# Sweden’s excess mortality in 2020–2022 and reporting in the media

## TL;DR

This paper examines Sweden's excess mortality during 2020–2022 and critiques media reporting on its comparison with other countries.

## Contribution

The study highlights the importance of considering the distribution of excess mortality over time and criticizes one-sided media reporting.

## Key findings

- Sweden had higher total excess mortality than Norway during 2020–2022.
- The distribution of excess mortality varied significantly between the two countries across years.
- Media reporting may overlook important nuances in mortality data.

## Abstract

The aim was to scrutinize the report in March 2023 that Sweden’s excess mortality was lowest in 2020–2022 compared with other European Union and Nordic countries, a report that received great national and international attention.

Comparison of excess mortality in Sweden and Norway.

Excess mortality for 2020–2022 was calculated for Sweden and Norway, the country with per-capita excess mortality closest to Sweden’s, compared with the average mortality for 2017–2019 in the respective country, following the definitions by Statistics Sweden reported in a daily newspaper.

Excess mortality is a measure with low misclassification compared with other pandemic outcome measures. Following the definitions, total excess mortality for the years 2020–2022 was 11,897 individuals in Sweden and 6089 in Norway. However, the distributions of excess mortality across the 3 years strongly differed. In Sweden, 60% of excess mortality was observed in 2020, 8% in 2021 and 32% in 2022. In sharp contrast, 0% of excess mortality was observed in Norway in 2020, 20% in 2021 and 80% in 2022. If the relative distribution of excess mortality in Sweden had been the same as in Norway in 2020–2022, approximately 7000 individuals who died in 2020 would instead have died as excess mortality in 2022, saving approximately 14,000 person-years in Sweden.

The report disregards residual confounding due to the broad definition of the period 2020–2022. Mass media should avoid one-sided reporting.