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People enjoy warm spring weather during the coronavirus outbreak in Stockholm, Sweden, on April 22, 2020.
- Swedish health officials are ready to unveil strict new rules on the coronavirus for local regions to enforce.
- The country chose not to take lockdown measures in response to the first wave of the pandemic.
- However, the increasing number of cases in areas like the cities of Stockholm and Uppsala has prompted a rethink.
- Authorities in the worst affected areas are expected to have the power to strongly advise people to avoid public transport, crowded public places and contact with the vulnerable and the elderly.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Sweden will move away from its initial coronavirus strategy of opting out of lockdown measures and instead adopt the restrictive measures taken by most of its neighbors amid the growing number of cases in the country.
Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, will meet with local health officials next week to discuss what measures to implement in response to the outbreaks in the capital Stockholm and the nearby city of Uppsala, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
Unlike its Nordic neighbors and most other countries, Sweden did not implement full lockdown measures in response to the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year.
Instead, the government led by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven allowed shops, bars and restaurants to remain mostly open and students to attend school, to avoid a second sharp spike in cases in late 2020.
Sweden has had a much higher death rate per population than any of its neighbors since adopting this strategy. It had recorded 5,918 deaths as of Sunday, compared to 278 in Norway and 346 in Finland.
Dr Joacim Rocklov from Umea University told The Telegraph newspaper that, after being an outlier earlier in the year, Sweden was shifting to a strategy closer to those adopted by most other governments.
It will give local authorities the power to strongly advise people to avoid crowded public places like shopping malls, museums, gyms, concerts, and sports games. Swedes can also be asked to avoid public transport and contact with the elderly and vulnerable.
“What has happened in the last two weeks is a move towards a model similar to what has been used in Norway and many other countries,” he said. “It is very obvious that it is a new strategy, but even so, the newspapers report on ‘the Swedish strategy’ as if it were fixed in March.”
Johan Nojd, who heads Uppsala’s infectious diseases department, suggested he would be prepared to introduce tougher restrictions on the city, such as new rules for hospitality, if the number of cases in the city continued to grow.
“Maybe tomorrow we will have several talking about concerts or restaurants and then perhaps one can say, ‘In Uppsala now for two or three weeks it is the advice of the Public Health Agency not to sit in restaurants late at night,'” he said. to the newspaper. .
However, unlike in other countries, there will be no fines or legal consequences for people who decide not to follow any new advice. Bitte Brastad, legal director of the Swedish public health agency, said the rules were “something between regulations and recommendations.”
Tegnell said this week that the level of immunity in Swedish cities was not as high as health officials had recently believed.
“I think the obvious conclusion is that the level of immunity in those cities is not as high as ours, as some people may have believed,” he said.
“I think what we’re seeing is largely a consequence of the very heterogeneous spread that this disease has, which means that even if you feel like there have been a lot of cases in some big cities, there are still large groups of people who haven’t yet they have been affected. “
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