Sweden death toll reaches new high? Depends how you look at it.

On January 12th MSN reported, “Sweden has passed a new law allowing coronavirus lockdown restrictions after its death toll reached a new high.” Headlines like this strike fear into the hearts of many.

Let’s look at the  numbers. The data comes from the website worldometers.The first spike in the above graph was 115 deaths on April 15th 2020. The new high at the second peak is 118 deaths on December 17th.

But various sites that track this type of data state that day to day fluctuations are caused by batches of data all being entered at once every few days. One method to remove those fluctuations is to use a rolling 3 or 7 day average.

The 3 day average makes April 16th 106 deaths and December 17th 101 deaths.

The 7 day average makes April 16th 99 deaths and December 28th 91 deaths.

When using the rolling average method the death toll has not reached a new high. With the rolling average the high occurred in April. There are many ways to view data and some can be panic inducing.

As of 1/14/2021

USA 1,190 total COVID deaths per million with lockdowns and mask mandates in many states. Sweden 1,005 total COVID deaths per million without lockdowns and without mask mandates.

On twitter Johan Hellström  @jhnhellstrom provided the following graph comparing total deaths from previous years including 2020.

It seems if there were a virus killing people in numbers sufficient to be described as a pandemic, in a country that didn’t do lockdowns and a did not mandate the wearing of masks, we would see it reflected as a dramatic increase in total deaths for 2020.

This however is not the case and may indicate that deaths from other causes are being attributed to COVID. This would make sense since countries are receiving directives from the WHO.

In the US for example, on March 24th in COVID-19 Alert No.2 was issued by the CDC. This significantly altered cause of death reporting exclusively for COVID-19. This change of procedure by the CDC violated federal laws by bypassing federal oversight by the office of management and budget and the office of information and regulatory affairs.

To see the full report that contains this graph go here

https://cf5e727d-d02d-4d71-89ff-9fe2d3ad957f.filesusr.com/ugd/adf864_411c766e79174b17b8911fcae08722b1.pdf