The number of confirmed covid cases has increased sharply after the Christmas weekend.

During week 51, the infection increased by 14 percent and on Thursday, 10,874 cases of covid-19 were reported, Swedish Radio reports.

This is the second highest figure in Sweden since the beginning of the pandemic.

The rapid spread goes against previous major weekends when the number of infected people instead decreased.

- It seems accelerated during the Christmas weekend, which it did not last year or during other major weekends, so we have a rapidly increasing spread of infection, says state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, to Ekot.

Omikron an explanation

There are several reasons why the spread of infection does not follow previous patterns, Tegnell states.

- It is partly a season now that we know since last year that the virus spreads more easily during the winter, then we have the new variant omikron which is obviously better at spreading and also affects people who have had the disease before more and are also vaccinated.

This means that Sweden is approaching the Swedish Public Health Agency's worst-case scenario for how the spread of infection can develop, writes Svenska Dagbladet.

The authority has previously presented three different scenarios of how the spread is expected to develop where we have already passed scenario 0 and scenario 1. In scenario 2, the protective effect of the vaccine is expected to be 40 percent and the number of new cases per day amounts to approximately 13,000.

May be new restrictions

However, it is too early to say how well the vaccine protects against the new virus variant omicron.

State epidemiologist Anders Tegnell tells SvD that the rapid spread of infection can lead to the introduction of new restrictions.

In that case, it could be about reducing the size of public gatherings or more rules for restaurants.

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Therefore, there are risks with omicron - even if the symptoms are mild.

Photo: Isabell Höjman / TT & SVT