Anti-lockdown Sweden among lowest for pandemic deaths
SWEDEN’S death rate during the pandemic was among the lowest in Europe despite the country refusing to impose strict lockdowns, according to figures from the World Health Organisation.
The UN health agency released estimates of excess deaths, people who died both directly and indirectly from Covid, showing 14.9million fatalities worldwide, three times higher than the figure officially reported.
Britain, according to the new data, had a lower excess death rate than Spain, Germany and Italy.
Experts said the figures demonstrated that stringent lockdowns alone did not determine success when battling Covid-19. Sweden, which was criticised early in the pandemic for resisting lockdowns, had fewer deaths per capita than much of Europe.
In 2020 and 2021, the country had an excess death rate of 56 per 100,000, compared with 109 in the UK, 111 in Spain, 116 in Germany and 133 in Italy.
The WHO analysis includes deaths indirectly linked to Covid-19, such as people who were unable to access healthcare for other conditions while services were overwhelmed or suspended. It also accounts for deaths avoided during the pandemic, for example because of the lower risk of traffic accidents.
Prof Devi Sridhar, the chairman of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, said: “The lesson from Sweden is to invest in your population’s health and have less inequality.” She said that although the UK’S initial response was weak, the country “definitely did better post-vaccine rollout than other places”.
Although Sweden fared worse than its Nordic neighbours, lower rates of obesity, which is a key risk factor for severe Covid, and a well-resourced healthcare system helped limit fatalities in the country.
Dr Michael Head, a University of Southampton global health expert, said: “There have been too many preventable deaths here in the UK during the pandemic. However, early rollout of the vaccines, including the booster doses, will also have avoided many deaths. By the end of the pandemic, it’s likely that the UK will probably end up mid-table on various metrics that measure pandemic performance.”
Australia, New Zealand and Japan
‘Early rollout of the vaccines, including the booster doses, will have avoided many deaths’
were among the 10 countries to report negative excess death rates, suggesting there were fewer fatalities than expected over the two years.
The global disparity between official figures and excess deaths is not a surprise – even before the pandemic, around six in 10 deaths globally went unreported.
The WHO said that middle-income countries, where both Covid testing and death registrations are patchy, accounted for 81 per cent of excess deaths in the first two years of the pandemic, compared with just 15 per cent in high-income nations.
Dr William Msemburi, an WHO official in the department of data and analytics, added that the vast majority of deaths, some 68 per cent, were based in just 10 countries, including America, Russia and India.
The analysis has provoked fury from the Indian government over fears that it will embarrass Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
The WHO said the country, which was devastated in spring 2021 by the delta variant, experienced almost a third of the worldwide fatalities, with 4.7million excess deaths. Ten times higher than the official toll of 482,000.
Yesterday, India insisted that its registration of births and deaths was “extremely robust” and claimed the WHO used “questionable” methodology and data.
But Colin Angus, a modeller at the University of Sheffield who was not involved in the study, said the WHO’S methodology “looks entirely sensible”, adding that excess death estimates were critical to hold governments to account.
The figures were compiled by a panel of experts who have been working on the data for months, using national and local information as well as statistical models to estimate totals.
By comparison, each year tuberculosis kills about 1.5million people and HIV about 680,000 people.