Less people died in Sweden 2020 then the bad flu year 1993 while Sweden had smaller population then today;
----------------------------------
The pandemic has led to economic disaster for industry after industry and a temporary law that gives the government the right to take our fundamental freedom away from us.
Now it turns out that as many died in 1993 as last year.
Statistics Sweden has published its preliminary death tolls for 2020.
The dark year when the corona paralyzed the world, countries were shut down, curfews were issued, in short, restrictions were implemented that had previously been reserved for wars, coups and plagues that threatened to wipe out civilizations.
A year that also contained curiosities I suspect that posterity will have a bit of a hard time understanding.
For example, opinion leaders who used their column space in a major newspaper to instruct readers how to make their own mouth guards and the occasional publicist who with alarmingly high blood pressure stood on the barricade and roared that the borders would be closed.
Statistics Sweden has translated this odd year into statistics, something that Sweden is unusually good at. The result?
97,164 Swedes died last year. These figures are somewhat uncertain, there is some delay in registration and the figures believe that when last year's number is locked at the end of February, the death toll will have been written up by a number of hundred people.
But it is a hint as good as anyone about what last year has to offer when death is to be reformulated into tables.
At the same time, it is statistics that do not tell us much if we do not compare with anything. As for example the years before that.
Between 2015 and 2019, an average of 90,962 people died each year. In other words, the pandemic year killed 6,202 more Swedes than in a normal year.
It is reasonable to explain this excess mortality with the virus that afflicts us all to varying degrees. It is also reasonable to assume that the number of deaths would have been higher without all these restrictions surrounding us.
The Swedish Public Health Agency's survey shows that 9,309 Swedes died with covid-19 by 31 December, but that statistic includes everyone who has been diagnosed and died within 30 days.
This means that people who have been infected but died in a car accident are registered. So do multi-sick and 89-year-old aunts. In other words, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether the virus was actually directly lethal.
But no matter how we twist and turn Statistics Sweden's material, it is impossible to get around the fact that 2020 was a miserable year with an unusual amount of deaths.
However, not unique much. In 1993, 97,008 deaths were registered. Malignant flu ravaged and effective vaccines were not yet properly established.
It can be pointed out that there were 156 fewer people than last year who died in those gloomy 12 months almost 30 years ago.
But it is also possible to point out that more people live in Sweden now than then and that 1.1 percent of the population was buried in 1993, compared with 0.9 percent during the 2020 pandemic.
This dimension is not unimportant. One of journalism's less successful moments last year was the alarmist headlines about "Deadliest November since Spanish flu".
In the excitement, more than one editor forgot that Sweden's population has more than doubled since 1918.
Now, however, perspective is not journalism's main discipline. Perspective is like the annoying fly that can not be waved away. Perspective tends to sabotage the story.
Nevertheless, there is reason to ask some questions based on these perspectives.
Are all these human tragedies in the form of life's work that went up in smoke, bankruptcies, more or less wiped out industries, rising unemployment and exclusion a reasonable price to pay for a virus that has not led to more deaths than a malignant flu?
And was it really reasonable to enact a law that gives the government and authorities the right to a comprehensive restriction of our fundamental rights?
Yes, the questions are rhetorical. They can be formulated in a completely different way. It is questionable whether a modern state, so much more developed than during the Spanish flu, should do everything in its power to fight a pandemic as far as possible.
The answer lies in the eye of the beholder . But I think that when historians, psychologists and behavioral scientists at some point in the future present their theses about what happened during the time of the virus, they will have one ingredient in their explanations in common:
One of man's many peculiar features is a horror-mixed love of disaster.
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/kolu ... er-coronan
