Anders Tegnell: "We have too much infection spread to use the corona app"

The Swedish Public Health Agency has no app plans. A kind of symptom survey was planned to be launched by MSB, but stopped.

- Apps where reporting symptoms are too specific, we have the information we need. As far as infection tracking apps are concerned, we are not in such a position in Sweden that we are tracking infection. We have such a large spread that there are no resources for it, and even with an app it requires a lot of hands-on effort, says state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell.

In addition, Tegnell believes it would be difficult to deal with all the warnings such apps would generate. You can't ask those warned to go and test themselves, even today there is not enough testing capacity, he notes.

- It's not really well thought out. From what I have seen from foreign examples, the resources required, especially in sampling, have not really been counted on to make this work.

In Norway, the Smittestopp app calls for quarantine if you have been closer than two meters from an infected person for more than 15 minutes. Why couldn't we do like them then?

- How much is society affected by health care and the elderly care? How many will disappear from work there in such cases? It is possible that you think you can afford it in Norway because there you do not have so many infected. Here in Sweden, with more infected, many would have to quarantine.

But from the point of view of infection, wouldn't that be good anyway?

- Few of them would prove to be truly infected. For every really sick person I would guess there are about thirty healthy people who would be asked to quarantine unnecessarily in this way.

But state epidemiologist Tegnell does not exclude a Swedish Corona app anymore.

- We think we can use one when we have less spread of infection, and we have experience from other countries how to calibrate such an app so that it is technically accurate. Is it the right level to have been near an infected for at least 15 minutes to get an app alert? We do not know today.

The Foreign Office is published every Wednesday evening on SVT Play. It is also broadcast in SVT2 on Wednesday 22.15.