While changed in 2009, the 2008 “definition” of a pandemic involved the phrase “enormous numbers of deaths”:
But if an enormous amount of death must come from an acute infection in order for it to qualify as a pandemic, then if you do not get enormous death, what will you call it?
One cheeky term you could use in order to refer to it would be:
nondemic
Nondemics are things that might have been pandemics if they had truly caused enormous death. Sweden, by avoiding enormous numbers of deaths, essentially avoided the COVID pandemic and ended up having a nondemic, instead:
The age-specific death rates for 2020 were compared to the average for the 7 years from 2013 to 2019, inclusive. Here are the numbers:
Age 45
2013-2019 mean death rate: 1.06
2020 death rate: 1.07
Z-score of 2020 death rate: 0.04 ← not extreme at all
Age 65
2013-2019 mean death rate: 8.46
2020 death rate: 8.68
Z-score of 2020 death rate: 0.46 ← not extreme at all
Age 80
2013-2019 mean death rate: 43.09
2020 death rate: 44.33
Z-score of 2020 death rate: 0.47 ← not extreme at all
The death rates for 2020 were not even one-half of one standard deviation above the mean. Contrast this against the same numbers for the USA — but using 2021 for the youngest two ages — and you find values higher than 1.96 standard deviations above the mean, a typical cutoff value for statistical significance.
By avoiding enormous death, Sweden avoided the COVID pandemic, ending up having a nondemic, instead. Because enormous death did not occur, then an enormous amount of lives could not have been saved, such as from COVID shots or other officially-sanctioned COVID treatments or protocols.
It doesn’t make sense to say that you saved an enormous number of lives when the disease, itself, had not been causing an enormous number of deaths in the first place.
Example Epidemic
An example epidemic in Sweden would be the Russian Flu which hit in early December of 1889. For 1890, those of age 45 had a death rate which had increased by 18% from the death rate found during 1888:
But for COVID, nothing near an 18% increase in age-specific death occurred. Instead, the 2020 increase from the prior average worked out to only:
a 0.04% increase for those of age 45
a 2.6% increase for those of age 65
a 2.9% increase for those of age 80
The evidence suggests that, in Sweden, the Russian flu of 1889 was much worse than COVID.
Reference
[WHO “definition” of pandemic until May 2009] — Doshi P. The elusive definition of pandemic influenza. Bull World Health Organ. 2011 Jul 1;89(7):532-8. doi: 10.2471/BLT.11.086173. PMID: 21734768; PMCID: PMC3127275. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3127275/
[age-specific death rates by nation] — https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-death-rates-in-different-age-groups
Excellent. Thank you once again. It it wasn’t a pandemic in Sweden it wasn’t a pandemic anywhere - it was deaths due to lockdowns and deaths due to medical malpractice punctuated with some medical homicides.