Never mind all you’ve heard about covid cases and covid deaths. This one simple graph shows better than anything else how deadly covid is not. It compares deaths from all causes in Sweden from 2015 to 2020, adjusting for population growth and leap years, using official data available to anyone at the link in the graph:  

As you can plainly see, fewer Swedes have died this year than in 2015, and almost as many Swedes died in 2016, 2017, and 2018 as have died in 2020. Only 2019 saw significantly fewer Swedes die, and that partly explains why more Swedes died this year: A year later, some old, sick Swedes were older and sicker and therefore more vulnerable to a lot of things, not just covid. 

Remember, Sweden didn’t do nearly as much as other countries to prevent infections—no lockdowns, no masks, few closures, little distancing—and yet 2020 turned out to be actually rather average in mortality. Got that? Average.

It may even turn out to be below average by the end of the year, because fewer of the most vulnerable Swedes are likely to die in the year’s final three months, having already died in April and May. 

And you can’t say a second wave is going to kill more Swedes this winter, because, as this graph shows, Sweden is not suffering a second wave, as is just about every country that locked down and mandated masks (lot of good it did them):

No, Sweden is essentially done with covid, even according to Sweden’s official data inflating the number of “covid deaths” by not distinguishing deaths of covid from deaths merely with covid. You can see that difference here, using data from Sweden’s Östergötland region:

(Here in the US, just 6% of deaths counted as covid were actually caused by only covid; the rest involved various comorbidities common among the elderly, according to the CDC.)

So the worse you can say about covid in Sweden is that some Swedes died a few months earlier, in April and May instead of November and December. That’s unfortunate, but it’s no reason to panic, no reason to change the way we live drastically and permanently, no reason for a “new normal.” Any such “new normal” would only be a new abnormal based not on science or statistics but on fear and lies. 

The initial posting of this article on Oct. 31, 2020, overstated overall mortality in 2016 in Figure 1 and the accompanying text; this re-posting on Nov. 1, 2020, corrects that error.