Did America’s COVID Lockdowns Save Lives?
Comparing the US to lockdown-free Sweden using OECD data
Note: I’ve done an updated version of this post for Stehanie Brail’s Wholistic substack. If your eyes have a tendency to glaze over when you are faced with tables of numbers, the bar charts on the version I did for Stephanie will be more to your liking.
Humanity has been living with disease pandemics for millennia. The norm in such situations was to quarantine the sick.
Epidemics of smallpox, bubonic plague, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, tuberculosis, polio, the 1918 flu, Ebola and SARS were all handled without throwing healthy populations into de facto quarantine.
What China did in early 2020 - throwing entire cities and provinces into lockdown - was unprecedented in human history.
Though Western countries initially condemned China’s harsh tactics, within a matter of weeks every Western nation save one adopted Chinese-style lockdowns as their primary strategy to rein in the COVID pandemic. This sudden about-face has never been adequately explained. One has to suspect a contagion of panic.
Only Sweden resisted the pressure to impose lockdowns.
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.
Sweden did tighten up its approach somewhat in 2021, but then rescinded virtually all of its COVID protocols in early 2022.
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. A lockdown-free zone, in other words.
We can consider the United as a case study of a moderate lockdown response. Less extreme than Canada, say, because many Republican States were not onside with the lock-downs. Lockdown-Lite, if you will.
Did the lockdowns work? Did they prevent people from dying of COVID? Did the lockdowns save lives? Three years into the pandemic we can give a definitive answer to those questions.
First, lets look at COVID deaths, using OECD data:
The US had a higher COVID death rate than Sweden in all three years. Overall, the death rate from COVID in the US was 53% higher than Sweden. So, no, lockdowns did not reduce COVID deaths in the USA.
Now let’s consider the second, more important question: Did the lockdowns save lives?
In normal times, overall death rates are remarkably stable from one year to the next, rising or falling only a few percentage points, mostly depending on whether the winter flu season is severe or mild.
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 deaths in all the OECD countries: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676.
It’s easy to modify the OECD data to show particular countries and/or age cohorts. We can use this data to compare the overall public health outcome of Sweden’s traditional approach versus America’s lockdown-based model.
The OECD data let’s s look at excess deaths in three separate age groups: Under age 44, 45to 64, and over age 65.
Over the full three years from 2020 to 2022, these are the totals:
The first thing to notice is that the number of excess deaths in the Under 45 age group in Sweden is negative. That means, over the full three years of the COVID pandemic slightly fewer young Swedes died than normal.
In the US, by contrast, 174,672 more young people than normal died over the same three years - more than 29% above normal. That’s a massive increase. What killed all those young people?
We also see that slightly fewer middle-aged Swedes died than normal during the pandemic. Yet 314,081 middle-aged Americans died in excess of normal during the period.
One of the arguments given to justify society-wide lock-downs, was that we could better protect the old and vulnerable. The lockdowns would supposedly keep Granny from dying. Yet, when we look at the table above, we see that the rate of excess deaths among seniors in Sweden was less than one-quarter of what it was in the US. (4.5% vs 20.4%) If the goal of the lockdowns was to prevent seniors from dying, they failed spectacularly.
Looking at the entire population, the picture is no happier:
Sweden’s excess deaths were only 3.3 percent above normal in the last three years. That’s remarkably low, the equivalent of what would be expected if Sweden had had one bad season of ordinary flu sometime during the past three years.
Americans were told that it was necessary and responsible to obey all those strict lock-down rules, or countless thousands would die. What actually happened?
When we compare Sweden with America’s COVID panic, the differences in outcomes is quite stark. The US suffered a rate of excess deaths between 2020 and 2022 more than six times that of Sweden. (21.0% vs 3.3%) It was the US, not lockdown-free Sweden, which saw an unprecedented rise in the number of excess deaths over the past three years.
If America had had the same rate of excess deaths as lockdown-free Sweden had over the past three years, 1,489,000 fewer Americans would have died.
What part did COVID Deaths play in the Excess Death totals?
Sweden’s excess deaths are less than half of the number of COVID deaths. (8,714 vs 22,411) This is not a surprising outcome. Many of the old and frail who died, died with COVID rather than from COVID. In addition, COVID essentially replaced the seasonal flu for the better part of three years; those old people who would normally have died of the flu, died of COVID instead.
America’s result, on the other hand, is shocking. America had 61% more excess deaths than COVID deaths. (1,766,764 vs 1,094,782) It’s as though America was hit by a second pandemic, a stealth pandemic that killed 671,000 Americans.
The big chunk of the huge number of Americans dying in excess of normal over the past three years did not die of COVID.
What killed all those people? How many of those deaths were stress-related? How many were deaths of despair? How many came as a result of delayed diagnoses for cancer or heart disease?
I know that it is disturbing to think that the lockdowns stole far more lives than they saved, but how else can we explain what happened?
If lockdowns weren’t responsible for the unprecedented surge in American deaths that started three years ago, what was? What other change in the US can we point to that would have had as large and sudden an impact on America’s non-COVID death rates?
What other difference between the US and Sweden could begin to explain the six-fold difference between excess mortality rates in the US and Sweden? (A difference that emerged suddenly in 2020!)
A great many Americans would like nothing better than to forget the COVID pandemic now that its over. But it is crucially important to understand what this data is telling us - not because of the past, but because of what might happen in the future.
There are probably millions of Americans who still believe that the lockdowns, though difficult, were necessary, and saved lives. If a deadly new variant of COVID were to emerge tomorrow, we can guess that most of those people would grudgingly accept a new round of lockdowns. Some would even clamor for new lockdowns.
Americans need to understand that the sacrifices they made - living in something akin to solitary confinement for extended periods of time - did not have the desired result. They need to understand that the end result of all that social isolation, all those small business failures, all those developmental delays in children, all that huge increase in our collective indebtedness, was that hundreds of thousands more Americans died than if America had kept its cool.
The more Americans understand that, the less willing they will be to allow their Government to succumb to panic a second time.
Once was more than enough for lockdowns. If you want to be sure they don’t happen again, it’s probably worth doing what you can to get the people in your circle to understand the sad reality that COVID lockdowns were a public health disaster.
Notes and Sources:
The OECD website again is: https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=104676
The same website tracks COVID deaths.
If you email me at bruceohara@substack.comI will send you an excel file of data downloaded from the OECD via 27 separate queries. You can check the formulas I used to total weekly data for each year. I calculated expected deaths by subtracting excess deaths from actual deaths. Expected deaths were then used to calculate the percent of excess deaths for each year. Again, feel free to check the formulas in the spreadsheet.
American death certificates are all filed electronically and list cause(s) of death. It would take the numbers geeks at the CDC a few days to determine in detail which specific causes of death were elevated over the past three years, if the US Government really wanted to know.
A detailed analysis who died in excess of normal over the past three years, and why, would be helpful at teasing out secondary issues. If certain respiratory problems increased, did long-term mask use play a part in that? If certain cancers increased, are there toxicity issues with common antiseptics that need to be addressed? If myocarditis and stroke deaths increased among young people, were vaccine side-effects responsible?
Sweden had almost the same rate of vaccination as the US, using the same types of vaccines, so it is unlikely that vaccine side-effects played a significant part in differences between Swedish and Canadian excess deaths over the past three years.
Finally, there will undoubtedly be nay-sayers who will try to ya-but the OECD data presented here. Ya-but Sweden may have had a different demographic profile than the US. Ya-but Sweden could have had a couple of bad flu years prior to the pandemic, which would have artificially inflated their expected mortality stats. Ya-but Sweden may have had a lower rate of comorbidities than the US.
If the US had had a rate of excess deaths 20% higher than Sweden, perhaps even 40% higher, those factors could possibly have been significant in explaining the difference in excess mortality outcomes between the two countries.
But when America’s rate of excess deaths was 636% that of Sweden, none of those factors would significantly change the outcome. To pretend otherwise is simply grasping at straws to avoid facing the sad truth: The OECD evidence strongly suggests that America’s COVID lockdowns were a counterproductive intervention.