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by marcell 2041 days ago
I think looking at the last 20 years is pretty reasonable. All the years are within my lifetime. I agree we should not zoom out for the last 200 years.

If the data only looks bad when you look at 5 year window, and not 20 year window, that seems like a pretty fragile argument.
3 comments
Loughla 2041 days ago
What problems have had advancements in treatment in the last 20 years? HIV/AIDS, cancer, diabetes. Those are just three things off the top of my head that I know have improved, even without data to support me.

I'm not sure, with the speed of technological improvements in the last decade, that 20 years is appropriate.

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samatman 2041 days ago
Over the last two decades, life expectancy has either peaked in the developed world, or has even declined for some demographics.

Seems appropriate to me.

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mcguire 2041 days ago
Not in Sweden. Life expectancy has gone from 77.4 to 81.3 for men since 2000. It does go up every year except for 2014/2015 (80.4 to 80.3).

https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

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Veen 2041 days ago
Interestingly, in the UK the average age of people who die from coronavirus (82.4) is slightly older than the average age of people dying of other causes (81.5).

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/average-age-of-coronaviru...

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rualca 2041 days ago
Why, think about it.

Covid deaths are practically concentrated on age groups over 65 years old.

People dying from other causes aggregate multiple causes which, due to the aggregation, are spread out over the whole age range.

Due to the pyramid shape of the population distribution (they call it population pyramid for a reason) then the median and the mean are shifted towards the base/younger age groups.

Hell, if a disease affected mankind in a way that killed everyone uniformly, the average age of people dying would be around 30 years old.

The way you presented your conclusion implies that dying from covid actually extends your life, which is absurd.

Instead, it just reads that it kills older people disproportionately, and the older you are the more likely you are of dying from it.

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marcell 2041 days ago
Curious if you looked at the underlying data.

Aside from 2018, this year does not even look like much of an outlier: https://mobile.twitter.com/TLennhamn/status/1295269505984344... . 2012 seems to have been deadlier, for Sweden, than 2020, which was 8 years ago.

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Spare_account 2041 days ago
What about other countries?
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0-_-0 2041 days ago
Other coutries used lockdowns.
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fairity 2041 days ago
Sweden basically did a lockdown - it just wasn't state-mandated.

If you look at the mobility data [1], you'll see that Sweden followed a very similar trend to its neighbors, and actually maintained lower mobility after other state-mandated lockdowns let up.

[1] https://www.teliacompany.com/sv/om-foretaget/uppdatering/mob...

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0-_-0 2041 days ago
The arbitrary choice of the reference point makes that bad data.
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fairity 2041 days ago
To get a better idea of why zooming out 20 years isn't reasonable, take a look at the past 120 years in the US (Sweden's numbers likely follow the same trajectory): https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends...

Directly comparing 2000 to 2020 makes little sense given the consistent downward trend and magnitude of difference between 2001-2005 and 2015-2019.

Given the downward trend in adjusted deaths per million over time, a more reasonable approach is to average the last 5 years and compare it to 2020. Doing so, you will find that 2020 has ~750 more deaths per million in Sweden than prior periods. (Keep in mind this approach likely understates the affect of COVID on mortality rate due to the aforementioned trend).

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dustinmoris 2041 days ago
I am afraid it is more complicated than that.

For example, before we decide that the last 5 years are a good average we should look at what the trend of the last 5 years looked like. If for example there was an upwards trend (which it was for many countries around the world) then even without COVID you'd expect that 2020 would have continued on that trend for whatever reason it was going that way. In that case it would be fairly unexciting to say that 2020 was above the 5 year average in the context of COVID.

In my opinion the fairest comparison would be to check if 2020 continued the trend of the last 5 years, or if it had a non linear jump upwards from that trend, but looking at figures such as "above average" doesn't mean anything if every year in the last 5 years was "above average" because it started to trend upwards again.

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mcguire 2041 days ago
Swedish life expectancy has been trending up and death rate trending down (the latter from 10.5 to 8.6 per thousand) since 2000.

https://www.scb.se/en/finding-statistics/statistics-by-subje...

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fbelzile 2041 days ago
I think if you look at "excess mortality" rates from other countries and average them out, the 14% increase of deaths in 2020 might make more sense [1]. A +14% increase in mortality rates is statistically significant when compared to the UN projection of +0.44% made before covid-19 [2].

Looking at one county's stats and ignoring all others is making a fragile counter-argument on worldwide death rates.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/death-rate

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