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Photo: Press photo
Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh (S).
The pandemic has shaped 2020, a year with many deaths and reduced social contacts.
– It has been – and is – a difficult year marked by pain, says Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh (S), president of the Malmö municipal council.
For Aftonbladet, it tells about the year of the pandemic in the municipality, missing persons and the challenges before 2021.
– How has your life changed during the year?
– He has changed like everyone else, with a big change both in private life and at work. I am the president of the municipal board and the leader of an organization with 26,000 employees, and I spend a lot of time visiting companies and meeting with employees from different parts of the organization. It has not been physically possible in recent months, but has had to try to find other ways to keep up. Visits to associations and companies have also had to be modified and digitized.
What have you missed the most during the year?
– They are social gatherings, social contacts, what comes up when you meet. In this situation, it is more difficult to network with new people. Social closeness and what comes out when they actually see you is difficult to achieve in digital encounters. So it’s not being able to date people as usual. I miss being close to my parents and other important people with whom contact has been limited, I think that is the case for most of us.
How do you celebrate the New Year this year?
– The new year will be very limited. I’m following the recommendations closely and I’m dating very few at the moment, and that means of course there won’t be any major matches. But the plan is to celebrate with a very close friend.
How would you like to summarize the year?
– It has been, and is, a difficult year marked by pain for many linked to the pandemic and the strong restrictions that really affect the moon for many. There are so many this year who have lost loved ones and who have not been able to meet those who mean so much to them. There are many people who have invested and built their life’s work that they now view with great concern or who have even collapsed, there are many residents of Malmö who have lost their jobs, it is clear that it has affected much of the year and how we work to try to support and improve the situation.
– Although it has been very urgent to manage the pandemic, it has also tried to maintain what is important in the long term. Like school, home construction, and preventive work that creates safety. It’s important to do what you can to keep it so that it doesn’t just stand there when the crisis turns and you’ve lost a year. Although it has been such a difficult year, we have seen continued positive school development, results are increasing, grades are improving. We have worked offensively to ensure that fewer Malmö residents are homeless and we see that the number of homeless people has dropped dramatically. We have seen that we have been able to maintain a high rate of construction, a lot is still being built, there is a great willingness to invest in Malmö and construction is taking place throughout the city. Something that I find very gratifying is the slow cooperation that we have with the police and that we have worked with for many years. We see that serious crime in the city has been rebuffed and some of the efforts that we started a couple of years ago are now starting to have an effect.
Photo: Jesper Berg
“Although it has been very urgent to deal with the pandemic, it has also tried to stick to what is important in the long term,” says Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh (S).
How does the municipality handle the pandemic?
– In the spring, we made sure to manipulate the organization to be robust to deal with the crisis. We saw for a long time that we were four or five weeks behind Stockholm in the spread of the infection and that gave us the opportunity to develop. We get out quickly compared to many municipalities, creating special covid teams and cohort care in which we isolate infected people. We quickly got the organization together and also hired several hundred to maintain a high level of preparation. Initially, the big problem was the availability of protective equipment, where we saw that the whole of Sweden was faced with a seat where protective equipment was lacking to be able to maintain it in the long term, so the larger municipalities joined forces to secure orders for the entire Municipal Sweden.
– In the spring we made up a lot. We got a respite as the pandemic didn’t hit us as hard at first. Now we have a great social diffusion and we see that the pressure on the care and care of the elderly has increased, but it is possible that we already have a more solid organization than many others. In relative terms, we have, perhaps especially compared to Stockholm, which has been hit hard, we have more secure employment, we have more permanent employees and fewer hourly employees in our operations. In general, since we spent the first few weeks putting together a contingency plan, we have managed it relatively well. So we are still in the middle of the crisis and it is too early to draw full conclusions, we will definitely need to strengthen wellness activities here in the future.
– We will start vaccination soon, which hopefully means that the situation will quickly stabilize, but now we see everywhere that it really is going in the wrong direction.
What are the lessons of the pandemic?
– We have established a very close cooperation with the Skåne Region and I hope that these relations can be preserved and further developed. Above all, initially, the availability of protective materials was a very big issue, and there I believe that the whole country will work differently to have a better preparation. Then I see that in general, across the country, we need to invest more in medical and elderly care. Support for such initiatives appears to be growing in a rewarding way and more people seem to see that employment conditions, with secure employment and good opportunities for skill development, are important.
Photo: Fredrik Sandberg / TT
“Relatively speaking, we have, perhaps especially compared to Stockholm, which has been hit hard, we have more secure employment, we have more permanent employees and fewer hourly employees in our operations,” says Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh (S).
What is the biggest challenge for 2021?
– To endure We have nine years of positive school development and it is important that it continues.
– The hope is that the vaccine will ease the pressure on care activities. As it stands now, both municipal healthcare and elderly care are strained, they have worked incredibly hard, so you need to make sure that staff recover while coping with the pressure of care we have.
– The pandemic has hit very hard, perhaps especially the hospitality industry and commerce, which are important industries in Malmö. We also have one of the youngest populations in Sweden. The hospitality industry and commerce are precisely those industries that employ the young population. A big challenge in 2021 is that more people have lost their jobs and need the support of society to retrain or get the jobs that really exist.
What are your New Years vows?
– I do not usually make New Year’s promises, but I promise to do everything I can to defend Malmö and the people of Malmö, to press for us to come out of the crisis well, to get support in national politics.
Photo: Johan Nilsson / TT
A syringe is filled with the Covid-19 vaccine at Vårdcentralen in Råå, Helsingborg, ahead of Sunday’s vaccinations. The first vaccines were administered to the elderly in certain special dwellings in Helsingborg after a time of high infection in the city. On Tuesday, the first Malmö resident was vaccinated.
What is your wish for Christmas and wish for 2021?
– My wish or appeal is that people manage to hold out all the way until the majority of the population is vaccinated. So that we can go back to a little more normal ways of living and working. Fortunately, the first vaccine arrived in Malmö on Tuesday and on the same day vaccination began in some of the city’s nursing homes.
– My goal is to continue the positive evolution that we see linked to safety. Many Malmö residents continue to experience insecurity, but in the large investigation the police show that we have a lower crime rate than for a long time. Malmö has been very exposed to shootings and explosions, and there is that each event is too much, and for those affected, it is a small consolation that the big trend is going in the right direction. But for those of us who have tried to work systematically for a long time, it is proof that today we have closer and better cooperation between the authorities that we have managed to roll back the most serious crime. Attention has focused on a few more efforts for people in criminal settings and the care of young people who need protection or help to get out of a destructive situation. There we have made important reinforcements and that is also in our budget for 2021.
…. on the situation with the border with Denmark
– I hope this period is as short as possible. Because it is clear that it poses big problems in the labor market region. We are the largest labor market region in Northern Europe and right now we have a strong barrier running through it and it is clear that it runs the risk of having long-term consequences, but in the short term I make the assessment that this is necessary to put life and health first.
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