> Which is why good analysis looks at excess deaths (ie, compared to the average over the last few years).
The excess mortality graph you link to only goes back 19 months, not a few years.
Here's an article which [0] references a paper which says that over the past 4 years there's no difference between all cause mortality in Sweden and Norway:
> "Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic," emphasize study authors in this medRxiv paper.
It may be that Sweden had more older people than Norway at the beginning of the pandemic, i.e. a more vulnerable population. Also they admitted to doing a poor job early on in nursing homes.
I think you are simplifying this too much, insisting that it is valid to come to a conclusion on lockdowns based on a comparison of Sweden to two nearby countries. That doesn't exactly explain why a bunch of countries like the U.K., France, Spain, and Portugal that did lockdown had more per-capita deaths than Sweden. It ends up looking like you cherry picked your data, ignoring contradictory data, and not really explaining anything.
About Dr. Bhatt, from the same article you quoted:
> Samir Bhatt, professor of Public Health at the University of Copenhagen, and one of the team at Imperial College who pushed the UK's lockdown strategy.
It's too bad nobody asked him why the the U.K. with lockdowns had more deaths that Sweden without lockdowns.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201116/Study-compares-de...