Coronavirus: Belgium therefore has extremely high death rates

Still, the list looks different if you consider population figures. Then Belgium is among the most affected countries in the world.

This explains the high death toll in the small central European country.

Among the most affected

In the last 24 hours, 942 new cases of coronavirus have been registered in Belgium. The country now has 30,589 confirmed cases of infection, writes The Brussels Times, which is based on official figures from health authorities.

In Belgium, about 11.5 million people live. The death toll in the country is now 3903, of which 310 have been recorded in the past 24 hours, the newspaper writes.

The death toll puts Belgium in third place worldwide over the number per capita deaths. Only Italy and the United Kingdom have higher numbers.

Also in Belgium, the pressure on the country’s hospital capacity is enormous, and although authorities have recorded a drop in hospital admissions in April, virologist Steven Van Gucht, one of the spokespersons for the Belgian Center for National Crises (NCCN), He said the death toll would likely increase further. next days

Different practices

But although the death toll appears to be worrying in Belgium, and there is little doubt that the country is seriously affected by the pandemic, authorities believe that the situation is not necessarily worse here than other severely affected countries.

Although he emphasized that different countries are at different stages of the pandemic, another NCCN spokesman, Emmanuel André, explained that the number of reported deaths is strongly related to the testing capacity of hospitals.

Another important factor is also how Belgium records crown deaths, André said during a press conference on Friday, according to the Bulletin.

– In Belgium, we want to record all deaths related to the corona virus, and we also include deaths in nursing homes.

According to The Brussels Times, crowned deaths in nursing homes account for almost half of the registered deaths in the country.

Countries like the United Kingdom, meanwhile, do not include deaths outside hospitals in their updates. André believes that countries that count in this way can have a high underreporting of deaths.

This is supported by John Ashton, a professor and former director of health in Cumbria. He warns of big dark figures in the official death toll in Britain, claiming that British authorities “don’t know the whole picture” at all.

It also points to estimates that up to half of the country’s nursing homes have so far been diagnosed with infection, and that death rates here can be high.

– Norway could have had higher numbers

Also in Scandinavia, countries do not use the same method to record coronary deaths.

The FHI daily report shows that Norway has more detected cases of infection per 100,000 population than Sweden, with 121 and 103 respectively, however Sweden has a much higher death rate.

While deaths per million inhabitants in Norway are 19.4, Sweden is up to 88.3. There are between four and five times more.

The difference may be due in part to differences in the registration method, says Svenska Dagbladet.

According to the newspaper, the various regions of Sweden check the lists of people infected with crowns in the Swedish National Register. This means that all those who died and those who tested positive were recorded as coronary deaths.

In Norway, municipalities and hospitals report directly to FHI if a person dies of Covid-19. If a Norwegian infected with the corona virus is considered to die from another cause, it is not certain that the person is registered as a covid-19 death. This is because the cause of death is decided locally.

FHI has even stated to Svenska Dagbladet that Norway could have had a higher death rate if we had used the same registration method as Sweden.

“Norway may have had a higher number of recorded deaths if we count as in Sweden,” Trine Hessevik Paulsen, a doctor at the Institute of Public Health, told Svenska Dagbladet.

Although a change in the registry in Norway could have an impact on death rates in Norway in the long term, Hauge still does not believe that this will make a big difference in Norway’s death rates so far.