But it’s not Sweden’s commitment to economic freedom that I come to laud today, but its relative commitment to trusting the common sense of its citizens during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Sweden’s record is not without warts, but broadly speaking their approach worked better than anybody else’s.

When the United States, the UK and most of the advanced industrialized countries in the world seized on the pandemic as an opportunity to bully their citizens into compliance, Sweden actually took a look at the science and decided to follow it. They made recommendations to citizens based upon the available data, changed their advice as new information warranted, and trusted them to make rational decisions based upon their own assessments of risks and benefits. Sweden was hardly perfect, but they chose not to get heavy handed.

For that the country was roundly criticized, even demonized. Early in the pandemic President Trump himself criticized Sweden for its less restrictive policies, although he eventually reversed his position.

Despite reports to the contrary, Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown. As of today, 2462 people have died there, a much higher number than the neighboring countries of Norway (207), Finland (206) or Denmark (443). The United States made the correct decision!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 30, 2020

Sweden went through its own COVID waves, so it would be wrong to suggest that it escaped the worst of the pandemic. But that was never the point. The judgment of the epidemiologists there was that there was no way to escape the virus in the first place, rendering the policies of the other Western governments and China ridiculous.

In this they were not only correct, but prescient. Sweden is coming out of the pandemic in much better shape than the countries that chose more restrictive paths. Much better. And by that I don’t mean just economically, but in terms of the physical health of its citizenry.

Sweden 🇸🇪

🇸🇪 No lockdowns
🇸🇪 No school closures
🇸🇪 No mask mandates

Sweden had the lowest overall cumulative excess deaths in countries analysed by the OECD during the pandemic era from March 2020 to June 2022. pic.twitter.com/nbzI1veo8y

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) November 27, 2022

One of the huge mistakes made by almost everybody was looking at COVID-19 in isolation from all causes of morbidity and mortality, as if preventing a death or injury from COVID meant one fewer unnecessary death. It was as if all forms of death from causes other than COVID had disappeared from the equation. This was always absurd.

As you can see from the data, while Sweden is not lowest on the chart for deaths from COVID (it did pretty well), it is lowest on the chart that actually matters: excess deaths. This is the number of deaths that exceeds the expected total if COVID had never existed and ravaged the world.

Further, Norway put enormous effort into prevent COVID deaths, and indeed had fewer than 1/3 the number as Sweden. But their excess death rate is essentially equal. For all the damage done to their society there was no net benefit to the health of their citizenry. No country in the OECD came out of the pandemic with better outcomes, and most have much, much worse.

COVID death statistics are ridiculously unreliable for obvious reasons: many governments actually encouraged reporting deaths as COVID related because compensation for treating COVID was higher. Medicare patients were worth 20% in federal payments than patients with other problems, so of course our numbers were higher. That doesn’t necessarily tell you by how much, but you get more of things you pay for. That is basic economics.

But excess deaths? That is something that is indisputable. There is, to put it bluntly, a corpse. And you have good statistical tools to predict with decent precision how many deaths would normally occur. And Sweden did better than anybody else. That is a solid number.

Sweden’s policies were developed, almost uniquely, based upon existing science and a practical view of what could be done. Everywhere else the policies were based partly on wishful thinking with a large dose of “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Professor Johan Giesecke, who first recruited Tegnell during his own time as state epidemiologist, used a rare interview last week to argue that the Swedish people would respond better to more sensible measures. He blasted the sort of lockdowns imposed in Britain and Australia and warned a second wave would be inevitable once the measures are eased.

“The Swedish Government decided early in January that the measures we should take against the pandemic should be evidence based. And when you start looking around at the measures being taken by different countries, you find very few of them have a shred of evidence-base,” he said.

Giesecke, who has served as the first Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Control and has been advising the Swedish Government during the pandemic, told the UnHerd website there was “almost no science” behind border closures and school closures and social distancing and said he looked forward to reviewing the course of the disease in a year’s time.

“I think that the difference between countries will be quite small in the end,” he said. “I don’t think you can stop it. It’s spreading. It will roll over Europe no matter what you do.”

Ironically Giesecke gave himself and Sweden not enough credit, as he too underestimated the effect of restrictive policies on the health of the citizenry. He didn’t predict how harmful the lockdowns and other measures would be. They wound up killing a lot of people. He was correct in assuming COVID would rip through the population no matter what interventions took place; wrong in believing that those interventions wouldn’t be as harmful as they turned out to be.

There is now a lot of talk about Long COVID, and it will take years to sort out fact from fantasy. Undoubtedly there will be people who suffer long-term consequences from COVID, but it is far too soon to sort out the signal from the noise scientifically. Every virus leaves some people with lingering problems to some degree or another; how long and to what extent have to be teased out of data. Any numbers being thrown around now are either WAGs or BS.

Not that this is dispositive, but I have spoken to some doctors who were convinced that Long COVID is a huge deal who have become skeptics over time. Perhaps there are doctors who have gone the other direction as well. That just tells us what we already knew: collect data and analyze it over time. I had mono in college and it took nearly a year to recover fully, perhaps a bit longer. Getting sick sucks.

COVID was never the Black Plague. It turned out to be far less severe than the 1918 flu. Vastly less severe, actually. The Spanish flu killed about 50 million people, which COVID-19 has killed fewer than 7 million worldwide. In 1920 the world population was 1.8 billion, or about 22% of today’s. There is simply no comparison. If there were, almost 200 million would have died worldwide.

We all know why, even after it became clear that COVID is 1) bad, but hardly civilization-shattering; 2) impossible to stop; 3) responds not at all to social distancing, masks, and other measures, the powers-that-be continued down the path of oppressing citizens. It had nothing to do with health, at all. Canada’s excess mortality rate is 5 times Swedens, yet Trudeau used the military and the banking system to suppress protests against COVID restrictions.

It was and remains about power. The US actually remains in a COVID emergency, giving wide powers to the government to restrict your freedoms. Expect a “climate emergency” soon, expanding government powers further.

It is the “emergency” want, not your well beings.

The excess death numbers prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt.