It\u2019s now been more than eighteen months since governments began the new social experiment now known as \u201clockdowns.\u201d Prior to 2020, forced \u201csocial distancing\u201d was generally considered to be<\/a>\u00a0too costly in societal terms to justify such a risky experiment.<\/p>\n Yet in 2020, led by health technocrats at the World Health Organization, nearly all national governments in the world suddenly and without precedent embraced the idea of lockdowns.<\/p>\n On the other hand, the Swedish regime rejected the idea.<\/p>\n For this act of iconoclasm, the Swedish government was pilloried by media organizations and non-Swedish government officials worldwide. The predictions of doom and of a widespread Swedish bloodbath were ubiquitous. Months later, even when it became clear Sweden was not the death-addled outlier many assumed it would be, it was common to see articles declaring Swedish covid policy to\u00a0be a \u201cdisaster<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Even eighteen months later, as the Sweden-is-doomed narrative broke down even more, critics of Sweden contort themselves to create an anti-Swedish narrative. Consider this August 2021<\/a> article at Business Insider<\/em>, for example, which carefully slices and dices the data to make Sweden\u2019s outcomes look bad. The author slyly writes:<\/p>\n Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people \u2014 around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.<\/p>\n Note the sleight of hand used here. In one sentence, the comparison focuses on diagnoses compared to the UK and Italy. This is surely because actual deaths<\/a> from covid are fewer per million in Sweden than in either of the UK or Italy. Indeed, the author with this comparison only succeeds in showing us that covid is less fatal in Sweden where there are more cases but fewer deaths. The author then quickly changes the subject to comparisons in deaths so as to make sure Sweden compares unfavorably to Denmark, Finland, and Norway.<\/p>\n These claims are becoming\u00a0increasingly desperate, since\u00a0in terms of excess deaths\u00a0Sweden is better off than most of Europe overall, and also better off than most other northern European countries. (And\u00a0much<\/em>\u00a0better than southern European countries.) Moreover, “excess mortality” is a better measure of deaths in a given country since it provides a broader view of the actual effects of both covid and covid policy<\/em>.<\/p>\n Certainly, one can find some European regimes that had fewer deaths\u00a0proportionally. Norway, Denmark, and Finland have remarkably low numbers of covid deaths compared to\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0of Europe.<\/p>\n But this fails to explain why Sweden\u2019s nonbloodbath compares favorably to most\u00a0EU member states, including France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and others.<\/p>\n For example, as of late August, excess mortality<\/a> in Sweden\u00a0was approximately 785 per million people. In France, the total is 988 per million, and in Spain, it is 1,917 per million. In EU nonmember the United Kingdom, the total is 1,657 per million.<\/p>\n Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n This trend was already becoming apparent months ago, and\u00a0in March\u00a0Reuters reported<\/a>,<\/p>\n Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively\u2026. Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden.<\/p>\n Other data, also according to Reuters, “which included an adjustment to account for differences in both the age structures and seasonal mortality patterns of countries analysed,”\u00a0Placed Sweden at\u00a0eighteenth out of twenty-six in terms of mortality. The “highest” ranked\u2014that is, the worst ranked\u2014were Poland, Spain, and Belgium.<\/p>\n Another way of comparing Sweden to the rest of Europe is to look at excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 compared to \u201caverage monthly deaths\u201d from 2016 to 2019.<\/p>\n In the time since February 2020, total deaths\u00a0(measured as a percentage of the 2016\u201319 average<\/a>) were lower in Sweden than in the “EU 27<\/a>” in fourteen out of eighteen months.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/excess-martality-in-Sweden-compared-to-other-1024x724.jpg\")
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