Sweden’s ambassador to the U.K. has denied his country considered herd immunity as a response to the coronavirus epidemic.
Speaking to Times radio on Sunday, Torbjörn Sohlström said that Sweden’s maverick no-lockdown coronavirus response did not seek to boost the number of infections and reach a critical mass of infected to stop the virus from spreading.
“That was not part of the strategy,” he said. “The focus was to look at … what was necessary to deal with the challenge, and what would be sustainable over time in terms of restrictions on society.”
When the pandemic hit in February, Sweden famously left many of the day-to-day decisions on virus response to its citizens. The authorities only issued some simple guidance about social distancing and hand washing, but have kept borders, businesses and schools open throughout the pandemic.
Sohlström also said that despite its novel approach, Stockholm had not done well to protect its weak and elderly. “We were not successful enough in protecting our weak. We got COVID into quite a lot of care homes … we have a commission of inquiry in Sweden already looking at why this happened and what we can learn and what we should have done differently.”
The country now counts close to 6,000 deaths from COVID-19 so far, just under 95,000 total infections and 5,173 new infections over the last two weeks, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. It ranks fourth in the EU in terms of total infections per million citizens.