At the end of January this year, the Public Health Agency's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said he hoped and believed that the corona virus would be stopped with the help of the Chinese efforts. Shortly thereafter, Sweden received its first case, and today more than 2,000 Swedes have died with the corona virus.
In Aktuellt, the state epidemiologist had to comment on some of his earlier statements. About the initial assessments, he says they were based on past coronavirus experience.
- I was far from alone about this assessment. Then it built quite a lot on what we saw with the previous corona virus, ie sars and mers. Where both have worked with this type of effort, says Anders Tegnell.
"Developments in Italy became violent despite drastic measures"When the Sports Act came, many Swedes traveled to Italy, where Sweden did not recommend travel because the spread of infection was considered limited to certain areas of the country. According to Anders Tegnell, the Public Health Authority based its reasoning on the information that came from Italy, whose figures were trusted.
- There is no other country that can make assessments of the spread of infection in Sweden at the same level as we can. So here we have a long and very decades ago very good cooperation between the European countries, says Anders Tegnell.
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It has now been three months since the first corona case was confirmed in Sweden. Photo: SVT- The virus was much more unpredictable than we initially thought. After all, developments in Italy became violent, even though Italy had taken drastic measures to begin with. They shut down all flights to China, had extreme controls at the airports, worked really hard with measures that almost no one else had, but still it was this way, so there is much to learn from this outbreak, says Anders Tegnell.
Is it any of this that you regret?
- A lot of different players should have worked more on improving elderly care before we got into the situation we are in today. These other statements with assessments of where we were somewhere, they were based on the best possible knowledge we had at that time. We have to make an assessment based on the situation in which we stand. We can't try to look in a crystal ball and try to guess how it will be going forward, says Anders Tegnell.