Faced with mounting evidence that lockdowns did not substantially reduce COVID-19 deaths in most of the countries where they were implemented, lockdown proponents have fallen back on what Paul Yowell calls the “neighbour argument” – i.e., the argument that comparing Sweden to its neighbours shows that lockdowns really do work.
On May 10th, a tweet plotting cumulative COVID-19 deaths per million in Sweden, Norway and Finland – which referred to the “Nordic natural experiment” – garnered over 6,000 likes.
However, this argument isn’t convincing for a whole number of reasons, as I’ve outlined in two previous posts. For example: the other Nordics had a head start on Sweden; border controls – not lockdowns – made the difference in the first wave; and once you include the Baltics, Sweden no longer stands out.
However, suppose we just look at the mortality figures. Do they show that Sweden had an exceptionally bad year? Far from it. As I’ve noted before, the country saw age-adjusted excess mortality up to week 51 of just 1.7% – below the European average.
Now, it’s true that all three other Nordics saw negative excess mortality (of up to –5% in Norway’s case). Because mortality rates declined gradually from 2015 to 2019, no change from 2019 to 2020 yields a negative value for excess mortality. In addition, there may have been fewer flu deaths and car accidents, thanks to social distancing.
However, one reason why Sweden’s excess mortality figure isn’t lower is that the country saw particularly low mortality in 2019 (which brings down the average of the last five years). In that year, Sweden had the lowest mortality of all four Nordics – its rate was 4% lower even than Norway’s.
As several commentators have pointed out, this meant that there were more frail elderly people alive at the beginning of 2020 than there otherwise would have been. So even in the absence of a pandemic, you’d have expected to see a slight rise in mortality – owing to the “dry tinder” effect.
If we take the average of 2019 and 2020, then Sweden’s age-standardised mortality rate was 15.8 per 100,000, Denmark’s was 17.6, Finland’s was 16.4 and Norway’s was 15.5. In other words, Sweden’s was lower than both Denmark’s and Finland’s, and was only slightly higher than Norway’s.
Of course, the average of the last two years isn’t a measure of the impact of the pandemic (and other relevant events). For that, we can need to compute the excess mortality for 2019–20, by comparing the average mortality rate in those two years to the average over the preceding four years. When we do that, the numbers come out as follows: –3.3% in Sweden, –4.4% in Demark, –4.8% in Finland and –4.9% in Norway.
Although Sweden still saw the least favourable change (i.e., the smallest decline in mortality), the disparity with respect to its neighbours is much reduced.
This exercise is not meant to obscure the fact that Sweden saw a moderate rise in mortality last year, unlike the other Nordics. It’s simply meant to put that rise in mortality into perspective. After all, having a sense of perspective is very important when trying to evaluate the measures that were taken during the pandemic.
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Great photo well done. When I work from home, that is often myself with my cat at least for a few hours. We are mandated to be in the office 2 days a week (IT large bank). Many of us go 3 times or more occasionally.
There is absolutely no doubt from own experience that you are far more productive in an office. I don’t buy the WFH productivity bullshit. The only savings is travel- time to travel and related costs which are significant.
I would be in the office 4-5 days/wk (1 hr 15 min public transport commute), bar the very significant transport costs (often unpaid by firms). This is maybe the excuse used by the uncivil serpents.
Totally agree. I found the train journey good for reading or having a snooze but it would depend on how reliable your service is. I had to laugh when I read this morning that nationalising the rail companies was to focus on delivering for the passengers when there was me thinking the railways are run for the benefit of the unions overpaid and underworked members. I worked for London councils as a direct and indirect employee and both provided a season ticket purchase service so the annual cost was spread over the year.
I am way more productive at home for various reasons
Our firm ranges from 100% home to 100% office and all shades in between and I have noticed no pattern to how productive people are based on where they work
I too am more productive WFH because I’m not being constantly interrupted by others needing to access the single computer owned by the garage for which I do bookkeeping. I go in as they close on a Saturday, take a back up, bring it home, do my work and return a fresh back up before they open on Monday morning. Better than freezing to death, exhaust fumes, interruptions by mechanics who need to access data and those pesky customers!!!!
Indeed. Our office is too noisy for me but suits others.
Every business should choose what works best, but I do feel that insisting people go to offices is partly motivated by bored bosses, partly by a desire to fill expensive office space, and lazy managers and lazy thinking that says if you are at a desk in an office you are producing something. I would much rather see a focus on productivity from each individual, not on where they happen to do their work.
It depends on your role. My son is a software developer and he could concentrate on his work better at home rather than with colleagues interrupting him. Yes, he took time out to do the school run but he more than made up for that at other times of the day. Now he’s moved into management, obviously he has to go to the office more often
I manage people remotely and it seems to work – a manager should be looking at work produced, not presence at a desk. Of course if personal, in-person interactions are very important to a role then that is what should be done.
There needs to be a culture of ‘getting the job done’ for the employer to get the benefit of working from home. Some organisations have it – many do not.
I feel that “working from home” (i.e. doing some work in between all the distractions of home life) leads to lower productivity. As a self-employed freelance translator, I’m familiar with all the things that can tempt you away from your desk, but I also know that I have to be self-disciplined if I want to earn money. If I were on a fixed salary, that incentive would not be there.
I would normally deplore that loss of productivity in the public sector, but I’m actually quite cheered by the drop in productivity of the Net Zero crowd. The less they do to mess up life for the rest of us, the happier we’ll be.
I don’t know why this would surprise anyone, especially if you are a sad person like me who enjoys watching property programmes. During the COVID fiasco, they were full of London and other large town based civil servants who were moving out of the cities for a new life, because they were able to work from home now. These included local authority employees who, it seemed, were able to relocate hundreds of miles away from their employing council. None of these can want to return to their offices having spent so much to get away from them and they can’t have been isolated cases the TV production crews stumbled across.
Don’t judge others by your low standards. Some people enjoy the satisfaction of getting the job done free from distractions from colleagues just wanting to chat and endless unproductive meetings