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- The head of Stockholm’s health service has asked the government for help as hospitals in the Swedish capital fill up with COVID-19 patients amid a new wave of infections.
- Bjorn Eriksson, director of health care for the Stockholm region, said Wednesday that intensive care units in the region were nearly full of coronavirus patients and called for additional nurses and hospital staff.
- “We need help,” he told a news conference.
- Sweden has pulled out of its no-block stance as the government struggles to stop an alarming rise in the number of coronavirus infections and deaths.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
The head of the health service in Sweden’s capital Stockholm has asked the government for help as the city’s hospitals fill up with COVID-19 patients amid a new wave of infections.
Bjorn Eriksson, health care director for the Stockholm region, said Wednesday that intensive care units in the region were nearly full of coronavirus patients and called on the government to send in additional nurses and hospital staff to deal with the number of patients. with Covid, according to Reuters. report.
“We need help,” he told a news conference, according to Reuters, noting that 83 patients were in intensive care beds. “That more or less corresponds to all the intensive care beds we normally have.”
Sweden was the only one to pursue a no-block strategy early in the pandemic, relying instead on a more relaxed approach that relied on voluntary social distancing measures.
However, since then, the country has recorded 7,200 Covid-related deaths as of Dec. 8, according to the World Health Organization, meaning it has one of the highest per capita death rates in the world.
Anders Tegnell, the chief epidemiologist who is credited with being the architect of the no-lock policy, had predicted earlier this year that Sweden would be spared a second wave of Covid due to high levels of immunity in the general population, but he admitted last month that the country was experiencing a further increase in cases.
Tegnell has been heavily criticized for a policy that has coincided with a death rate many times higher than that of neighboring countries, including Norway.
Sweden has begun to gradually withdraw from its no-lock stance in recent months as the government struggles to stem an alarming rise in the number of coronavirus infections.
In November, the government banned the sale of alcohol after 10 p.m. and banned public gatherings of more than 8 people. Last week, Stefan Lofven, the prime minister, said secondary schools would close for the remainder of the term.
Tegnell in August criticized countries such as the UK and Norway for reintroducing lockdown measures, saying it would be “really bad for confidence” to do so.
“Lifting and closing things is really bad for confidence and it will also have a lot more negative effects than holding some kind of level of measures all the time,” he told the Observer newspaper. “Opening and closing schools, for example, would be disastrous.”
