Sebastian Rushworth

How dangerous is Covid? A Swedish doctor’s perspective

A doctor in a Swedish ICU (photo: Getty)

I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, and on living as a citizen in Sweden. As many people know, Sweden is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed attitude towards the Covid pandemic. Unlike other countries, Sweden never went into complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continued to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public.

Covid hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney stones, the normal things you see in the emergency room. The next day all those patients were gone and the only thing coming into the hospital was Covid. Practically everyone who was tested had Covid, regardless of their presenting symptoms. People came in with a nosebleed and they had Covid. They came in with stomach pain and they had Covid.

Then, after a few months, all the Covid patients disappeared. It is now four months since the start of the pandemic, and I haven’t seen a single Covid patient in over a month. When I do test someone because they have a cough or a fever, the test invariably comes back negative. At the peak three months back, a hundred people were dying a day of Covid in Sweden, a country with a population of ten million. We are now down to around five people dying per day in the whole country, and that number continues to drop. Since people generally die around three weeks after infection, that suggests virtually no one is now being infected. If we assume around 0.5 per cent of those infected die (which I think is very generous, more on that later) that means three weeks back 1,000 people were getting infected per day in the whole country, which works out to a daily risk per person of getting infected of 1 in 10,000.

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Written by
Sebastian Rushworth
Sebastian Rushworth is a junior doctor in Stockholm, who studied medicine at the Karolinska Institute. This article originally appeared on his personal website.

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