Use of care and mortality due to corona in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Estonia; data from yesterday 12.5.

Read the whole thread. (English)

Fig 1a-b. Number of persons in intensive and hospital care per day. 1/x

Fig 2a-c. Number of deaths per day (moving average) and cumulative mortality. 2/x

Fig 3a-c. Geographical differences within Finland: Nr of persons in care/day and nr daily verified diagnoses by the five “specialised medical care regions”. Might be of interest to other countries to understand the spread btw the capital area (Helsinki) vs rest. 3/x

Fig 4a-c: Apple’s Maps-app, mobility index; routing requests for transit, driving and walking in Helsinki, Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen (base 100 at 13.1.2020). 4/x
https://www.apple.com/covid19/mobility

Overall trends stable or declining everywhere. In Finland, some positive changes now also in the capital area Helsinki.
The changing trend in Sweden more pronounced, both mortality and intensive care declining markedly.
Iceland, just one person in hospital anymore. 5/x

The mobility data indicates rather homogenous increases in all capital areas. Sweden is (to me) surprisingly similar with the other countries in these.

(Forgot to mention: Estonia updated all their data on mortality during the weekend; but no changes in the overall picture.) 6/x

Yesterday, number of papers in Finland reported an “analysis” of countries as “winning”, “nearly there”, “need action”.

This was based on poor data, poor analysis, and oversimplified message; not useful (unless it fits your purposes; cherry picking). 7/x

I will not link to it as I think it was utter nonsense.

Good example of “scientific populism” discussed earlier (read the following thread carefully): 8/x https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1255436113952542720

Term “lock-down” not very clear; covers wide range of levels of activities.
I had not understood how “locked down” some countries are; “opening” will have very different meanings for different countries.
(I anticipate some misunderstandings stemming from this as well). 9/x

The usuals: While comparisons about the *levels between countries* with this kind of data is difficult, I do think these give a rough idea about the *within country changes*, and differences in *when* changes happen in different countries. 10/x

To be clear: I work at THL but my work not related to corona (dementia/diabetes); everything here my own opinions.

All data here from public sources; also the Finnish data. 

I’m not an expert on infectious disease epidemiology. 11/11