Calculating the Cost of Panic

Using Sweden as a baseline for rationality

Three years into the pandemic, I figure it’s time to calculate the cost of panic.

The world has been living with disease pandemics for millennia. The norm in such situations was to quarantine the sick. To throw entire societies into quarantine was unprecedented in human history.

Though they’ve never admitted it to the rest of us, I’m sure the Chinese Government knew COVID had escaped from a Chinese lab. After that kind of cosmic booboo, a certain level of blind, unreasoning panic on China’s part was understandable.

Why the West chose to copy that craziness is less comprehensible.

There are plenty of examples of countries that did not succumb to panic. Africa was too poor to shut down, and too poor to buy vaccines, yet the evidence suggests Africa’s COVID death rates were a fraction of ours. It is only the arrogance of the West that prevents us from seeing that.

In the West, only Sweden resisted the siren call to panic. For the first year of the pandemic, Sweden largely followed their preexisting pandemic preparedness plan. Schools were shut down only briefly. Masks weren’t pushed. Restaurants were never closed. The society-wide lock-downs that happened in every other Western country did not happen in Sweden.

Where the rest of the West relied on edicts and coercion, Sweden relied on recommendations, and focused on providing its citizenry with information on how to minimize their personal risks. Sweden called it a ‘light touch’ to pandemic management.

The rest of the West was horrified by Sweden’s approach, and demonized it. Sweden eventually acceded to parts of our craziness - restricting travel, restricting large gatherings, and going to remote learning for high schools and colleges for a time.

Despite those concessions, throughout the pandemic Sweden remained a reasonable proxy for how the pandemic would have been handled using the public health norms that existed prior to COVID. The non-panic option, if you will.

We can consider Canada as a prime example of a full-on panic response aping the Chinese model. (Canada’s Justin Trudeau even went so far as to copy Chinese totalitarianism, freezing the bank accounts of those who disagreed with him!)

The response of the United States might best be described as constrained panic. Though Federal legislation locked down the entire country to a certain extent, individual States either amplified or opposed the lockdowns, with a result that America’s panic was ambivalent and uneven compared to that of Canada.

The best way I know of to look at the overall impact of any public health policy is to look at what happens to death rates over time.

In normal times, death rates are remarkably stable from one year to the next, rising or falling only a few percent. Statisticians refer to deaths above the normal or expected deaths in a given year as ‘excess deaths.’

The OECD has a website which tracks excess weekly deaths in all the OECD nations. The same website separately tracks COVID deaths.

It’s easy to modify the OECD data to only show particular countries and/or particular age cohorts. I was able download selected data sets as Excel spreadsheets, make annual totals and correct for population size where appropriate. (A separate OECD website has current population data.)

The one caveat I would offer on the following data is that the excess deaths data for Canada in 2022 is missing the final 7 weeks. (Most countries are able to post excess deaths with only a six-week delay. As a Third World jurisdiction, Canada needs six months.)

Fifteen spreadsheets of data later, this is what I found. Here’s the excess deaths totals for each of three years, per million people:

Note first of all that in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, Sweden had no excess deaths at all. Nada. Zero. Zip. Wow.

When we compare Sweden with North America’s three year totals the differences are quite stark:

Canada suffered a rate of excess deaths between 2020 and 2022 triple what it would have been if our leaders had not surrendered to panic. (2,696 versus 836)

The United States suffered a rate of excess deaths between 2020 and 2022 more than six times what it would have been with a more measured COVID response. (5319 versus 836)

The end result of all that social isolation, all those small business closures, and all that immense increase in our collective indebtedness? A whole lot more people died. How does that make you feel?

As an aside: Sweden was vaccinated at almost the same rate as Canada, using primarily the same mRNA vaccines. Given that, it seems virtually certain that the mortality differences between Sweden and North America were not caused by vaccine side-effects.

Next, let’s break the excess deaths of the past three years into two categories: COVID Deaths and Non-COVID deaths. Now things get really interesting:

First of all look at the non-COVID excess deaths in Sweden: minus 13,696. What does this mean? It means Sweden’s overall death rate rose by less than the number of people who died of COVID.

Two explanations seem likely. First, many of the old and frail who died, died with COVID rather than because of COVID. Second, COVID essentially replaced the seasonal flu for the better part of three years. Those old people who would have normally died of the flu, died of COVID instead. This result, where the number who died in a pandemic is less than the increase in excess deaths, is what one should normally expect.

Canada’s result is mind-boggling: 49,000 Canadians died of COVID over the three years, but a further 53,000 people in excess of normal died of something else. What killed all those people? I suspect when the final seven weeks of 2022 excess deaths data get added in, the outcome will be even worse. It sure looks to me like Canada’s pandemic responses killed more people than the pandemic did. What do you think?

The American picture, with an additional 671,000 deaths beyond what can be explained by COVID deaths, is no better. This is an absolute scandal, but the CDC, Health Canada and the mainstream media remain supremely uninterested.

The last thing I’d like to look at is excess deaths broken down by age cohorts:

Please note that the excess deaths in Sweden in both the under 45, and the 45-64 age groups were NEGATIVE. (This was also true in each of the three individual years for each age group.) What that means is that the death rate in Sweden during the three pandemic years in the non-senior population was the same as if there had been no pandemic at all. Good public health policies save lives!

Contrast that with the US, where a total of 488,000 Americans in excess of normal died in the under age 65 population. Almost 17,000 Canadians under the age of 65 died in excess of normal between 2020 and 2022. Why were Sweden and North America so different? What killed all those younger people in North America?

Even in the 65-plus age cohort, Sweden did better than North America relative to its size. It’s clear that COVID killed a lot of seniors. How many did isolation kill?

The information cited here is all public domain. There’s nothing that prevents any academic researcher from replicating it. Maybe we are now approaching the time when a scientific journal would actually be willing to publish such a study. Please forward this post to any academic you know who might be up to the task. It will be mid-June before Canada finishes posting its 2022 data, so there’s no rush…

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Sources:

I am not going to overload you with fifteen excel spreadsheets. If you don’t trust my results, by all means, please check my data by downloading the data and creating your own spreadsheets.

The OECD website again is: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676

For those who want more detail, here’s the annual breakdown for COVID deaths:

Here’s the annual breakdown for non-COVID excess deaths:

Here is the annual breakdowns of excess deaths by age cohorts:

Finally here’s the population stats I used for the US, Canada, and Sweden: