The Public Health Agency of Sweden presents daily numbers of deaths
registered from the day before. But did really all those registered really die by corona alone? The answer is no.
According to The Public Health Agency of Sweden, everyone had, however, been diagnosed with Covid-19 in proximity before their death.
It has been a recurrent question for this blog: Have the swedes really died due to covid-19? What happens if someone is dying in cancer but also being diagnosed with Covid-19 — what will the cause of death be? It is a valid question to ask considering how many people that normally die every day in Sweden.
Now the Public Health Agency of Sweden (Folkhälsomyndigheten) provides with clarification regarding this question.
– The numbers of deaths that are presented by The Public Health Agency of Sweden are persons who have received laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 diagnoses in proximity of their deaths, that is, within 30 days from being diagnosed. That means that some people may have died due to unrelated circumstances but also that others may have died later in the course of their disease, though, not counted as due to Covid-19. This way of measuring works well in influenza surveillance as a conservative measure of deceased, says press officer Jon Pelling.
The Public Health Agency of Sweden also looks at a couple of other variables, such as numbers of deaths per week, regardless of the cause of death, and adds it into a model.
– The model gives a calculation of expected deaths for a given season. When the numbers of deaths are way above what is expected it is called excess mortality, says Pelling.
State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said during a press conference last week that there so far had been no excess mortality and that they, for example, now can observe a sharp decline of the influenza, just as I have reported earlier. The Public Health Agency of Sweden publish a weekly report containing information whether there has been an excess mortality or not. Next publication is released on Friday.
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Read the original post in Swedish.
