- Sweden in Covid's sights with over 4000 dead. In Spain the contagion curve flattens out
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June 03, 2020 Sweden could have done more to combat the coronavirus epidemic. Anders Tegnell, chief Swedish epidemiologist and the 'mind' behind the strategy applied by the Stockholm government, said it immediately decided not to close the country but to focus on social distancing and the sense of responsibility of citizens. So far, there have been over 38,000 infections and almost 4,500 people have died, much higher numbers than in the other Nordic countries.A soft approach that has sparked growing criticism not only abroad and also at home, so much so that Prime Minister Stefan Lofven on Monday, under increasing pressure from the opposition, ensured that an investigation will be launched before the summer on how it was managed the Covid-19 epidemic. "If we were to run into the same disease, knowing exactly what we know about it today, I think we would end up doing something in the middle between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world did," Tegnell admitted on Swedish radio. "Yes, I think we could have done better than what we did in Sweden, of course."
Instead of imposing a rigid lockdown, Sweden preferred to leave shops, schools and restaurants open, urging to follow the rules of hygiene and social distancing; only nursing homes were closed to visitors in late March but about half of the deaths were registered in these institutions. However, Tegnell partially defended the position taken, continuing to reject the idea of total lockdown and stressing that it was difficult to understand what measures taken by other countries would also have been effective in Sweden: now that the world is slowly emerging from the lockdown, "perhaps we will have some kind of information on what, in addition to what we have done, we could have done without adopting a total block. "