Thread by @baekdal

There is a really weird thing happening in relation to COVID-19 numbers for Sweden ... where the numbers people are told inside Sweden is massively different than outside of Sweden.

Let me explain:

Inside of Sweden, when you look at what the Swedish press and what the government is saying, they are all reporting numbers based on the official public health agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) in Sweden ... which is here: experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f…

This dashboard is tracking what they call "Total number of laboratory-confirmed cases". And they then break this out into 'cases per day', 'new intensive cases per day', and 'deaths per day.'

So what is the problem with this? Well, compare this to the numbers reported by Sweden to the WHO.

Take deaths per day. The Swedish dashboard reported 6 deaths on June 24, 2020 ... the WHO dashboard (for Sweden), reported 39 deaths on the same day. covid19.who.int/region/euro/co…

It's the same when we look at the number of new cases. Sweden's health agency is reporting that there were 1,610 new cases on June 24, 2020 ... but on the same day, they reported that there were 1,905 cases to the WHO.

Why is the Swedish government giving different numbers?

This has a huge impact on the press. Outside of Sweden, the press is relying on the numbers that Sweden is reporting to them (which are way higher), whereas newspapers inside of Sweden are reporting numbers from Folkhälsomyndigheten (which are much lower).

What's going on here?

To give you an example of this. Here is a news report from DN (one of Sweden's largest newspapers), reporting that the Swedish health authorities are saying that WHO is wrong. And they are saying that the increase in cases is due to more testing.

But when we look this up based on the data that the Swedish government is reporting, this doesn't appear to be the case:

While Sweden is testing more people, it still doesn't really change how they compare themselves with other countries.

And when we look at the total (again, data supplied by Sweden), it clearly doesn't have things under control yet. So the WHO is right...

But again, when you look at the data that the Swedish government it telling its own people, it suddenly look like the virus is no longer causing that many deaths.

As a media analyst, I don't know which data set is the correct one ... but I find this discrepancy really worrying.

Let me give you an example of how crazy this difference is. Looking at the deaths each country reported to the European CDC (total for the past two weeks)
Denmark: 10
Norway: 10
Sweden: 414

Looking at what each country reported to its own people
Denmark: 10
Norway: 9
Sweden: 242

You see what I mean! ... why is there such a gigantic difference between the numbers Sweden is reporting to its own people (and the Swedish press), and the numbers it reports to the WHO and European CDC???!!?

This may explain it... (but it opens up some other questions, and especially questions how we report about this in the press)

https://twitter.com/janlindgren/status/1276414665879412736?s=20