Opinion News Coverage by Tala Karkanawi, Staff Writer

May 30th, 2020

Sweden is currently not under lockdown, in fact it never was.

Sweden has insisted and persisted on using the coronavirus ‘herd immunity strategy’ that the United Kingdom decidedly has left behind since mid-march before implementing their lockdown. 

However, based on the data from the Swedish Ministry of Health, the vast majority of the population have decided to take on voluntary social distancing and follow the recommendations that were instructed by the authorities to help in flattening the curve. Usage of public transport has dropped significantly and a large amount of people are working from home. The government has also banned gatherings of more than 50 people and visits to elderly homes.

Many restaurants remain open, and children are remain attending traditional school and higher education institutions. In contrast to Norway, as well as other countries in Asia and the Middle East for example, Sweden has not introduced location-tracing technologies or applications. This has been an arguable secured benefit to Swedes ad they have not yet been faced with larger scaled violations of privacy.

Many scientists were discussing for weeks whether Sweden’s plan on trying to adopt herd immunity is a sensible and  sustainable plan, or whether they have placed the citizens on a deadly experiment that could unwittingly raise the amount of deaths and in turn fail to keep Covid-19 from spreading further. However, Sweden's decision not to institute lockdown measures in some of the country’s larger areas was taken after Dr. Tegnell, a Swedish state epidemiologist, and his team conducted simulations that predicted a more limited influence of the virus relative to population size than those made by other scientists, including those made from a report from Imperial College in London.

"To a great part, we have been able to achieve what we set out to achieve," noted Dr. Tegnell.

He has also gone to explain that the "Swedish healthcare keeps on working, basically with a lot of stress, but not in a way that they turn patients away". The Swedish Public Health Agency has kept great and extraordinary approval ratings throughout the pandemic.

As the chief epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, Dr. Tegnell has anticipated that the city of Stockholm could reach herd immunity earlier than what was expected. Based on updated behavioural norms and expectations, social-distancing is changing the way Swede's behave. To further this, the Stockholm University mathematician Tom Britton has reached a conclusion through intense analysis that 40 percent immunity in the capital could be enough to stop the virus from spreading, at least in a widespread manner, which otherwise is anticipated to have a high chance of occurring sometime by mid-June.

Sweden’s response towards this pandemic has been far from perfect, but it has succeeded in strengthening immunity among the young and the healthy, while also flattening and keeping the curve under control.

The country’s intensive care units (ICUs) have not been swarming with patients to dangerous extents, and hospital staff with families and children, although of course under immense pressure, have not had to manage further childcare responsibilities seeing as daycares and lower schools continue to work. Finally, until a vaccine or other form of immunity and treatment is developed, epidemiologist Emma Frans says immunity will "probably be important" for Sweden.