| Session | ||
Keynote 4: How Covid Pandemic Affected Mortality Rates in Nordic Countries and Germany?
| ||
| Presentations | ||
Keynote 4: How Covid Pandemic Affected Mortality Rates in Nordic Countries and Germany? THL Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Finland Globally WHO has reported 774 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections and 7 million deaths with uneven distribution of disease burden between the WHO Regions. As for December 2023, the Nordic countries reported 9.4 million cases (34/100 inhabitants), which is less than in Germany (38.4 million, 46/100). According to WHO, there were 51 500 COVID-19 deaths in the Nordic countries (188/100 000) and 175 000 (210/100 000) in Germany in 2020-2023. The Nordic average, however, hides a five-fold difference between Iceland (51/100 000) and Sweden (249/100 000). Measuring COVID-19 mortality is difficult, since countries have had different practices how to gather information on deaths related to COVID-19. Originally WHO recommended countries to report all deaths within 30 days of confirmed infections (deaths with COVID-19). Increasingly, countries report deaths directly or indirectly caused by COVID-19. International statistics is a mixture of these measurements, which hampers their comparability. | ||