Mainly law professors| Sometimes the tide| Often libertarian| Always independent
COVID lockdowns can have lives stored, by reducing COVID deaths (and also by reducing some other deaths, e. g. car accidents, other communicable diseases, etc. ). They may also have burdened lives, for example through deaths from drug addiction, suicides or homicides by others locked up for months, deaths from drug addiction or suicides or homicides from the economic damage and unemployment caused by confinement, cancers not detected in time other people delayed in early detection (although such early detection would have been officially excluded from the lockdown), and so on.
What was the most likely aggregation of all these effects?In particular, to take a look at a single knowledge point (recognizing that it’s just a knowledge point), how did Sweden, which essentially didn’t close, fare compared to other disgustingly rich countries?
Sweden had a higher COVID death rate than many other European countries, adding neighboring Norway, Denmark and Finland. -COVID mortality? Also, some of the effects of blockages (positive and negative) may have lasted long after the blocks, or even years after them. So what about excess all-cause mortality from 2020 to today, rather than relying on 2020 alone?Knowledge or knowledge 2020-21?
A recent report by the UK’s Office for National Statistics states that Sweden and Norway were necessarily tied for the lowest “proportional scores of excess mortality from all causes” (which “measure [. . . ] the replacement percentage in the number of deaths relative to the expected number of deaths (based on the five-year average [2015 to 2019])” among the European countries listed, Looking at the knowledge from January 2020 to June 2022: their excess mortality increased from 2. 7% to, say, 5. 2% for Denmark, 7. 1% for Finland and 11. 8% for the Netherlands.
Nor is Sweden’s good fortune likely to be due to Sweden’s age distribution, as measured by the percentage of the population aged 65 and over 80, which are between the OECD average and the most sensible average. cumulative mortality rates,” and Norway is slightly ahead of Sweden, at -4. 1% compared to -4. 0%, well ahead of all other countries listed. (Percentages are not directly comparable to excess mortality percentages as such, however, they remain useful for internal ratings within the type of measure. )
I also tried to do similar research, based on OECD knowledge (which covers the maximum of Europe, USA). USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel), from March 2020 to October 2022 (the maximum recent knowledge I can find). ). According to that knowledge, Sweden appears to have had the lowest rate, even below Norway. (Others have commented on this as well. ) You can check my knowledge in this spreadsheet; I downloaded the weekly knowledge for 2020, 2021 and 2022 from the OECD website, got rid of some Latin American countries that did not have knowledge for all years, calculated the average percentages of excess mortality per year (see line 8 of the sheet), and then calculated the average percentages of excess mortality for the 3 years (see line 2 of the 2022 sheet).
I also asked our members of the UCLA School of Law’s Empirical Research Group to verify this, and they confirmed it; here are the aggregate percentages of excess mortality they reported (or see Excel spreadsheet), I think my knowledge excluded the first nine weeks of 2020 (as necessarily before COVID) and their research included it:
Of course, there are limitations to such an analysis:
Having said that, I believe that the data from Sweden deserves attention and, of course, I would like to know whether there is more reliable data.
I deserve to point out that I have been neither a strong supporter nor a strong opponent of blockades, to the point of feeling that blockades are sometimes allowed by the Constitution. Whether they are adequate or not is a vital empirical question, which deserves further examination. . And to the extent that the Swedish experiment turns out to have been at least potentially successful (albeit contrary to the government’s judgment of fitness in other countries), I hope it will lead others to examine the factor more closely.
Eugene Volokh is Gary T Professor Emeritus of Law. Schwartz at UCLA. Naturally, his posts here (as well as reviews from other bloggers) are his own and endorsed by any educational institution.