Fig. 1.

Impact of COVID-19 outbreak on mortality and health. Shown is weekly excess mortality in Denmark, Sweden, and Italy for weeks 2 through 15 in 2020 (Top) and excess Google searches for symptoms of illness and sickness (Bottom) for the same period. Excess mortality is calculated based on daily deaths data from Statistics Denmark (Denmark), Statistics Sweden (Sweden), and the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Italy). Deaths data for Denmark and Sweden cover the whole population, whereas the Italian data are available for approximately half of all communes. Excess mortality is calculated as the percentage difference between the total number of deaths from all causes in a week in 2020 and the average number of total deaths in that week, 2015 to 2019. Excess Google searches are calculated based on data from Google Trends of weekly indexes of search intensity for the terms “cough” (Denmark, “hoste”; Sweden, “hosta”; Italy, “tosse”), “fever” (Denmark, “feber”; Sweden, “feber”; Italy, “febbre”), and “sick” (Denmark, “syg”; Sweden, “sjuk”; Italy, “malato”). Individual indexes for each search term are summed to create a composite index of all terms. Excess Google searches are then calculated in the same way as for excess mortality.