Did Canada’s COVID Lockdowns Save Lives?
Comparing Canada to lockdown-free Sweden using OECD data
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Sweden did tighten up its approach somewhat in 2021 but then rescinded virtually all of its COVID protocols in early 2022.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.
Canada, by contrast, can serve as a case study on the effects of strict and protracted lockdowns.
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:
Canada had a lower COVID death rate than Sweden in all three years. Overall, the death rate from COVID in Canada was 41% lower than Sweden. So, yes, lockdowns did reduce COVID deaths in Canada.
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 Canada’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 Canada, by contrast, 10,263 more young people than normal died over the same three years - more than 25% 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 9,496 middle-aged Canadians 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-third of what it was in Canada. (4.5% vs 14.9%) 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.
Canadians 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 Canada’s COVID panic, the differences in outcomes is quite stark. Canada suffered a rate of excess deaths between 2020 and 2022 more than four times that of Sweden. (14.3% vs 3.3%) It was Canada, not lockdown-free Sweden, which saw an unprecedented rise in the number of excess deaths over the past three years.
If Canada had had the same rate of excess deaths as lockdown-free Sweden had over the past three years, 91,000 fewer Canadians 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.
Canada’s result, on the other hand, is truly shocking. Canada had more than twice as many excess deaths as COVID deaths. (118,733 vs 48,768) It’s as though Canada was hit by a second pandemic, a stealth pandemic even larger and deadlier than COVID.
The large majority of the huge number of Canadians 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 Canadian deaths that started three years ago, what was? What other change in Canada can we point to that would have had as large and sudden an impact on Canada’s non-COVID death rates?
What other difference between Canada and Sweden could begin to explain the four-fold difference between excess mortality rates here and there? (A difference that emerged suddenly in 2020 and shows up in every age group!)
A great many Canadians 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 Canadians 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 clamour for new lockdowns.
Canadians 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 tens of thousands more Canadians died than if Canada had kept its cool.
The more Canadians understand that, the less willing we will be to allow our 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.com I 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.
With a total of only 48,000 COVID deaths in Canada over the three years in all age groups, it seems a very safe bet that at least 50,000 of the 98,000 seniors who died in excess of normal died of something other than COVID. How many did loneliness and isolation kill?
With Only about 1.2% of those who died of COVID in the under 40 age group, roughly 600 of excess deaths in the under-40 cohort can be blamed on COVID. (48,000 total deaths X 1.2% = 576) How to we explain the other 9,500 excess deaths in this age cohort?
You’ll see on my data spreadsheets I also calculated the rates of excess death per million of population as another way to compare Canada and Sweden, using OECD population data. (Click on ‘Table’ on that page.)
Canada’s death certificates are all filed electronically and list cause(s) of death. It would take the numbers geeks at Statistics Canada a few days to determine in detail which specific causes of death were elevated over the past three years, if the Canadian Government really wanted to know. In January of 2023, the Statscan Daily did take a shot at answering the question of what caused upsurge of the excess deaths in Canada during the COVID pandemic, but was pretty shallow, scattered and sloppy in its approach. A lot more rigor needs to be brought to the issue. That article does suggest that deaths of despair were likely a significant source of the excess mortality observed in young people.
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 Canada, 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 Canada. 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 Canada.
If Canada had had a rate of excess deaths 10% higher than Sweden, perhaps even 20% higher, those factors could possibly have been significant in explaining the difference in excess mortality outcomes between the two countries.
But when Canada’s rate of excess deaths was 430% 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 Canada’s COVID lockdowns were a counterproductive intervention.