many seem convinced sweden is having a significant second wave of covid, but i suspect it's mostly an artifact of aggressive counting. any death for any reason within 30 days of a covid diagnosis is a "covid death"

one check on this is all cause deaths.

as can be seen (thanks to @HaraldofW for graph) this surge looks little like the last one. this seems like the -artifact of more testing.

previously hard hit stockholm is not looking anything like the spring.

such rise in all cause as exists looks to be coming from elsewhere

and testing in sweden is WAY up. it's 4X the rate from summer. this flows through to deaths in a unique way there because you can be PCR +, have no symptoms, and have a piano fall on your head (or die of old age) 3 weeks later and it's "covid death".

test NH's a lot and you'll get piles of non clinical covid deaths especially if trace virus is lingering.

this led me to comp sweden all cause deaths to US. the variance is striking.

sweden was about normal for the year overall, ~1% high.

the US was more like +11%

both had big negative excess deaths coming into march and from 2019. this is supportive of the "dry tinder" theory.

but this divergence was really striking. both had low ACD from 0-14. everyone did. but sweden had materially low ACD from 15-64 while the US had big excess.

they got a quick bump up in april that rapidly flipped negative again.

that's consistent with the idea of developing low cost herd immunity by keeping super-connectors in place and that blocking it in the US kept deaths high. (path dependent HIT)

that is exactly the opposite of what you'd expect to see if lockdowns worked.

obviously, there could be significant confounds: co-morbidities jump to mind. but so do "lockdown induced deaths" from despair, dementia, suicide, OD, not seeking care for cardiac events, etc.

that's going to be an interesting set of issues to sort out over time, but given that 70% of swedish deaths were over 80 years old and only 9% under 70, it's hard to see what lockdown of the under 65's could possibly have accomplished.

this all came down to elder care.

and so we see sweden with basically normal all cause mortality this CY (and quite low by flu year) vs most other countries that are quite high. they massively outperformed the US and EU averages and even with their counting are not top 25 globally on per capita covid deaths.

they have taken a lot of heat this year and seem now to be caving in to political pressure, but it seems needless.

games are won in the 4th quarter and it's becoming clear that their plan worked and was just accounted for poorly.

i'd like to tack on this graphic i got from @DaFeid from a tool that unfortunately does not seem to exist anymore.

you can see how widely sweden ACD varied from other in the 15-64 demographic.

down 5% vs up 11-15%.

was that the price of lockdown?