No-Lockdown Sweden Seemingly Tied for Lowest All-Causes Mortality in OECD Since COVID Arrived

Sweden did have a higher COVID mortality rate than many other European countries, including the neighboring Norway, Denmark, and Finland. But what about what is sometimes called "all-cause excess mortality," which is to say total mortality in the country compared, on a percentage basis, to the pre-COVID mortality?

A recent UK Office of National Statistics report says that Sweden and Norway were essentially tied for the lowest "[p]roportional all-cause excess-mortality scores" (which "measure[] the percentage change in the number of deaths compared to the expected number of deaths (based on the five-year average [from 2015 to 2019])" among the listed European countries, looking at data from Jan. 2020 to June 2022: Their excess mortality was up 2.7%, compared to, say, 5.2% for Denmark, 7.1% for Finland, and 11.8% for the Netherlands.

I also tried to do a similar analysis myself, based on OECD data (which covers most of Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel), for Mar. 2020 to Oct. 2022 (the most recent data I could find).

I also asked our UCLA School of Law Empirical Research Group people to check into that, and they confirmed; here are the aggregate excess mortality percentages they reported (or see the Excel spreadsheet), though I think my data excluded the first 9 weeks of 2020 (as basically pre-COVID) and their analysis included it:

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