Newly released emails show Sweden’s top epidemiologist brainstorming ways “herd immunity” could be achieved to curb the spread of COVID-19, an approach that this week marked a failure by one academic study.
While governments around the world have used a variety of tactics in their efforts to stop the new coronavirus from destroying populations, Sweden’s Sweden epidemiologist Anders Tegnell advocated a “common sense” strategy over forced lockdowns.
Swedish citizens were asked to voluntarily adhere to social distance and work house rules, a tactic that presumably led to higher rates of infection, hospitalization and death than some of the neighbors – including Norway, Denmark and Finland.
While the strategy has been widely discussed, emails now show how Tegnell, who is the Swedish equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci, initially tried to formulate his approach for “herd immunity”, that is, when up to 70 percent of the population or a vaccine got infected, affecting the rate of virus spread.
Get your unlimited Newsweek trial>
The e-mail correspondence shows the conversations between Tegnell and his predecessor Johan Giesecke, some dating from March this year, reported The Local.se.
They were released following requests for Multiple Freedom of Information (FoI) submitted by a Swedish freelance journalist named Emanuel Karlsten.
“I believe [that] the virus will soar like a storm over Sweden and infect everyone in one to two months, “Giesecke, who was the state epidemiologist in Sweden between 1995 and 2005, predicted earlier this year, the reports show.
“I believe that thousands have already been infected in Sweden … it will all come to an end if so many are infected and therefore become immune that the virus has nowhere else to go (so-called herd immunity),” read the email, dated March 13. .
Get your unlimited Newsweek trial>
In another email of the same month, it was revealed that Tegnell was brainstorming ways to show the public how herd immunity could work, reported The Local.se.
“Certainly it should be the case that as immunity increases in the population, the rate of spread of the disease decreases,” Tegnell wrote in an email to Giesecke on March 19 this year. “So it’s obviously not the case that when you reach culture immunity, everything stops all of a sudden. Is there a way to model how the spread stops?”
Four months later, the spread has not stopped, but it seems to be slowing down. There have been more than 83,000 COVID-19 cases in Sweden, and more than 5,700 deaths.
When it appeared, COVID-19 was unknown, meaning no one had immunity. It remains unclear if those who contract it will be protected against a second infection.
As noted by the BBC, in a country of around 10 million people, statistics indicate that the country has one of the highest causes of death (compared to the population) in Europe, despite bans on meetings and shifting to table service in bars and restaurants .
In June, Tegnell admitted that too many citizens had died. “If we meet the same disease again … I think we would arrange to do something between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world did,” he told the BBC.
Not only has COVID-19 not come to a standstill, but herd immunity is still “nowhere in sight”, according to a Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine study published Tuesday.
“It is clear that not only are the rates of viral infection, hospitalization and mortality (per million population) much higher than those seen in neighboring Scandinavian countries, but also that the time course of the epidemic in Sweden is different, with persistent persistence. of higher infection and mortality (because the one is unforgettably linked to the other) far above the few critical period of weeks seen in Denmark, Finland and Norway, whose rapid exclusion measures at first seem to have been more in ‘ the limitation of the infection uprising, “the authors wrote in their academic analysis.
In terms of COVID-19-related deaths, Norway, Denmark and Finland are each believed in the hundreds not thousands, current statistics indicate.
While some countries are now moving to loosen lockdown restrictions and approach some degree of normality, the COVID-19 health crisis is still far from over. The US is the least affected nation, with the coronavirus claiming more than 166,000 lives.
JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP / Getty
