Early on in the Covid outbreak Sweden decided it was not going to lock the country down. Its strategy instead would be to pursue herd immunity. There has been a concerted effort to delegitimize Sweden’s strategy by the international community ever since.
But the numbers simply do not lie.
Sweden put in place common sense guidelines and trusted its citizens to behave responsibly. That hasn’t stopped world health officials from trying to attach Swedens strategy at every turn however.
Last week the World Health Organization’s Europe director Hans Henri Kluge warned that 11 European countries, including Sweden, were seeing a “dangerous resurgence” of the virus and that healthcare systems in those countries could soon be overwhelmed.
But the Covid19 outbreak in Sweden is showing signs of improvement according to Anders Tegnell, the architect of Sweden’s Covid strategy.
Tegnell said the “surge” in cases is actually the result of more testing, and that mild cases, that were previously unreported, are now being included in the data.
Deaths, hospital admissions and ICU admissions are all falling, signs of a outbreak that is in retreat not on the rise Tegnell said.
“It’s an overall total misunderstanding, I’d say. They have looked at the amount of cases daily and it has increased steeply within the last week.”
Tegnells says the confusion has arisen because Kluge never called anyone from Sweden to inquire about the situation behind the raw data.
“It is regrettable that people are confusing Sweden with countries that have perhaps not previously had problems, which are demonstrably in the beginning. Sweden is nearing the end.”
Photo by Heather Cowper