Mr. Salminen replied that his agency had rejected the idea after considering that allowing a spread among children would increase the rate of spread elsewhere in society.
“We thought so too, but over time, the children will still spread the infection.”
“True,” replies Dr. Tegnell, “but probably mostly to each other because of the extremely age-stratified contact structure we have.”
Dr. Tegnell has consistently argued in public that children, just as they are generally asymptomatic, do not spread coronavirus to some degree, not even to each other.
The email suggests that this, at least in the first half of March, was not something he was fully convinced of, because if that were the case, keeping schools open would have little effect on levels of immunity.
Four days later, Dr. Tegnell said on Swedish state television that he did not think children were spreading coronavirus.
“When we ask in China, we find that they can not see a spread of children,” he said. “That does not mean that children do not get the disease at all, but they do not seem to spread it.”
When Dr. Tegnell was approached for comment, claiming he had in his email to Mr Salminen about possibilities that were not expected.
“My comments were about a possible effect, not about an expected one, that was part of the assessment of the appropriateness of the measure,” he said. “Keeping schools open to achieve herd immunity was therefore never relevant [as a strategy]. “
Other e-mails support this, indicating that at this early stage Dr Tegnell still had to make a full decision on the role of children.
The day after his e-mail to Mr Salminen, Dr Tegnell responded to his predecessor as state epidemiologist, Annika Linde, who had sent him an e-mail arguing that children who are severely affected by influenza, ” asymptomatic spreaders ”were of coronavirus.
“This could facilitate the build-up of at least temporary immunity in the population …,” she wrote to him. “But almost asymptomatic spread also increases the risk of spreading to risk groups.”
In his reply, Dr. Tegnell asked her argument. “The role of children in this epidemic is difficult to understand, I think. Apparently they are not the engine of the epidemic as with flu.”
In July, The Public Health Agency of Sweden published a joint study with the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, which found a similar rate of cases of coronavirus among children in Sweden, who keep schools open, as in Finland, which ‘ t has closed.
This suggests that holding schools did not increase the spread among children.
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