In July, new guidelines came from the Swedish Public Health Agency that allow healthcare to delegate parts of the infection tracking at covid-19 to the individual patient. This is to get a more effective infection tracking.

However, healthcare must not hand over all responsibility for infection tracing to the patient. Nor can a doctor force a patient who has tested positive for covid-19 to contact people he has been in contact with and who may have been infected. However, a patient is always obliged to participate in an infection tracing, for example by telling which persons the infection tracker should contact.

State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell has previously described it as the responsibility, according to the Swedish Communicable Diseases Act, lies with the doctor who made the diagnosis, but that you can also delegate parts to the patient. 

Patients important

SVT Nyheter and Agenda have asked questions to all 21 regions of the country about how their infection tracing is done, including who contacts suspected infected people during contact tracing.

In the answers, it can be seen that all regions use the patients in infection tracking. It is especially common when a patient has been found infected outside of care, for example received the diagnosis via 1177.

Staff available

Four regions answer that it is usually the infected person himself who belongs to close relatives who is suspected of having been infected. In one of these, the answer is that only the patient handles the contact. Twenty of the regions answer that the contact during infection tracing is handled by both care and patients.

The regions have also had to answer whether they believe that they have enough staff to cope with infection tracing. No one answers here that there is a lack of staff, but in some regions work is now underway to redistribute resources before any major outbreaks.