with implied causations if it were the other way.

brnt2• 6 years ago

The 20th century was the least deadly century ever, but we shouldn't conclude poison gas or misinformation are safe.

If you're summing all effects, you'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.

natmaka3• 6 years ago

COVID-19 has at least 2 main solutions, which are mutually exclusive: (lockdown) or (no lockdown).

If there is no major other new pertinent factor, then when it comes to compare those solutions (deciding when to assess is a challenge) there are (proportionally) less deaths where the more efficient one is implemented.

Am I wrong?

brnt2• 6 years ago

There are many intermediate stages of lockdown, have a look at the different strategies of the various (smaller) European countries.

Besides, counting an integral number of deaths gives you an integral number. You'll only know the cumulative effect of whatever state the country is in, which is the result of many factors, among which the precise state of the lockdown.

TooCreative• 6 years ago

Would love to see charts of mortality over the years for other countries. If you guys know such, please post!

Here is one for Germany:

https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Querschnitt/Corona/Gesells...

aaaxyz• 6 years ago

Only covers 2015-now : https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/#z-scores-by-country

hirundo• 6 years ago

Here's one from the CDC for excess deaths in the U.S. and its states:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

The excess deaths during the pandemic are not subtle in these graphs. If the data is accurate and the comparison with Sweden is valid, then it does tend to support the importance herd immunity to this virus.

rbjorklin• 6 years ago

There is no herd immunity in Sweden and it was never a stated goal. New infections are trending up the same as everywhere else. The official statistics dashboard can be found here: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...

kenjackson• 6 years ago

How does this support herd immunity? Herd immunity wouldn’t lead to the distinction between the US and Sweden unless Sweden achieved herd immunity before the virus was being tracked.

pjc503• 6 years ago

Explain what you mean by "herd immunity"? It is normally achieved through vaccination; if you mean "wait until most of the population has had the disease", you'd need to wait until the US death toll was much higher to achieve that.

Vinnl• 6 years ago

Dutch numbers appear to be here: https://opendata.cbs.nl/statline/#/CBS/nl/dataset/70895ned/t...

tims33• 6 years ago

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't mean Swedes were completely unafraid and behaving recklessly. They're not out recreating their own version of the Sturgis rally daily.

mrfusion2• 6 years ago

It’s a nice CNN talking point but any actual evidence Swedes are less “reckless”?

hbosch• 6 years ago

I have a few friends at Spotify working in Stockholm. Anecdotally, it seems that in general Swedes have never really shared the global concern for COVID. No masks, no real social distancing, still working in the office all summer, plenty of holiday fun with friends, and yet somewhat low hospitalizations anyway. Seeing how life has been there since the lockdown here in the USA I have been admittedly quite jealous.

hising• 6 years ago

Not true. People are working from home when they can and are recommended to do so at least until 2021. People do practice social distancing. As in all countries some are better and some are worse at following recommendations.

When it comes to analyze why death rates are lower, I guess one thing to consider is that we have been social distancing, working from home and making fewer visits to doctors and had cancelled operations. If Sweden would have managed covid the way some people think we have managed covid (no measures) the death rate would probably been on an ATH for September.

nchi3• 6 years ago

Spotify employees started working from home in March though, just like most tech companies. Yes, some people still go to their offices, but they are small minority unless they have a job where they can't work from home.

dfilppi• 6 years ago

This is forbidden knowledge

barbecue_sauce• 6 years ago

This is an easily misinterpretable factoid.

ytdytvhxgydvhh• 6 years ago

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: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6942e2.htm?s_cid=mm...

Really makes one wonder about differences in the US and Swedish population, especially regarding widespread obesity and diabetes.

mrfusion2• 6 years ago

Lockdowns equal suicides, overeating, lack of exercise, collapse of support networks, domestic violence, delayed preventative care, and more.

I’m not surprised at all that domestic deaths went up.

phreeza3• 6 years ago

Excess deaths went down, not up, during very strict lockdowns in European countries as measured by EuroMomo data. Excess deaths also correlate quite well with reported corona deaths in this and the US dataset.

Both these facts point towards excess deaths being mostly corona-related, and not lockdown-related.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

People are making all kinds of assumptions about the pandemic but the data point is only that, one month.

And I think it is related to the pandemic but in 2 ways:

- As people said, less activity in general and it was one of the better months in Europe in terms of deaths.

- The mortality in the initial months has probably anticipated possible deaths that would occur later in the year

Gwypaas2• 6 years ago

Really the stronger but not as striking data point, sadly not in the title is:

For the year 2020 so far, ie January - September, the number of deaths per capita is the third lowest ever.

air7• 6 years ago

"During the 15th week of the year, we saw the highest death rate in Sweden this millenium. " [0]

Statistics are just so hard to interpret and translate into a narrative that headlining a single data point is often misleading. I'm not interested enough to dive into this particular issue so I'm still not sure which claim is "true".

[0] https://emanuelkarlsten.se/number-of-deaths-in-sweden-during...

jonahrd• 6 years ago

They may both be true. The 15th week of the year is in late March while the OP is talking about September.

wolfgang42• 6 years ago

For reference, September is roughly weeks 36-40.

playingchanges• 6 years ago

Kinda makes perfect sense that the same year would have a month with both the highest and lowest no?

jobigoud• 6 years ago

Yup. Redistribution, people dying in March didn't die in September.

In France as well we had severely negative excess mortality in June. The combo of preloading deaths that would have happened later and lockdown measure preventing other diseases/road accidents, etc.

orangecat• 6 years ago

They aren't contradictory. 2019 had unusually few deaths, in part due to a mild flu season: https://www.icuregswe.org/globalassets/dokument/influenza-in.... So there were lots of vulnerable people who likely would have died in the next year, but COVID compressed many of those deaths into a few weeks.

seppel• 6 years ago

I means that people who would have died later this year (e.g. September) already died in March.

repsilat• 6 years ago

The article title and first paragraph also say that 2020 has been the third least deadly year on record (to date).

All three things can be true -- bad week in March, good September, good 2020. But March explaining September is more tenuous.

chrisco2553• 6 years ago

This millenium is 20 years in. That's an example of hyperbolic language implying a much greater time horizon.

Pinus2• 6 years ago

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 — "Swedish summer" is a sufficiently low level of activity!

chinathrow2• 6 years ago

At least this seems to indicate that you do not need a full-blown lockdown to stamp out Covid-19

We can't simply "stamp out" Covid-19, not even the swedes. Not even temporarily, they never had less than 150 cases per day since summer.

Source: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

asdfasgasdgasdg3• 6 years ago

I never know what people mean when they say "can't." We can -- it's been demonstrated possible in several different countries, some of which had very significant spread of the virus before they managed to get control. I feel like "can't" isn't the right word to describe our situation. "Won't" or "choose not to" feel more appropriate.

Pinus2• 6 years ago

Oh, come on, all we need to do is to keep the entire world in "summer holiday" mode for a few years! :-)

zosima• 6 years ago

Most likely this is due to a rapidly changing age distribution in Sweden.

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.

http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/en/ssd/START__BE_...

This won't skew the average age very much, but will definitely reduce deaths per capita.

If mortality was calculated as a function of age distribution september would likely be average and april would have had a high excess mortality.

xenocratus• 6 years ago

The Economist has a quite detailed set of graphs showing "excess deaths" during 2020 for a host of countries. Contrast Sweden to Norway: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...

oxymoron3• 6 years ago

I think there are a few things going on here:

a) The spread of contagion before measures where imposed. Sweden was a few days later than the other Nordics in taking action, and may have been in a further advanced state to begin with. b) Safety equipment. Sweden had no functioning central reserves for health care gear. c) Failure to protect the vulnerable. The nursing homes are a mix of private and public, but all are administered at the municipal level. Proper care was not taken to protect the elderly, largely due to lack of local know how and incompetent central response.

I’ve been a staunch defender of the Swedish strategy, but it seems like there’s no avoiding the conclusion that the path taken by the other nordics may have been smarter in that it contained the spread until adequate supplies could be secured, good routines established and treatment options better understood. (To be fair to FHM that devised the strategy, b and c are certainly on other authorities.)

Significantly, although all the nordics now have a climbing number of cases, none has seen a sharp rise in the number of deaths. Mean time from hospitilization to death is around 18 days, so the resurgence has been ongoing for long enough that it’d have been noticeable by now.

It seems like the Swedish path may have two main benefits left:

1) Fewer vulnerable children were hurt by being sent home. Fewer women locked in with abusive partners. Nordic lock downs were less drastic, and may have avoided some of it, but at the global level it’s numbing to think of the suffering of children this year. 2) In terms of GDP growth, the indication is that Sweden didn’t do much better than the other nordics, but I think it’s still to early to gauge the long term economic benefits of a soft strategy. Maybe Sweden ended up taking on less debt per capita, for instance? I haven’t seen numbers on that, but school closings in particular are expensive, and so seems like reasonable speculation. Time will tell.

The economic benefits are probably not going to turn out to be compelling enough to justify the potentially avoidable deaths. From a utilitarian perspective, I think the first point may be though. The deaths have largely been people towards the end of their life. I think the constructive way to view it is that we should consider all years of a humans life equal. Is it worth sacrifying an 80 year old to save a 10 year old from being beaten up at home? If it hurts that kid for life in a tangible way, then yeah, that grim calculus may just work out.

natmaka3• 6 years ago

The Economist graph shows "covid-19 excess deaths".

The article is about "September 2020 least deadly month ((...)) 2020 third least deadly year ever so far".

AFAIK there is no normalized way to count COVID-19-induced deaths.

If so there is no way to compare official "COVID-19-induced deaths", because a given case may be counted as such in a country and not in another one, or even in the same nation by a given doctor and not by another one.

The total amount of deaths seems more objective.

Moreover the pandemics is running, therefore any comparison offers only a peek on a fraction of the challenge. Isn't this "herd immunity" approach a sort of "let's endure more short-term deaths, then durably much less afterwards" bet? In such a case any accounting may be moot for years.

chmanie• 6 years ago

[...] with the October 19 updated Excel sheet.

First thing I would do is to check whether they are lost some rows (or columns).

pelasaco2• 6 years ago

From the comments:

"One forgotten contribution could possibly be the large number of canceled surgeries.

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's and I have been repeatedly promised (by doctors) that "..it is different now.."

We have also noted a quite dramatic reduction of cancer diagnoses because of reduced screening for breast- and gyn cancer. The common wisdom among "experts" 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 "overdiagnose" by at least a factor of 10 (and in reality up to a factor of 50) in order to not miss any "real" cases of cancer. Better to cut nine healthy breasts or prostates than to have one undiagnosed case.

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."

And

"Oh, todays newspaper say it is 75k less surgeries in Sweden since Mar -20."

yread• 6 years ago

This is complete FUD. Overtreatment is a real concern that oncologists take seriously - for cancer precursors the recommended treatment now is often just "monitoring"

pelasaco2• 6 years ago

Said.. you?

It doesn't change the problem of the large number of canceled surgeries. The narrative from the linked post is "because Sweden went through a different route to fight COVID-19 than France and Germany, now they are paying the price".. and the comments add some variables to this equation.

viraptor• 6 years ago

defining guidelines for interpretation of pathological finds and they state explicitly that it is better to "overdiagnose"

Was it definitely after pathology reporting? It's normal to have a low threshold to send people to biopsy. From the number of developed cases you can get some idea about what ratio of "ok" results you should have as a referring doctor. (this is tracked) But once you do biopsy / further checks I haven't heard of overdiagnosis by a large factor - not the "you should have surgery" overdiagnosis anyway. "Wait, see how it develops, retest" seems more common.

pjc503• 6 years ago

What is it about Sweden that makes people like cherry-picking facts from it? There's a whole right-wing conspiracy meme about muslim no-go areas that doesn't match the reality observed by Swedes.

Similarly, Sweden didn't have no restrictions in response to coronavirus.

jeofken• 6 years ago

Zones where it’s not safe and police must negotiate with criminal gangs of foreigners are real in my town Gothenburg, and certainly in Malmö, Uppsala, Stockholm etc. I’ve personally witnessed them shooting and burning cars outside of my apartment.

The image many foreigners have of Sweden is outdated due to mass immigration (HN PC may dislike it, but I call it population replacement) - that image is from when it was a homogenous country.

aflessner• 6 years ago

For week 15 of 2020 Sweden has excess deaths that were 12 standard deviations above the baseline.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality

username90• 6 years ago

Week 02 2017 France and neighbors had mortality of around 12 standard deviations above the baseline. I think number of standard deviations are a bad measure when the data is so chaotic, especially since the standard deviation can vary strongly from year to year and from country to country. Lets say that one country had a few lucky years with few abnormalizes, while another country faces catastrophes regularly. Then a minor catastrophe in the first country will look way worse than in the second.

hristov3• 6 years ago

You can find a very informative chart of Sweden's weekly deaths here:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1115707/sweden-number-of...

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's disastrous "herd immunity" policy failed.

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.

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.

agarden• 6 years ago

Do you have a source on your claim that Swedes have changed their behavior?

hristov3• 6 years ago

Yes I do. For example, this is an article from the company that owns all of Swedens large airports saying traffic fell by 87%. https://www.swedavia.com/visby/press/swedavias-traffic-stati...

Here you can see that in september 2020 road traffic accidents fell sharply from the september average of the previous years.

https://www.ssb.no/en/vtu

phreeza3• 6 years ago

Certainly not conclusive proof, but Google Mobility data shows Swedes are using public transport -28% compared to pre-pandemic levels: https://www.gstatic.com/covid19/mobility/2020-10-18_SE_Mobil...

This is a stronger effect than in many other countries with official measures in place, e.g. Germany has -21% and was at -8% before case numbers started spiking again a few weeks ago.

Gwypaas2• 6 years ago

Both mobility data and the curves of ICU cases and deaths, which are fairly reliable proxies for the infection level in the society regardless of variations in testing capacity, are orthogonal to your claims.

ICU cases peaked early april, deaths a week later, then a fatter tail happened due to a less restrictive approach. See the official Swedish data by the public health agency. [0] The mobility showed a similar curve, creeping back up to 10% less than baseline early June and staying there. [1]

[0] https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6...

[1] https://www.teliacompany.com/sv/om-foretaget/uppdatering/mob...

hristov3• 6 years ago

Why do you say this is "orthoganal to my claims"? It seems pretty supportive of my claims. Looks like swedes moved around less which means that they changed their behavior due to covid which resulted in less non-covid deaths than previous years.

oxymoron3• 6 years ago

Anecdotally, we were all scared shitless in March and that’s when there was a drastic change in behavior. People stayed at home and stopped traveling. The period after which you describe is actually the period in which travel restrictions was relaxed, and people became _less_ careful.

More formally, the decline after mid April was probably due to widespread immunity and weather effects. That’s only my conclusion, but based on the following:

* https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publ... - A model releases mid april bases on march data which accurately placed the peak around mid april. It’s a standard SEIR model, so it predicts that it tapers off only based on population immunity. * https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-t... - Study showing much higher incidence of T-cell immunity in Stockholm than the incidence of individuals with anti bodies, indicating that the true population immunity is much higher than what anti body studies will show * https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/846 - Another mathematical modeling study, based loosely on Stockholm dynamics, which demonstrates that hers immunity thresholds may be much lower when accounting for social stratification. In particular, Sweden asked ages 70+ to isolate themselves, so it’s likely the case that immunity rates are much lower in that group. * Finally, warm weather surely helped drive down the spread.

hyko• 6 years ago

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.

The Swedish authorities never suggested that lockdowns wouldn’t work in controlling the pandemic, in fact they acknowledged that they definitely would 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.

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).

For now, let’s just enjoy this good news about the people in Sweden at face value–we need it!

September 2020 least deadly month ever in Sweden

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