In 2020, it really seemed like COVID in Sweden was causing higher than normal deaths. But the baseline for what is considered “normal” really matters. In this prior Substack, I showed how it was that not even a 1% drop in life expectancy was found in Sweden — indicating that “the pandemic” was not especially dangerous.
COVID in Sweden was roughly similar to a severe flu, and it was definitely less than two times as bad as severe flu. Here is even more evidence using death rate trends:
The blue dots at top left are actual crude death rates for the five years of 2014-2018 inclusive. The extended blue line is a forecast of expected death rates projected into the future, assuming that the 5-year trend holds in Sweden and the death rates drop at the same rate for every future year (rather than leveling off).
The slope of the line is -3.75, meaning that, each year, the death rate in Sweden reduces by 3.75 deaths per 100,000. A notation is made about the peculiar death rate seen in 2019. That’s much lower than expected from the prior trend. It also largely offsets the death rate rise of 2020 (under COVID).
The orange dots are actual death rates from 2019-2022, and a follow-up question is:
Was COVID so bad that it changed the trend in death rates in Sweden?
Let’s extend the model so that it incorporates, rather than predicts, the 2019-2022 death rates:
In Sweden, COVID wasn’t a “once-in-a-century” pandemic as has been advertised by government officials outside of Sweden. In Sweden, where they refused to implement strict mandates, COVID was more like a ripple that failed to reach statistical signficance when using a baseline from 2014-2018.