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No 'Carpet Bombing': Swedish Professor Sees No Greater Immunity in Stockholm

© REUTERS / NIH/NIAIDColorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (red) infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow), also known as novel coronavirus, isolated from a patient sample. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland
Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (red) infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow), also known as novel coronavirus, isolated from a patient sample. Image captured at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland - Sputnik International
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While Sweden's Public Health Authority has estimated that up to one-fourth of Stockholmers may be infected with COVID-19 by 1 May, Professor Björn Olsen has argued that this won't be the case.

Despite the Swedish capital avoiding lockdowns and by and large continuing its ordinary life, the spread of the coronavirus in Stockholm is continuing at a slower pace than expected, Björn Olsen, a professor of infectious medicine at Uppsala University has maintained.

While the Public Health Authority surmised that the peak of infection may have passed on 15 April and estimated that one-third of Stockholm's population may be infected with COVID-19 as early as 1 May, Olsen cautioned against over-optimistic forecasts.

According to him, the virus did not hit Stockholm like a “carpet bombing”, but hit some groups worse than others.

“Based on the preliminary investigations we have done, it does not look like that. We have done small studies among people in Stockholm. We see no greater immunity. It may take longer”, Björn Olsen told the newspaper Expressen.

As an illustration, Olsen performed a coronavirus test on Expressen's journalist, which returned negative. This means that the journalist has neither had the infection, nor developed antibodies.

Still, Olsen remains a believer in the concept of immunity as such. Anything else would be strange, because our immune system is designed to protect us, he maintained.

At the same time Olsen does not believe that the novel coronavirus is man-made. Earlier this week, Fox News claimed that a great deal indicates that the virus has spread from a laboratory in Wuhan. Olsen is skeptical about the idea of “human engineering”.

“Until disproved, I still think that nature can handle this by itself. By jumping between species, it is very likely that the virus can buff up and gain extra parts of its genetic mass”, Olsen told the news outlet Världen Idag.

According to Olsen, the virus may have jumped from bats via dogs as an intermediate. “In dogs, the mutation process can go relatively fast, and there are plenty of dogs in China”, Olsen said.

Stockholm University professor Tom Britton, who earlier predicted half of Sweden's population to be infected in April, admitted that his forecasts of reaching so-called herd immunity by the end of May may not necessarily come true. The spread has been slower than he initially judged, using modelling, he said.

“The preventive measures have been more powerful than I estimated”, Britton told Expressen, pointing out that the figure may instead be 40-50 percent infected, whereas 60 percent or more is required for herd immunity.

Having performed random tests, the Public Health Authority predicted that up to 600,000 Stockholmers, or one-third of the city's population, will have been infected by the novel coronavirus by 1 May. Subsequently, however, a “serious error” was discovered, and the report was withdrawn. Later, deputy state epidemiologist Anders Wallensten toned down the figure to 26 percent.

Sweden, which unlike its Nordic cousins refrained from a total lockdown and instead relied on mostly voluntary restrictions described as “the Swedish model”, has seen 16,755 confirmed cases and 2,021 deaths, more than the rest of Scandinavia combined. While state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell denied that the strategy is attaining herd immunity, he ventured that it is the only way of beating the infection. Lower-tier epidemiological authorities, by contrast, admitted that herd immunity was indeed the goal.

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