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The message was clear at the Skåne Region press conference on Wednesday morning. The crown situation is dire in Skåne. Infection continues to rise in the 10-60 age group, the proportion of test positives has risen to 25 percent, and more than 400 are now being treated in hospitals.
This is despite a long period of strict advice in Skåne. Eva Melander, an infection control doctor in Skåne, does not mean that the people of Skåne have misbehaved, but she says there is room for improvement.
– There are many who follow the advice, but we get indications from various sectors that, for example, there are more people staying than there should be in different environments. For example, we have also received reports of people who have gone to work sick, have not kept their distance, etc.
“Have a serious situation”
As of December 14, stricter national regulations and general guidelines on everyone’s responsibility to prevent COVID-19 infection apply. However, Skåne has chosen to go one step further with additional adjustments in addition to the national councils.
Among other things, it is emphasized that the Scans should not visit shopping centers or stores if it is not necessary, that they should not be more than eight people when they practice sports and should only go by public transport if necessary.
– I think nationally they mean almost the same thing, but when they say, for example, that you should avoid congestion in stores and malls, we mean that you should avoid stores at all if you don’t have to buy anything.
Should your decision to clarify and sharpen the advice be seen as a criticism of the Swedish Public Health Agency, in the sense that the national advice is too vague or weak?
– No, I think the general advice has become much clearer now. We have chosen to add some clarity or we have chosen to formulate ourselves a little differently so that the advice is more similar to the one we expressed in the municipalities that we had before.
– We have a serious situation at Scania.
“No tools to close”
As in Skåne, the situation is dire in Denmark. According to statistics from the ECDC, the EU infection control authority, through Our World In Data, which is led by researchers from the University of Oxford, the neighboring country has as much average infection per million inhabitants now as Sweden does. one week.
To stop the spread of the infection, Denmark has shut down the country as of Wednesday.
In Sweden and especially in the region, there aren’t many additional tools to use right now without a pandemic team on the table.
– In what we can work more in the region is in communication, directed. Communicate with different groups to try to influence different behaviors even more. Try to further influence the rate of infection sampling and monitoring, so that the chain from symptoms to sampling and response to infection monitoring is even faster, says Eva Melander.
– Sweden lacks the tools to close, for example, companies or public transport.
The government has introduced a temporary bill against a pandemic that is proposed to take effect on March 15, 2021 and expire at the end of March 2022.
– It would be an opportunity for the government and national authorities to go one step further and could probably be useful if the infection situation worsens even more, says Eva Melander, infection control doctor in Skåne.
