Finland has gone much further than Sweden with restrictions during the corona pandemic. Schools have been closed and the Helsinki region was isolated for a period. Now Health Security Manager Mika Salminen, the equivalent of Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, states that this has led to the pandemic becoming more prolonged in Finland.
- Now the epidemic is going so slowly that the peak of infection is far away. At this rate it will not come this summer but it will be in the fall. That's the negative side of the restrictions, he tells Finnish MTV Uutiset.
He continues:
- When the restrictions were introduced, we couldn't know for sure how the epidemic would develop. Now it may have slowed down more than we had imagined.
"A large proportion of the population is infected"He nevertheless notes that the positive thing about the slow development is that care is not overloaded.
Before the weekend, 4395 people had been confirmed to be infected by the corona virus in Finland. Of these, 177 have died. The salmine, on the other hand, expects that significantly more than that will be transmitted later.
- If we talk about a longer period of time, several years, then a large part of the population will be infected by the virus, he says.
When MTV Uutiset asks how many infected it could then be, it says that it is half the population.