Study: Sweden’s Corona route “exported” virus to Scandinavia

Sonderweg in the pandemic
Study: Sweden’s Corona route caused the virus to be “exported” to Scandinavia

A sign in Stockholm indicates distance rules. According to a study, Sweden’s lax corona path has caused the virus to spread in Scandinavia.

© Jonathan Nackstrand / AFP

The Swedish corona strategy was controversial from the start. A new study now comes to the end: Sweden’s special route has caused the corona virus to spread to neighboring countries.

No mask requirement, open restaurants and shops: Sweden’s special Corona route has caused a stir internationally. Many discussed or even argued about whether this strategy was right or wrong. Even Sweden’s King Carl XVI. Gustaf spoke of a “failed” path.

A new study by researchers from the Swedish University of Uppsala, the Norwegian Health Authority and the University of Sydney in Australia now sheds a worse light on Sweden’s special corona path.

Accordingly, Sweden’s corona strategy meant that the virus could be transmitted from Sweden to other countries. According to the study about which the Swedish newspaper “Upsala Nya Tiding” as the first reported and in the trade magazine “Eurosurveillance” was published, the chains of infection have spread to other countries in several hundred cases. Despite strict travel restrictions in Finland, the neighboring country was particularly affected, according to the study.

Numbers would have been lower if the corona path had been stricter

Conversely, according to the researchers, there was practically no export of the virus from Finland to Sweden. They believe it was Finns who brought an infection with them from Sweden when they returned to their home country, as they were not covered by the Finnish entry ban.

For the study, 71,000 patient samples were analyzed, which could be used to create a kind of genetic tree for the spread of the virus in the Nordic countries. “In the first year of the ongoing pandemic, Sweden was actually a net exporter of the Sars-CoV-2 virus to our Nordic neighbors,” said John Pettersson, a researcher at Uppsala University’s Zoonosis Science Center. But Denmark had also “exported” infections to other countries.

The analyzes showed that Sars-CoV-2 was imported into all Nordic countries between January and the end of February 2020, with a detectable transmission from the beginning of February in Sweden and from the beginning of March in the other Nordic countries.

More chains of infection in Sweden

“Our results suggest that Sweden’s containment strategy has had an impact on the epidemiological situation in the country and in the entire Nordic region,” the study said. One must, however, take into account that Sweden – like Denmark – is a transit country.

The study shows that the chains of infection in Sweden would have included more people than in neighboring countries and, according to the researchers, there is a possibility that the number of corona cases in Sweden and other Nordic countries would have been lower if Sweden had chosen a more restrictive strategy. Finland, Denmark and Norway had introduced significantly stricter measures against the spread of the coronavirus, including strict quarantines and lockdowns.


Corona situation: More and more children are infected - eight districts with an incidence of 1000

According to the study, the number of chains of infection in Sweden was significantly higher at 677. In Denmark it was 227. The longest chain of infection was found in Sweden with 366 cases, followed by Denmark with 228, Norway with 134, Finland with 80 and Iceland with 44. This leads the researchers to conclude that Sweden compared to the others Nordic countries had the least disrupted chains of infection during the sampling period.

Break chains of infection to prevent mutations

In terms of population size, Sweden had a higher number of Covid19-related infections and deaths than the other Nordic countries, with a cumulative incidence of around 9758 cases and 137 deaths per 100,000 population compared to around 4465 cases and 43 deaths in Denmark , 2,169 cases and 14 deaths in Norway, 1,608 cases and 17 deaths in Finland and 1,790 cases and eight deaths in Iceland by May 2, 2021, according to the study.

The researchers also emphasize that if the chains of infection are allowed to remain active, they will also give the virus more opportunities to develop, adapt to local populations, and possibly mutate. As a result, it is important not only to break and stop chains of transmission to minimize the spread of the virus, but also to reduce the likelihood that the virus will mutate.

Further sources: SVT, DPA news agency.

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