This weekend, a specific wording began to circulate in social media and on forums.

This is the following sentence, taken from Figure 4A in the weekly report for week 48, where the Swedish Public Health Agency reports the number of patients admitted to IVA per week, divided into unvaccinated and vaccinated:

"Due to the risk of disclosure of information about an individual, vaccination status is not reported separately when the number of vaccinated is less than three, but is then included in the unvaccinated."

The wording below the table has been included in several previous weekly reports and can also be found under the figure which describes the number of deaths.

But in recent times, the line has been captured by vaccine critics, and interpreted by some as a way for the authority to angle the statistics to the detriment of the unvaccinated.

The text below the figure in the weekly report has since this screenshot been taken corrected by FHM - which writes that the reason for reporting in this way is due to the risk of otherwise revealing individuals' identities.

Photo: Screenshot from folkhälsomyndigheten.se

The public health authority is well aware of the criticism and believes that it is all about a mistake, something the blogger and journalist Emanuel Karlsten was the first to report.

- It was an unfortunate formulation that they went into the bar unvaccinated, says Britta Björkholm, head of the department for infection control and is responsible for the report.

According to Björkholm, the fact that FHM does not report vaccinated people separately when there are less than three is about respect for individuals.

- If there is one or two people in any category, they can not be reported separately because then you can identify the back door who it could be.

A total of 3,759 patients with confirmed covid-19 have been admitted to intensive care between week 1 and week 48 this year, according to statistics from the Swedish Intensive Care Register.

123 were vaccinated, of which 21 of these have thus been reported as unvaccinated in the current figure.

"The numbers are there"

Britta Björkholm is clear that this has not affected or in any way distorted the statistics as it is only an accounting problem.

- In the further analyzes that we do, we of course use the actual vaccination status of the cases, and we also report them together at group level.

The numbers are there and you can find them in several different places, but precisely in this figure, where we land in very small numbers, we can not report them separately per week.

On Tuesday, the Swedish Public Health Agency updated the current weekly report with a longer clarification.

- Now that we have been made aware of the misunderstandings, we will correct it so that it becomes clear and hopefully not misunderstood in the future, says Björkholm.

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This is the infection and IVA situation among vaccinated and unvaccinated people.

Photo: SVT