[judofyr]

> Sweden's official death toll was 2270 yesterday (2020-04-28). The three worst influenza seasons in Sweden since 1969 killed 807, 674 and 652 people[1]. So we've already passed his "at most" claim. The only way I can see that working out is if he feels that none of the influenza seasons in the past 50 years count as "severe".

> [1]: numbers taken from the Swedish wikipedia entry on influenza. I didn't bother to check wikipedia's source. An average Swedish influenza season kills about 200.

Sorry, but you can't just throw around numbers without explaining exactly what they mean or where they come from. The numbers you're quoting is most likely deaths that has been diagnozed as influenza. To get the full picture you need to look at excess mortality (which is reported by EuroMOMO[1]) and possibly adjust the numbers to pick out the influenza-related excess (FluMOMO[2] is the model most countries use).

If you look at the 2016/2017 season in Sweden [3, figure 17, page 46] you will see that the excess mortality as reported by FluMOMO goes way beyond ~600 for a season. In the peak season we see that it was ~300 per week. There are of course uncertainties in these numbers (which is why you won't see any official "x number of people died of influenza" figures), but it was probably closer to thousands than hundreds in 2016/2017.

[1]: https://www.euromomo.eu/ [2]: https://www.euromomo.eu/how-it-works/flumomo [3]: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/publicerat-material/publ...

[matthiasl]

> you can't just throw around numbers without explaining exactly what they mean or where they come from.

In the interview, Gieseke says influenza kills 1000 to 2000 people per year in Sweden, it's part of the exchange starting at 24:16. He doesn't explain exactly what those numbers mean or where they come from.

A minute or two later, he guards his 'double' comment by saying it's not going to be 10x.

One interpretation of the exchange is that he's predicting 2000-4000 deaths in Sweden, and definitely not 20000.