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As of December 18th, 2020 deaths in Sweden are only the 3rd highest for the past decade:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...

So its unlikely that COVID has lead to much excess death outside of what could be expected from an unusually strong 'flu year'.

However the avoidable major driver of death is lockdown (from suicides, overdoses, homicide, destitution, interrupted medical care) and mismanagement (eg. sending symptomatic people back into nursing homes as in New York).

This whole state of affairs has been great for Billionaires though - who have increased their wealth by 36% in the past 9 months thanks to egregious money printing and economic disruption:

https://yubanet.com/usa/net-worth-of-u-s-billionaires-has-so...

discuss

y-c-o-m-b|5 years ago

From the WHO (https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2017-up-to-650-000-peopl...)

> Up to 650,000 people die of respiratory diseases linked to seasonal flu each year

Current COVID-19 deaths: 1.85 million. That's more than double the flu. This is not the flu. Sweden is not representative of the rest of the world. You do not know what long-term complications to longevity COVID-19 has. It's quite possible you live a full healthy life or it's possible you drop dead in 5 years because of permanent damage to the lungs and/or cardiovascular system.

jonathanjaeger|5 years ago

Deaths from the current year can take a while to be finalized, and Decembers can be one of the deadliest months. If the U.S. hits 500k excess deaths this year, that's still a 20-25% hike on our normal death rate (2.7M give or take). Seems like Sweden will surpass past years in the end, perhaps by a similar percentage.

iridium_core|5 years ago

If we linearly extrapolate the December 18 data to December 31st, we get 91773 * (366/353) = 95,152.

Which would indeed be the highest level this decade, but still only 3.2% higher than 2018.

Sweden's 2019 deaths were also the lowest in the decade, so there was a lot of built up 'dry tinder'. In fact the excess deaths in 2020 match up almost exactly with the 'non-deaths' of 2019.

This concept is also matched by research:

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...

"In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement."