In places with much lighter lockdowns (or no lockdowns at all) we still had significant social distancing. It turns out most people don’t want to catch a deadly disease.
So we are comparing strict lockdowns compared with sensible social distancing - not with doing nothing.
There are strong arguments to be made, and we will have to see how they play out over the next 12-18 months, that strict lockdowns actually resulted in more deaths because the fear they induced stopped people from doing regular health checkups etc.
> The death rate in Sweden has now risen significantly higher than many other countries in Europe, reaching more than 22 per 100,000 people
There is endless misinformation being put out over COVID.
Comparing the other Nordic countries to Sweden is misleading because it was on a different trajectory before any lockdowns were implemented.
Note if you compare Sweden to the US it’s around half of the US rate per 100,000 despite lack of lockdowns.
Now the nice thing about Sweden is they have open data and accurate reporting of data - and so you can dive in and see that their total deaths haven’t changed significantly compared to prior years.
They have had ~100 excess deaths/week - and if you remove the older population (>65) then it’s basically 0 excess deaths/week.
It will be interesting next year to see if (as typically happens with the flu) we see significantly fewer total deaths - which would indicate for those 100/week excess deaths this year the total life lost per death was 1 year. But that’s just my speculation for now.
Edit: A clear trend is emerging that a countries deaths come down to two factors:
1) Ability to properly protect the old
See the failures in Italy and NYC as examples.
2) The overall health of your young population
See for example Singapore where the majority of infections were in young healthy men - and their corresponding tiny 26 deaths for ~45000 positive cases.