In a previous Substack, I noted how the year of 2019 in Sweden was a more extreme year in terms of death rates than the year of 2020 — 2019 was farther from the 5-year average. It was farther below the 5-year average than 2020 was above it.
This explains the big difference in excess death rates between Sweden and another country of the world which did not ‘mask-up and lock-down’:
As you can see, Malawi — a nation which refused masks and lockdowns for all of 2020 — did not have any accumulation of excess death by 21 Dec 2020. Yet Sweden has an apparent excess death rate which even exceeds the excess death rate found in The Netherlands in the most-recent severe flu year of 2018:
54 yearly excess deaths per 100,000 (54 YEDp100k)
How can this be? Which result is more likely to be the true result of not ‘masking-up & locking-down’?
Is it the zero excess deaths which had accumulated in Malawi, or the 80-per-100,000 excess deaths which Sweden shows? The answer is “both.”
Both the zero excess deaths of Malawi, and the excess death of Sweden in 2020 — after adjusting it with the ‘negative excess’ found in 2019 — reveal that not masking up, and not locking down, was the right choice for nation-states.
Nation-states that didn’t ‘mask-up & lock-down’ did much better than the world average in terms of excess death.
A revealing piece of information, given how lopsided the Sweden deaths of 2019 were, would be to obtain a two-year excess death count, for 2019-2020, for all nations of the world. Sweden’s 2-year excess death count is zero.
What about other places?
Reference
[average daily excess death during 2018 in the Netherlands was 1.49 per million; when 9373 excess deaths were found and population was 17.23 million] — van Asten L, Harmsen CN, Stoeldraijer L, Klinkenberg D, Teirlinck AC, de Lange MMA, Meijer A, van de Kassteele J, van Gageldonk-Lafeber AB, van den Hof S, van der Hoek W. Excess Deaths during Influenza and Coronavirus Disease and Infection-Fatality Rate for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2, the Netherlands. Emerg Infect Dis. 2021 Feb;27(2):411-420. doi: 10.3201/eid2702.202999. Epub 2021 Jan 4. PMID: 33395381; PMCID: PMC7853586. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7853586/