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STOCKHOLM • Sweden’s unique strategy for dealing with the coronavirus will ensure that it only has a small second wave of cases, unlike other countries that may be forced to return to the blockade, according to the contentious policy architect.
Anders Tegnell, the Swedish state epidemiologist who devised the non-blocking approach, estimated that 40 percent of people in the capital Stockholm would be immune to Covid-19 by the end of this month, giving the country a advantage against a virus that “we will have to live for a long time”.
“In the fall there will be a second wave. Sweden will have a high level of immunity and the number of cases will probably be quite low,” Tegnell told the Financial Times. “But Finland will have a very low level of immunity. Will it have to go into a complete blockade again?”
Sweden and Mr. Tegnell are under the global spotlight, as their response to the pandemic has made them a global outlier.
Primary and secondary schools, restaurants, cafes and shops are mostly open in Sweden, and health authorities rely on voluntary social distancing and people who choose to work from home. Schools for those over 16 and universities are closed and gatherings of more than 50 people are prohibited, but it remains the most relaxed approach of any country in the European Union.
The death toll from the Swedish virus on Thursday reached 3,040. This is significantly higher than that of neighboring Denmark, Norway and Finland, which have registered fewer than 1,000 among them.
Mr. Tegnell said it would take a year or two to know which strategy had worked best and at what cost to society. He emphasized that Sweden’s approach was to analyze the “general public health issue” where an important consideration was that “people should be able to maintain a reasonably normal life”.
The epidemiologist has become a cult figure in Sweden, with reports of people getting tattoos of him.
Public confidence in Sweden’s public health agency increased during the crisis, which Tegnell attributed in part to his efforts to communicate openly, “answering the same questions hundreds of times.” She said she found the attention itself “quite absurd,” like her daughters “laughing hilariously” about a fashion magazine that discusses her sense of dress.
Mr. Tegnell argued that “nothing (to do with blockages) was scientifically based,” particularly decisions to close schools, because there was no evidence that children were a major cause of transmission.
He believes that European leaders, fearful that their health systems will be overwhelmed, felt they should copy the approach of China, the first country to close due to the disease.
About a quarter of people in Stockholm had the virus earlier this month, according to a mathematical model from the Swedish public health agency, which Tegnell said was part of the reason why the number of cases in the capital had recently fallen. By contrast, tests this week in Norway’s capital Oslo suggested that less than 2 percent of the population had been infected.
But Mr. Tegnell said uncertainty about how long the virus’s immunity would last meant that Sweden was unlikely to achieve “herd immunity,” a level of the disease where so many people are infected, usually about 80 percent, that stops spreading. “I do not believe that we or any country in the world achieve herd immunity in the sense that the disease disappears, because I do not think it is a disease that disappears,” he added.
The hope of many countries is that they can keep the virus at bay until a vaccine is found. But Mr. Tegnell said that, even at best, it would probably take years to develop one, before it could be administered to an entire population.
“It’s a big mistake to sit down and say, ‘We should wait for a vaccine.’ It will take much longer than we think. And in the end, we don’t know how good a vaccine will be. Another reason is to have a sustainable policy in place.”
Sweden’s focus has been to have a strategy that could last for months, if not years, without the need for major changes. That contrasts with almost all other European countries, which are grappling with how to reopen their partnerships without causing an increase in transmission.
This has drawn some criticism from those who say Sweden should do much more to reduce the number of Covid-19 deaths. Per capita death statistics show that Sweden lags behind Britain, Italy, Belgium and Spain at this stage.
One area in which Sweden has done poorly is trying to keep the virus out of care homes. Tegnell, who suggests that the highest infection rate in such households in Sweden is the main reason it has had more deaths than its neighbors, said: “It is something we deeply regret.”
He pointed out that care homes in Sweden, as in the rest of the Nordic region, were for “the very old and the very sick”, since most of the elderly live in their homes, and that “problems of quality “with careful providers, often private companies.
“Unfortunately, those quality problems have shown that the elderly are very vulnerable to infection,” Tegnell said, adding that an investigation had begun.
FINANCIAL TIMES
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