![[OC] Excess mortality in Europe during COVID-19 | Sweden recorded the lowest number despite (or because of) leveraging a heard-immunity strategy.](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6dhghmup0b7f1-1122x1536.png "[OC] Excess mortality in Europe during COVID-19 | Sweden recorded the lowest number despite (or because of) leveraging a heard-immunity strategy.")
Data source: Eurostat – Excess mortality by month
Tools used: Matplotlib
Background
I live in Sweden, and it was clear right away that our handling of the COVID-19 pandemic stood out.
We had no laws regulating what we could and couldn’t do.
Instead, it was up to the individuals.
You could work from home if you wanted to, but many people still went to their offices as usual and traveled on subways and busses.
Perhaps 50% used face masks, but that was a recommendation and not mandatory.
You could leave your house as you liked, through out the pandemic.
Sweden never implemented a formal lockdown.
During all this time, we faced heavy criticism from all across the world for our dangerously relaxed approach to the pandemic.
Early on, it looked like Sweden was suffering from the pandemic more than most other countries.
However, the way countries attributed deaths to COVID-19 differed.
In Sweden, even the tiniest suspicion led to a death being classified as COVID while other countries were more conservative.
In response, the European Union introduced “Excess Mortality”, a way to measure the total number of deaths from any cause in relation to the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
It allows us to see how different countries fared by stripping away any differences in deciding the cause of death.
And,
It turns out that Sweden recorded the lowest numbers of excess mortality of all European countries.
Posted by oscarleo0
20 Comments
What did France, Netherlands and Portugal to similar to have such similar grouping?
The top three are Scandinavian countries. How to factors like climate, financial strength and education factor in? The top three has similar excess mortality, were their covid restrictions similar? Generally speaking I suspect that the richer countries did a better job, so how did the Netherlands and Austria ‘underperform’? What restrictions were applied in the countries that had the most excess mortality?
I am not really into this, but I do have a lot of questions. XD
Could it be because Sweden has the capacity to handle COVID without it overburdening the healthcare system?
Could just be a list of how good the overall healthcare system is. Less how well they handled COVID in particular, more how capable they are of handling any epidemic.
With that interpretation, Sweden could have done even better had they not adopted the heard immunity strategy.
You are reading this wrong. When talking about the lockdowns, look at 2020 only. Sweden’s numbers are much worse than Norway’s or Denmark’s. Your non lockdown strategy clearly lead to more death’s in 2020.
[removed]
Two factors here:
-Quarantine didn’t avoid people getting sick, it avoided people getting all sick at the same time and saturating the health system. So as long as you could treat everyone it really doesn’t change anything.
-There probably are fewer people with untreated respiratory issues in the Nordic countries because you don’t want to live with that during the winters there.
Just one tiny nitpick, excess mortality predates covid, it wasnt something introduced at the time.
Why isn’t the UK on your list?
This is interesting data and I like the display of it. Fits in well to this sub.
However, the interpretation of this and much other data is challenging and requires nuance.
Applying post hoc rationalisation to observed data is fraught with biases and needs to be done with care in complex systems such as a pandemic with so many unmeasured and unknown factors.
For example, it might be fair to say that Sweden not having a lockdown in 2020 meant others that would become at risk in future years and with novel variants had a degree of immunity already. Therefore, that explains their lower 2021/2 excess mortality. However, there are other explanations that are potentially as good. Awareness and treatment of an emerging infection improves with time. So the fall in excess mortality could be due to improved treatment (non invasive ventilation, oxygen, blood thinners or antivirals), increased health system resources (more staff, beds, increased capacity to triage infected individuals) and altered human behaviour (increased healthcare access, changing working patterns etc ).
Not trying to diminish what you’ve done here which I think is a great visualisation but the science is hard.
Herd immunity itself is also a very difficult concept, it is entirely dependent on viral dynamics and population mixing patterns which are obviously different across time. When you add on international travel and viral evolution it becomes even more of a headache.
I think its misleading to say that Sweden didn’t apply any measures during Covid.
Many services were very restricted, restrictions applied to public spaces, many offices closed and there were very strict restrictions around health care.
But yea, Sweden took a nuanced approach and trusted its citizens would be careful.
Also Sweden never adopted a herd immunity strategy, nobody ever expected that, it is a lie told a thousand times.
Very interesting, thanks. One variable that I wonder about… did Sweden, after the initial wave in 2020, get very strict with any group homes where the very old resided? My memory is that Sweden did… that is, there was focused strictness where the risk was high.
If there was strictness in Sweden in group homes for those with age >70, it might complicate the interpretation.
Still very interesting trends outside of the Sweden/Norway comparison (which is of course very interesting… seems like Norway suffered in 2022… as I think China did when China removed all restrictions… as documented in the deaths of elderly Chinese scientists)…
like… Poland?
I’m not sure I agree with how you’re interpreting this.
Looked at another way this list is basically sorted from richest to poorest, and notably Sweden has a higher 2020 excess mortality than seven of the next nine countries.
One could easily read this data to mean that rich Sweden already had a head-start compared to poorer areas of the EU, and its herd immunity strategy was rendered successful simply because far more of the weaker parts of the population just died off early.
Then you have factors your data and your analysis don’t mention at all. Education level, trust in the government and medical professionals, cultural norms, economic share of work which can be undertaken from home even without a formal lockdown, vaccine uptake, and probably far more.
Nah we where never remotely close to 50% people using masks. Everytime I saw one it really stood out to me.
Every country reported deaths differently remember that, the UK for instance just checked for COVID and if the person had it at the time of death it was reported as a death from Covid
As a Swedish person myself, I think iy has more to do with our long standing trading(togheter with the rest if scandinavia) of staying the fuck at home if you are sick and enjoying sick pay. Not going to work to show how good of an employee you are or make money to afford living.
We are also overall less social and a lot of us generally avoid big gatherings of people compared to many other nations.
We imposed severe restrictions on public events (I helped run a large public event which had to be canceled for the first time in 40+ years) and while a lot of it wasn’t government mandated there were a *lot* of restrictions imposed more or less universally. People could go to the office yes but in most cases there was a quota to comply with health recommendations. So you’re not being totally honest with your description of how Sweden managed the pandemic.
Here is one explanation (in Swedish) why this is not the best measurement
https://kvartal.se/artiklar/overdodligheten-sager-inte-allt/
As every thing else in Sweden, this became very politicized, that together with the Swedish exceptionalism
It just shows how hard statistics is for events like this.
u/oscarleo0
Would be interesting to see the excess mortiality after Covid, as it‘s still high as fuuu for a unknown reason
I doubt the medical outcome of somebody infected with covid is different depending on what the government strategy is. What will matter is how many got sick and the quality of healthcare they got.