Sweden’s coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed

“For me, it started going wrong at the end of January,” says Lena Einhorn, a virologist and author who has been a vocal critic of Sweden’s approach. She was following research coming out of China, and in early February she emailed state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell – the man who has been leading Sweden’s response to the pandemic – to raise her concerns about some of the projections published in The Lancet. After a while, he just stopped replying. “The public health agency and the government have separated themselves from critics,” she says. “They played down the risk consistently from the beginning of February.”

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At the end of February, thousands of Swedes had a week off for the so-called ‘sports vacation’ – with many of them heading skiing in the Alps, just at the time that the situation in northern Italy exploded. But there was no requirement for those returning to self-isolate, and while some private companies shifted to working from home – public workers and school children were told they had to go to school unless they were already feeling ill.

As in the UK, there was a failure to prepare testing capacity and protective equipment – even now, the official advice in Sweden only recommends face masks if you’re working with a sick patient. “They absolutely denied the possibility of presymptomatic spread,” Einhorn says.

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