Thread by @MarkkuPeltonen

Use of care and mortality due to corona in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Estonia; data from yesterday 24.4.

Read the whole thread. (English)

Fig 1. Number of persons in intensive care per day. Measures the burden on intensive care capacity. 1/x

Fig 2. Number of persons in hospital care per day. Measures the burden on hospital capacity. 2/x

Fig 3. Mortality per million population. Finlands numbers corrected starting 21.4 as capital area Helsinki is reporting deaths at care homes which were previously missing (read below). 3/x

Fig 4. Mortality per million population on log-scale, by days since 2/million deaths in the country. Finlands numbers corrected starting 21.4 as capital area Helsinki is reporting deaths at care homes which were previously missing (read below). 4/x

Fig 5. Absolute number of deaths by days since 10th death in the country. Finlands numbers corrected starting 21.4 as capital area Helsinki is reporting deaths at care homes which were previously missing (read below). 5/x

Geographical differences within Finland; might be of interest to other countries to understand the spread&trend between the capital area (Helsinki) vs rest.
Fig 6. Nr of persons in intensive care/day by the five “specialised medical care regions”: 6/x

Fig 7. Within Finland: Number of persons in hospital care per day by the five “specialised medical care regions”: 7/x

Finlands mortality numbers being corrected starting 21.4, as capital area Helsinki reported deaths at care homes which were previously missing.

I don’t have exact dates of deaths for the corrected; that is the reason I now only report the most recent number for Fin. 8/x

Antibody testing will be discussed a lot in near future. The aim of these is to identify those who already *have been* infected; compared to diagnostic testing aiming to identify those infected *now*. 9/x

Antibody testing will thus be important additional component to battle the epidemic. In addition, they will help to understand the epidemiology and severity of the disease (which we still don’t understand). 10/x

It comes as no surprise that evaluationg the results of these studies is difficult. All the difficulties in basic epidemiology starting from the sampling and representatives of the study population to accuracy of the tests + new virus 11/x

These will make it difficult to estimate central measures such as case and infection fatality rates. I’ve already seen unfair comparisons such as “infection fatality rates is much higher/lower than what X expected”. 12/x

I will not go into more details, but an excellent starting point on this topic is the Oxfordin CEBM site. Their current estimates for overall case fatality rate is 0.72% and infection fatality rate between 0.1%-0.36%: 13/x
cebm.net/covid-19/globa…

And finally, in reality, the case and infection fatality rates are not universal, but vary between countries/populations; there is no one number to be estimated! 14/x

I use here “corona-related death”; third measure of mortality.

In addition, also “total mortality” or “excess total mortality” measure the burden of disease.

The next post will be on Monday 27.4!

15/15

Ps: In addition to the possible differences in definitions/reporting, there could be many other explanations for the country differences: how the disease started to spread in populations (undetected cases); case-mix; distributions of demographics/comorbidities etc. 1/2

While comparisons about the levels between countries is difficult, I do think that these data give a rough idea about the *within country* changes, and differences in *when* changes happen in different countries. 2/2