Stockholm pushes through emergency law amid warnings that death toll is set to soar
SWEDEN’S government is rushing through an emergency law after a rise in deaths over the weekend raised further questions over its relaxed strategy on the virus, which has allowed schools, kindergartens, bars and restaurants to remain open.
Lena Hallengren, the health minister, said the government’s limited existing powers would not allow it to take the tough actions needed should infection numbers start to spiral upwards.
“We believe that the provisions currently available under the infectious diseases law are not sufficiently powerful,” she told the country’s TT newswire. The law, she said, would give the authorities “possibilities which are at least close to those available to other countries”.
It came after Stefan Löfven, the Swedish prime minister, on Friday warned that the coming weeks would see a steady increase in the number of people dying as a result of coronavirus.
“We are going to count the dead in their thousands,” he told newspaper Dagens Nyheter. “We may as well prepare ourselves for that.”
Yesterday Sweden’s public health agency said 76 more people had died on Sunday, taking the country’s death
‘We are going to count the dead in their thousands. We may as well prepare ourselves for that’
toll to 477. With 47 per million people, this is significantly above the 33 deaths per million and 11 deaths per million seen in neighbouring Denmark and Norway, which have been in lockdown.
However, Swedish health officials said yesterday that as many as a fifth of the country’s intensive care places currently remained unfilled.
Even in Stockholm, the centre of the epidemic, Björn Eriksson, the regional health chief, said there were “plenty of spaces both for intensive care and outpatient care”.
The Swedish army has erected field hospitals outside major cities, with the biggest, at the Stockholmsmässan conference centre, opened yesterday.
The new law, to which the government gave Sweden’s agencies just 24 hours to respond during a speeded-up consultation phase, will, among other measures, give the authorities powers to shut down events, institutions, or places where they believe there is a risk of infection, without requiring them to consult parliament.
It will also allow the government and its agencies to overrule regional health authorities to enable medicine and medical equipment to be moved to wherever it is most needed.
The law, like similar legislation in neighbouring Denmark and Norway, comes with a sunset clause, with the new powers expiring automatically on June 30.