Mortality of the COVID-19 Outbreak in Sweden in Relation to Previous Severe Disease Outbreaks
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
Influenza viruses have caused disease outbreaks in human societies for a long time. Influenza often has rapid onset and relatively short duration, both in the individual and in the population. The case fatality rate varies for different strains of the virus, as do the effects on total mortality. Outbreaks related to coronavirus infections have recently become a global concern but much less is known about the dynamics of these outbreaks and their effects on mortality. In this work, disease outbreaks in Sweden, in the time period of 1860–2020, are characterized and compared to the currently ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. The focus is on outbreaks with a sharp increase in all-cause mortality. Outbreak onset is defined as the time point when death counts start to increase consistently for a period of at least 10 days. The duration of the outbreak is defined as the time period in which mortality rates are elevated. Excess mortality is estimated by standard methods. In total there were 15 outbreaks detected in the time period, the first 14 were likely caused by influenza virus infections, the last by SARS-CoV-2. The mortality dynamics of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak is shown to be similar to outbreaks due to influenza virus, and in terms of the number of excess deaths, it is the worst outbreak in Sweden since the “Spanish flu” of 1918–1919.
Article activity feed
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.22.20110320: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It should be emphasized that the results obtained with respect to excess mortality are not very sensitive to the exact delimitation of the outbreak: when the observed death counts return to the expected counts, the contribution to the excess mortality is minor. Of the eleven outbreaks that were detected in the 20th century the five first were the most severe in terms of cases per 100,000 population, and they all occurred before 1932. …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.22.20110320: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It should be emphasized that the results obtained with respect to excess mortality are not very sensitive to the exact delimitation of the outbreak: when the observed death counts return to the expected counts, the contribution to the excess mortality is minor. Of the eleven outbreaks that were detected in the 20th century the five first were the most severe in terms of cases per 100,000 population, and they all occurred before 1932. This decrease in severity likely has several causes, including better treatment of those infected as well as the development of influenza vaccines. It is interesting to note that the amplitude of the overall seasonality of deaths decreased under the same time period (Ledberg 2020), supporting the notion that infectious diseases are one main driver of the seasonal fluctuations in mortality (Reichert et al. 2004). The SARS-CoV-2-related outbreak in 2020 seems to be an exception from this trend of decreasing severity. In terms of absolute number of excess deaths this outbreak is the most severe since the Spanish flu in 1918-1919. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, and the final number of excess deaths will likely be much higher than the 5200 reported here.
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
-
-
-
-