Scientist behind Sweden’s covid-19 strategy suggests it allowed too many deaths - The Washington Post

This week, the architect of the strategy acknowledged that too many people have died and said that, in retrospect, he might have pushed something closer to other countries' restrictions.

The outbreak appears to be continuing to course through Swedish society, even while most other European countries seem to have gotten things under control, at least for now.

Facing heat from voters, Sweden’s center-left government said this week that it would appoint a commission to investigate the country’s handling of the pandemic.

Confidence in the public health response is dropping, according to several polls released Thursday.

A Novus survey for public television that found that 45 percent of people now trust the government’s response, down from 63 percent in April.

Public health officials expressed confidence that their citizens would wash their hands and stay apart from each other — and said there was no need to impose tougher requirements.

Scientists in Sweden and Britain fight over who took the right public health path.

Asked whether too many people in Sweden had died, he replied: “Yes, absolutely.”.

Public health officials in Norway and Denmark have come to agree with Sweden’s open-door approach to schools, saying it may not have been necessary to close them for children under age 14 because of limited evidence that they contribute to the spread of the coronavirus.

Tegnell has said that because the Swedish strategy aims to avoid having to shut down a second time — or to face a significant second wave at all — the most meaningful comparisons can only be made later in the progress of the pandemic.

Still, as even the hardest-hit countries in Europe reduce their infection numbers and step blinking back into the sun, Sweden appears to remain on a different trajectory.

But in Sweden you have a plateau at a pretty high level,” said Bjorn Olsen, a professor of infectious medicine at Uppsala University and one of Sweden’s leading researchers of pandemics, who has been sharply critical of the government’s response.

Instead, he said, it appears to concentrate in certain spots and wreak deep devastation.

About half of Sweden’s deaths have occurred in homes for the elderly, which is similar to some other European countries but has fueled criticism in Sweden that policymakers abandoned the elderly to the virus.

In neighboring countries, public health officials say Sweden’s situation does indeed look difficult — although they also say that so little is understood about how to fight the virus that it may still be too early to tell who has taken the best approach.

“It’s a very sad situation with the high number of deaths in Sweden,” said Camilla Stoltenberg, the director general of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, who has advocated a more conventional lockdown approach.