When the National Board of Health analyzes its statistics on the causes of death, they discover more deceased in covid-19 than the Public Health Agency reports. This was stated at Monday's press conference on the pandemic situation in Sweden.

- We find about ten percent more people than has been found so far in the tasks of the Public Health Authority, says Mona Heurgren, Head of Department at the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Ten percent is quite a lot more deaths than the Public Health Authority previously reported. Why are they taller?

- The big difference is that we also have cases that have not been laboratory tested, but where the responsible doctor has documented that there is a patient with covid-19.

Long lag

The National Board of Health and Welfare is responsible for the official statistics on health, care and care and causes of death in Sweden. However, since the causes of death are reported according to specific routines and must be coded according to the World Health Organization WHO's regulations, healthcare has three weeks to submit the cause of death certificate. Therefore, it has been delayed before the figures became available.

Now the authority has started publishing statistics on people who have died of covid-19 on its website. The National Board of Health has now determined the cause of death regarding covid-19 in approximately 1,700 cases, and it is the analysis of these figures that the National Board of Health presented today. About 90 percent of the deceased were over 70; only 1 per cent under 50 years, and half of the deaths have occurred in Stockholm County. Most deceased have one or more known risk factors.

- The analysis shows that there are about ten percent more deaths than the Public Health Authority had registered at the same time. The statistics that the Public Health Authority has so far registered are otherwise very well in agreement on an overall level. By that I mean who is affected, age, sex and underlying illnesses. But we have a certain difference, which is the number of people who die as a result of covid-19 until today, says Mona Heurgren.

Always some difference

Deputy state epidemiologist at the Public Health Agency Anders Wallensten points out that there will always be a certain difference between different registers:

- One way to see the total number of deaths is to then look at the mortality, where you catch cases that may not even have been diagnosed by a doctor. We will have different secure data in different parts of this development.

The important thing, says Wallensten, is to have consistent reporting that can be evaluated continuously over time.