Bay Area to tighten COVID-19 rules as hospitalizations rise

The Telegraph

Swedish government sidelines epidemiologist who steered country’s no lockdown experiment as deaths rise

The high-profile epidemiologist who led Sweden’s no lock-down strategy in the spring appears to be being sidelined by the government after his prediction that greater immunity would mean a lighter second wave proved badly wrong. Anders Tegnell’s biweekly press conference was on Thursday pushed into the shade by an overlapping press conference fronted by Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, where new scenarios prepared by the Public Health Agency were announced. “There’s certainly a split, and I’m pretty sure that many in the government have rather lost faith in the Public Health Agency,” said Nicholas Aylott, an associate politics professor at Stockholm’s Södertorn University. “By some counts, we’ve now got exactly the same level of spread of the virus that we had in the spring, and that’s about as clear a refutation of Tegnell’s strategy as you could wish for.” Dr Tegnell has always insisted that his Public Health Agency has never pursued a herd immunity strategy, but he repeatedly suggested in the summer that his counterparts in Norway, Finland and Denmark would face a tougher task over the winter because of lower levels of immunity in their populations. This month, though, the number of deaths in Sweden has again begun to soar above that of its Nordic neighbours, with 630 deaths so far registered as a result of Covid-19. That is about ten times the per capita death rate in Norway — where just 30 Covid-19 deaths were registered between October 28th and November 25th.