The Swedish Strategy

virus News today. India past Mexico in COVID nineteen fatalities, making it the country with the third largest death toll in the world. The country is fast becoming the new virus epicenter, behind only the US and Brazil in both deaths and infections. The virus has swept India's vast rural areas. The grim milestone comes a day after the country set another record, reporting the most daily infections of any country.

It's seventy eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty one new infections surpassed a previous high set by the US in Uganda. The coronavirus outbreak is spreading quickly. Health care facilities in the capital Kampala have run out of bed capacity, according to the newspaper New Vision. The newspaper cited Monica New Scenario, the Presidential advisor on the outbreak, as saying the city is racing toward uncontrollable transmission. Finally, in the US, most

people see the vaccine process as politicized. According to a new survey from Stat and the Harris Poll, seventy eight percent of Americans worry that the COVID nineteen vaccine approval process is being driven more by politics than science. Seventy two percent of Republicans and eighty two percent of Democrats

expressed such concerns. The results underscore speculation that President Donald Trump may pressure the US Food and Drug Administration to approve or authorize emergency use of at least one vaccine prior to the election, but before testing has been fully completed, according to STAT and Now for today's main story. Recently, Sweden won praise from one of the World Health Organization's

six Special Envoys on COVID nineteen, Dr David Navarro. Navarro said the key to assist anable coronavirus strategy is trust and highlighted Sweden as a case in point the Nordic nation imposed far fewer restrictions on movement than other countries and instead relied on Swedes to act responsibly and embrace the guidelines laid out by the country's health authorities, but

the country's strategy has been controversial. Sweden's COVID nineteen death rate is considerably higher than in many other countries, at fifty seven per one hundred thousand people, but the pace of new infections and deaths has slowed markedly since the end of June. I talked to Stockholm based reporter Nikolas Rolander about how the strategy was devised and where the country has gone right and wrong in fighting the virus. What has been Sweden's strategy to battle COVID nineteen since March.

The strategy has been based on mainly on voluntary measures from from the public. So Sweden has taken some legal decisions, such as to ban public gatherings of more than fifty people, but it has largely avoided more stringent lockdowns than that many other countries have imposed, and instead it's urged its citizens to take responsibility themselves, to keep a distance to work from home if they can, and to stay home

if they have any symptoms of COVID. Schools have remained open largely, shops have been open, restaurants have been open, with some restrictions when it comes to how many people they let in and the distances between patrons, and the argument has been that these more loose restrictions are more sustainable in the long run than a lockdown where everyone

is forced to stay at home. But Sweden has always made the argument that this is something that we'll have to live with for a long time, and therefore it's better to have measures that are sustainable, that that are possible to keep going for for a long time. So what have been some of the major criticisms of sweden strategy. I think domestically, the critics have focused a lot on the death rates, which are at the moment about ten times higher than in Norway, five times higher than in Denmark.

So it's from that perspective there is definitely a cause for concern about what what sweden strategy has meant for death rates. Its also say that Sweden could have bought valuable time earlier in the pandemic by adopting specter measures to learn more about how the virus behaves and develop better methods for treatment that could have saved lives if we had just delayed some of the transmission we had

early on. There's also the claim that Swedish public health experts have underestimated the role that asymptomatic spread has played in the transmission of the disease, and that has underpinned some of the decisions that Sweden has made. Now I'm interested by keeping schools open, many businesses open. What has been perhaps the impact of this strategy on Sweden's economy. The impact has been slightly less bad than comparable countries.

It's not a huge difference, though. We still have pretty historic PLoP and g d P, and Sweden's economy is very reliant on exports, so so no matter how how much better we're doing in the domestic economy, we will be hurt by by a decrease in in international demand. So it may not have been as as different as you might think it would would be from from other countries, but still slightly less affected than than other countries. You know.

Looking to the last few months, say the summer months, there has been seemingly some good news coming out of Sweden, with lower daily death rates or lower reports of new cases. Does this perhaps account for changing global opinion about whether or not Sweden had the correct strategy all along. Definitely that's contributed. I think there's probably two factors behind that. One is that we've seen a rapid decrease in transmission, number of cases, number of cases in I See you,

and the number of deaths as well. At the same time, I think people are obviously looking at Sweden for clues

on how to approach this pandemic more long term. And that's also the case that's been made by for example, w h O experts that after this space of very strict lockdowns that may or may not may not have been necessary in the early phases of the pandemic to really stem the transmission, you now need to look at something that's more sustainable that you can hold onto for a longer period of time, and that's always been Sweden's approach.

So Sweden it's more likely to be seen as a model at the stage of the pandemic than it was before, you know, taking a long look at sweden strategy over the last six months or even longer, there has always been this question of whether the intent behind this policy was to achieve herd immunity. Do you think this was part of the strategy overall, or do you think that

there's much more broader factors at play. I mean, if you listen to the public health experts in Sweden, they have consistently denied that her immunity was the aim of the strategy. They have said, why it may be the case that sweden strategy will lead to bigger transmission and therefore more immunity, that has never been the primary target. I mean, some critics have questioned that and called it a stealth strategy, but the official line is that her

immunity is not part of the strategy. And after a few months into the pandemic, I think it was clear to public health experts here as well that this virus wasn't really behaving in the way that previous similar viruses have. So the idea that the virus would be spreading widely throughout society society and that a large portion of the population would be infected within a reasonably short period of

time wasn't really how this panned out. Instead, it's been more about very local outbreaks and so called cluster or transmission, which makes it much harder to reach that level of immunity and the population, and so recently public health experts here have have stressed that we don't have the levels

of immunity that protects us from further outbreaks. Now that we're looking to the end of summer and oncoming flu season the start of a new school year, how iswen looking ahead to say, the fall or winter um with with these elements kind of on the horizon. I think, just as in the rest of the world, we're looking

forward with some prepidation. I mean, the situation right now looks pretty positive, but you shouldn't forget also that we have we still have more cases than in many other countries that had more strict lockdowns, and there will be

local outbreaks. So we'll see what happens during the fall, and the public health authorities will publish their report on new guidelines for the fall this week, and there may be some reconsidering of things like face mosques, which Swedish public Health Agency has been very skeptical of so far and have said that there may be a case for advising the use of face masks in some situations where

it's hard or impossible to keep a proper distance. That was Nick class Rowlander and that's it for our show Today. For coverage of the outbreak from one hundred and bureaus around the world, visit bloom dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Top for Foreheads

Jordan Gaspore, Magnus Hendrickson, and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Nick Las Rolander. Original music by Leo Sitran. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.