I would expect that the really heavy load on the Swedish health care system is dominated by the number of coronavirus patients needing intensive care places. Of course any patient who needs hospitalization and isolation also raises the load. The number of tests to be carried out places a load on the labs and the health care system in general but probably not specifically on hospitals.
Maybe I am just an optimist and it is probably too early to be sure, but the daily number of cases needing intensive care has dropped over the last few days. At the time of writing there are a total of 310 Covid-19 patients in intensive care. The daily new cases for intensive care reached 43 and 42 respectively on 23rd and 24th March. However, there has been a drop in new cases since then.
Source: Swedish Intensive Care Register
The age and gender distribution of the 310 intensive care cases (as of 28th March) show a predominance of men and over 50% between the ages of 50 and 70. Those over 70 account for 28% of intensive care cases. It seems a relative under-representation which, in turn, suggests some success with the voluntary social distancing.
78% of those in intensive care are people with some “risk” condition (chronic heart-lung conditions, chronic liver-kidney conditions, hypertension, diabetes, ……)
It is far too early to draw any clear conclusions but possibly Sweden has yet to see any wave of Phase 3 “community transmission” of the virus.
My guess is that after 3 weeks of a voluntary lock-down, it will be time to start allowing manufacturing to restart, but that service businesses with high levels of customer contact will need another 3 weeks after that. The risk groups will probably need to practice social distancing for 2 – 3 months.
Tags: coronavirus, covid-19
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