"As of August 2020 that is not true." Except that it isn't of...

"As of August 2020 that is not true."

Except that it isn't of August 2020.

August (the 11th) was when the report was published.

But it referenced data only until 22 June... which is just 14 weeks after the arrival of the virus in Sweden.

So, at the point of the blue dotted lines in the graphs below, after which the situation changed markedly:










The report cited data right until the point at which the Gompertz plateau kicked in... as it does for all viruses:





Clearly, 14 weeks is an absolutely nothing time frame over which to assess both the impact, as well as the effectiveness of the management of, a pandemic.

Accordingly, anyone trying to do so can't been seen to have much credibility.


Not just that, but the measure that actually counts when it comes to the impact of a pandemic (or any other mortality-related event) is the excess death rate, i.e., the number of deaths above (or below) the normal death rate.

This is especially important when the mortality event in question overwhelmingly impacts a part of the population which is aged at, or in excess of, average life expectancy.

And in the case of Sweden, the excess deaths were running below par leading up to the virus, and has turned negative again in recent months (reflecting an effective "front-loading" of deaths that would have otherwise occurred, anyway):






While, for Finland, it has been running excess deaths for the entire year so far:





If one performs a numerical integration to derive the respective areas under those two curves (the summation of the red areas less the summation of the blue areas), it will be seen that Finland's excess YTD death figure is around 2,800 excess deaths, while for Sweden it is currently around 3,280.

And of course, it needs to be borne in mind that Sweden's population of 10.3m is double that of Finland 5.5m , so there's that that needs to be considered.

It means that, currently, Sweden's excess deaths per capita is 320 per million head of population, which is actually better than Finland's 510 excess deaths per head of population.

So the difference in Sweden's performance and its neighbour Finland, is not nearly as adversely stark as it appears, when viewed on the relevant measure.

In fact, Sweden is performing better.

..