Sweden, Covid and 'excess deaths': a look at the data

While Covid deaths were counted daily, the longer-term effects would take years to come through.

The only real way of counting this would be to look at 'excess deaths', i.e. how many more people die every month compared to normal.

Using the most common methodology, Sweden is at the bottom – below Australia and New Zealand, which had plenty of lockdowns but very few Covid deaths.

There is no internationally-agreed methodology for excess deaths, so we used the methodology used by the ONS and applied it to all developed countries.

A weekly snapshot is not much use when factoring in Covid and non-Covid deaths – you'd have to use a cumulative figure.

Like other studies this puts Sweden at the bottom, with just 3.3 per cent more deaths than were expected.

Another way of doing this is to express excess deaths not as a percentage of the previous baseline but as a share of population.

The New Zealand data fluctuates, though: its press has been reporting the biggest increase in deaths since the 1918 flu virus.

The Economist magazine uses its own model to produce its own excess death figures.

On every measure yet published for excess deaths, Sweden comes either at or near the bottom.

PS One important caveat: since 2016 Sweden has approximately a few thousand deaths each year assigned to that year but no precise date: so they show in the annual but not weekly figures published by Eurostat or the OECD. For example, there were 3,500 undated deaths for 2022.

We have assigned these weekly deaths at a flat rate for each year: so, 70 a week for 2022.