Sweden sticks with deadly plan
Sweden is suffering the highest Covid-19 death rate in Europe, raising pressure on the government to abandon its soft approach and impose a lockdown of the kind that has worked elsewhere.
Stefan Lofven, the Social Democrat prime minister, said that the country’s strategy, which encourages people to work from home if they can while schools, restaurants and businesses stay open, will bear fruit in the long run, despite signs that the disease is persisting as it declines on the rest of the continent.
While Sweden was less affected than Britain, Spain and Italy earlier in the epidemic, figures for the past week showed that its deaths per capita have overtaken every other country in Europe, according to Our World In Data, an online research site based in Oxford. Sweden averaged 6.25 deaths a day per million people over the past week. Britain averaged 5.75 deaths a day per million, Belgium 4.6, France 3.49, and Italy 3.
Nearly 4000 people have died from the virus in Sweden, a figure many times higher per capita than those of its Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway, and Finland, which all imposed strict lockdown measures. Since the start of the epidemic, 380 Swedes per million have died, compared with 43 in Norway, 96 in Denmark and 55 in Finland, according to the Worldometer website. Sweden has had fewer per capita deaths from coronavirus in total than Britain,
Spain, Italy, Belgium and France over the course of the pandemic but the new weekly figures have been devastating.
Concerns about Sweden made the other Nordic countries reluctant to let it join a proposed ‘‘travel bubble’’ among them along the lines of one started last week among the Baltic nations. ‘‘Norway, Denmark and Iceland have managed to stabilise their situation, but in Sweden the situation is more alarming,’’ Maria Ohisalo, the Finnish interior minister, said.
Twenty-two researchers published an appeal in Dagens Nyheter, the Stockholm newspaper, last week accusing the government and the health authorities of aiming to achieve herd immunity without saying so, and calling the policy dangerous and unrealistic.
Lofven has denied that there was any strategy to achieve herd immunity.
He is worried about the image that Sweden is being wrongly cast as the odd one out when its approach would come good over the long haul and the country would suffer less economically and socially than other states. ‘‘This fight against Covid-19 is a marathon,’’ he said.
The prime minister has received strong public support for a strategy that has avoided the severe disruption to life that has been experienced almost everywhere else in Europe.
– The Times