More ppl die of hypothermia in Australia than Sweden. It all comes down to basic living standards

I found this snippet shocking so I decided to look a bit further. The ABC has a fact check about it. And it’s not quite that simple.

While the Lancet study supports Mr Kelly’s claim that more Australians than Swedes die in cold weather, pinning these deaths on one contributing factor isn’t so simple.

Professor Andrew Wilson, Director of the Menzies Centre for Health Policy, points out that if more people are exposed to risks (e.g. cold temperatures) there will be more deaths.

”Most of the deaths occur among those at moderate risk because there are a lot more people with these risk exposures,” he said.

Professor Alan Lopez, Director of the Global Burden of Disease Group with Melbourne University’s School of Population and Global Health, told Fact Check: “It is also not clear what fraction of these deaths were among people who were otherwise at high risk from confounding exposures such as tobacco, existing heart/respiratory illness and for whom the cold was an aggravating, rather than causal factor.”

He added: “Many of those deaths attributed to cold would have been old people who might have died soon in any case. So the fraction of potential years of life lost due to temperature might have been much less than 7 per cent.”