As of January 6, 2021, a total of 4,275 coronavirus (COVID-19) patients have been hospitalized in intensive care in Sweden. The number of male patients was 3,059, while the number of female patients in intensive care due to the virus was 1,216. The number of new patients in intensive care with confirmed coronavirus infection peaked in April. After a period of relatively scarce admissions, intensive care units saw a rise in admissions around October. On January 6, 2021 for instance, eight patients were transferred to intensive care in Sweden.

The first case of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in Sweden was confirmed on February 4, 2020. The number of cases has since risen to a total of 482,284. For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Facts and Figures page.

Feel free to upvote if you find interesting or useful! I'd also love to hear feedback or answer any questions!

9th November 2020

Context

With European governments struggling with a 'second-wave' of rising cases, hospitalizations and deaths resulting from the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19), I wanted to make a comparative analysis between the data coming out of major European nations since the start of the pandemic.

It has been well publicized that Sweden has taken a different approach to most Western European nations when it comes to public policy regarding COVID-19. This has drawn significant attention from across the world and so, allied to the fact that Sweden publishes it's data in a clear and understandable way that is easy to access, it seemed like a good place to start.

In time, I hope to construct other European national datasets for direct comparison - probably starting with my own country, the United Kingdom.

I also should say I am not an Epidemiologist, Sociologist or even a Data Scientist. I am actually a Mechanical Engineer! The objective here is to improve my data science skills and maybe provide some useful data to the wider community.

Acknowledgements

This data was obtained from the Official Swedish COVID-19 Public Health Agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten) website: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/09f821667ce64bf7be6f9f87457ed9aa/page/page_0/

The notebook used to obtained is public and can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/vascodegama/sweden-covid-19-data-scrape

Updates

It is my understanding that the weekly data is published by the Swedish Health Agency every 2pm (CET) on a Thursday so the initial aim is to update the whole dataset each Friday.

Any questions, comments or suggestions are most welcome! I am open to requests and collaborations! Stay Safe!

AimsTo develop a disease risk score for COVID-19-related hospitalization and mortality in Sweden and externally validate it in Norway.MethodWe employed linked data from the national health registries of Sweden and Norway to conduct our study. We focused on individuals in Sweden with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection through RT-PCR testing up to August 2022 as our study cohort. Within this group, we identified hospitalized cases as those who were admitted to the hospital within 14 days of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and matched them with five controls from the same cohort who were not hospitalized due to SARS-CoV-2. Additionally, we identified individuals who died within 30 days after being hospitalized for COVID-19. To develop our disease risk scores, we considered various factors, including demographics, infectious, somatic, and mental health conditions, recorded diagnoses, and pharmacological treatments. We also conducted age-specific analyses and assessed model performance through 5-fold cross-validation. Finally, we performed external validation using data from the Norwegian population with COVID-19 up to December 2021.ResultsDuring the study period, a total of 124,560 individuals in Sweden were hospitalized, and 15,877 individuals died within 30 days following COVID-19 hospitalization. Disease risk scores for both hospitalization and mortality demonstrated predictive capabilities with ROC-AUC values of 0.70 and 0.72, respectively, across the entire study period. Notably, these scores exhibited a positive correlation with the likelihood of hospitalization or death. In the external validation using data from the Norwegian COVID-19 population (consisting of 53,744 individuals), the disease risk score predicted hospitalization with an AUC of 0.47 and death with an AUC of 0.74.ConclusionThe disease risk score showed moderately good performance to predict COVID-19-related mortality but performed poorly in predicting hospitalization when externally validated.

There is limited data on whether SARS-CoV-2 infections will result in increased long-term use of general healthcare, potentially impacting healthcare systems and management. Exploring this, we investigated the healthcare use of individuals with a SARS-CoV-2 infection in 2020 over a period of two years, using comprehensive medical records. We followed a cohort of 365,354 individuals in Stockholm, Sweden, who had been tested with SARS-CoV-2 serology in 2020, for healthcare use during 2021/22. SARS-CoV-2 seropositive and seronegative individuals were matched 1:1 on age, sex, 2019 healthcare use, and date of last serology, and compared on healthcare use during 2021/22 using registry linkages. Seropositive individuals were stratified on hospitalization for COVID-19 in 2020. Individuals were compared for total healthcare use, measured as incidence rate rations (IRR), and healthcare type usage-or-not per month, measured as a difference-in-differences regression. There were 272,918 seronegative and 73,814 seropositive subjects. Incidence rate ratios (IRRs) for primary healthcare use were 1.0, 1.16, and 0.98, for all, only hospitalized, and only non-hospitalized, seropositive individuals respectively. For outpatient specialist care IRRs were 0.96, 1.31, and 0.93. For inpatient care IRRs were 0.98, 1.19, and 0.95. Healthcare type usage-or-not per month showed no substantial differences, ranging from 0.01 to -0.01 in deviation. Increased healthcare use during follow-up was restricted to the seropositive individuals hospitalized for COVID-19 in 2020. There was no increase in healthcare use in the overall population from SARS-CoV-2 infections during 2020, suggesting there is no apparent need to adapt healthcare systems at scale for the COVID-19 aftermath.

ObjectiveTo analyse if the health progression of geriatric Covid-19 survivors three months after an acute Covid-19 infection was worse than in other geriatric patients. Specifically, we wanted to see if we could see distinct health profiles in the flow of re-admitted Covid-19 patients compared to re-admitted non-Covid-19 controls.DesignMatched cohort study.Setting and participantsElectronic medical records of geriatric patients hospitalised in geriatric clinics in Stockholm, Sweden, between March 2020 and January 2022. Patients readmitted three months after initial admission were selected for the analysis and Covid-19 survivors (n = 895) were compared to age-sex-Charlson comorbidity index (CCI)-matched non-Covid-19 controls (n = 2685).MethodsWe assessed using binary logistic and Cox regression if a previous Covid-19 infection could be a risk factor for worse health progression indicated by the CCI, hospital frailty risk score (HFRS), mortality and specific comorbidities.ResultsThe patients were mostly older than 75 years and, already at baseline, had typically multiple comorbidities. The Covid-19 patients with readmission had mostly had their acute-phase infection in the 1st or 2nd pandemic waves before the vaccinations. The Covid-19 patients did not have worse health after three months compared to the matched controls according to the CCI (odds ratio, OR[95% confidence interval, CI] = 1.12[0.94–1.34]), HFRS (OR[95%CI] = 1.05[0.87–1.26]), 6-months (hazard ratio, HR[95%CI] = 1.04[0.70–1.52]) and 1-year-mortality risk (HR[95%CI] = 0.89[0.71–1.10]), adjusted for age, sex and health at baseline (the CCI and HFRS).Conclusions and implicationsThe overall health progression of re-hospitalized geriatric Covid-19 survivors did not differ dramatically from other re-hospitalized geriatric patients with similar age, sex and health at baseline. Our results emphasize that Covid-19 was especially detrimental for geriatric patients in the acute-phase, but not in the later phase. Further studies including post-vaccination samples are needed.

VE against COVID-19 hospitalisation from 7 days onwards after a second dose of vaccine as compared to never vaccinated individuals from 1 January 2022 until 5 June 2022, and by time since vaccination and subgroups.

Characteristics of the Covid-19 3-months survivors and matched control patients in the main analysis.

Risk of hospitalisation for any cause and for 30 selected diagnoses in vaccinated individuals vaccinated compared to never vaccinated individuals.

Baseline characteristics of the individuals at date of the first dose of vaccine and in never vaccinated individuals.

VE against SARS-CoV-2 infection of any severity from 7 days onwards after a second dose of vaccine as compared to never vaccinated individuals from 1 January 2022 until 28 February 2022, and by baseline date.