more perspective on sweden and the lies we were told

a preliminary look at 2021 full year all cause mortality

measuring covid has, over the course of this pandemic, been devilishly difficult. definitions vary widely, some places count far more inclusively than others, and nearly everyone has tested to the point of OCD exhaustion using oversensitive assays that have turned data to debacle.

covid deaths have become nearly uncountable in any meaningful sense and have been vastly exaggerated to great media and policy effect but to even greater epidemiological and public health detriment.

a bad map rapidly becomes worse than no map at all.

this is why we need to fall back on the tried and true tests and data that have not been adulterated by these manifold machinations and manipulations.

all cause mortality is that data. you died or you didn’t. it’s a binary that everyone measures the same way and it’s pretty hard to argue about. this final count contains all trade offs.

if lockdowns kill, you’ll see it and see how many lives you traded in one group to try to affect another.

if covid kills only the very old and infirm who were of short life expectancy to begin with, you’ll see little rise in the overall expected deaths rate and their passing “with covid” instead of “from covid” or perhaps of “accelerated a few weeks or months by covid” will not move the needle far. conversely if big groups of people who would not have been expected to die start shuffling off this moral coil, you’re going to see it clearly.

this is the real acid test.

you can compare the sum total of what happened to past years and these sums are what ought be the real focus of public health as such a concept must be general, not a myopic fixation on one facet dominated by dirty data.

to this end, we turn to longtime gatopal™, collaborator, and possible actual viking @HaroldofWorld who, being a swede himself, has done so much great work on swedish data.

this is the preliminary take on the full year of 2021:

as can be readily seen, 2021 is shaping up to be the second lowest per capita all cause deaths year in the history of sweden as a nation. (these figures are all higher pre 1991) only the oddly low 2019 year was lower.

2020, the peak covid year, was about the same as noted “years absolutely no one noticed” 2011 and 2012. it was so similar to the period of 2013-18 that it would likely have passed without comment absent the covidian obsession and was somewhat predicted in any event due to the mean reverting nature of this series after an especially low year as you have a bigger cohort of older folks present who lived past expectation.

we can see the pattern of this pandemic in the graph below.

Harold @HaroldofWorld

2/2 As you probably notice, November and December is hardly noticeable bc they are pretty much on pair with average of 2015-2019, at least as preliminary data shows.

some care is warranted however, as this is easy to misinterpret. this is not a percentage figure. this is an absolute number expressed in deaths per 100k population vs a 2015-19 baseline.

so that “27” peak in april 2020 means 27 extra deaths per 100,000 population. that’s 0.03% in absolute terms. not exactly “break out the plague carts” territory…

it’s important to keep this in perspective.

in 2020, the media would have had you believe that sweden looked like this:

it’s easy to forget just how aggressively they were pilloried and attacked.

in fact, they looked like this:

and suffered no material ill effect for it. they had a year in 2020 that could easily have been mistaken for most of the last decade, and this year are right back at all time lows for deaths. on all cause deaths, they outperformed pretty much the entire western world outside of scandanavian sates and looked near identical to those.

the true cautionary tale has been for policy makers who ran riot with global lives and livelihoods. they spent much and bought nothing.

the net harm of their policies represents the worst peacetime public policy blunder per unit time in human history.

i do not think this can even be argued anymore.

not even mao or stalin could do this much damage in 2 years.

let that one sink in.

and this harm is nothing like over yet. we started to explore this the other day:

why are northern european (except for sweden) all cause deaths up in 2021 vs 2020?

unlike the plucky swedes, all the neighbors still have meaningfully elevated all cause deaths and have all year.

having now puzzled through this a bit further, the cause looks twofold:

some are still getting covid deaths. sweden is not. but honestly, none of these are very high. this has gone pretty mild/endemic.

the bigger effect seems to be the hangover from 2020 and from ongoing current strictures, policies, and fear.

the killer was lockdowns and societal panic.

suicide is up, drug overdoses are up, depression has soared.

many, many medical appointments were missed.

cancer diagnoses plummeted but the cancer did not. so it went late stage and now people are dying of cancers that might have been curable if discovered 18 months ago.

heart disease is up, obesity is up, and deaths from diabetes, which got out of control in 2020-1 are WAY up.

and it’s why we see this divergence from 2020 to 2021. (more in the above link)

these are the effects of policy, not of covid. they are the awful butcher’s bill of political stupidity and cupidity and the people who did this warrant extraordinary blame.

this was not public health, it was mass derangement.

the media that sought to vilify and disparage sweden and call their policy murder are complicit in what turned out to be the actual killing. they aided, abetted, and outright cheer led for it perhaps because they were stupid, perhaps because they were partisan, perhaps because they just thrive on carnage and that which bleeds inevitably leads.

but they were desperately, devastatingly wrong.

and we all need to remember that. because they’re not going to change. so we must.

their silence on sweden is now deafening. the official media map of scandinavia appears to look like this:

the will sweep this and their ignominious failure and malicious misbehavior under the rug.

the NYT in particular has a rich history of siding with fascists and totalitarians. they loved mussolini, loved hitler, loved stalin. hitler won time’s “man of the year.” stalin won twice.

do you think today is any different?

media loves authoritarianism because it elevates them to policy level status as propaganda ministries. they fall all over themselves to join.

the new breed is no better and they will similarly seek to hide what they have done and the evidence of their thumbs upon the scales of discourse.

so we must remember.

and we must learn.

and we must never, never trust these people again.

because they lie.