Category Archives: Sweden

Sweden records highest death tally in 150 years in first half of 2020

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Covid-19 caused about 4,500 deaths in six months to end of June as Sweden opted against strict lockdown

Sweden, which has stood out among European countries for its low-key approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic, has recorded its highest tally of deaths in the first half of 2020 for 150 years, the Statistics Office said.

Covid-19 claimed about 4,500 lives in the period to the end of June – a number that has now risen to 5,800 – a much higher percentage of the population than in other Nordic nations, though lower than in some others, including Britain and Spain.

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Sweden’s Covid-19 strategist under fire over herd immunity emails

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Anders Tegnell appears to have asked if higher death rate among older people acceptable if faster herd immunity achieved

Sweden’s light-touch approach to Covid-19 has come under renewed criticism after emails show the country’s chief epidemiologist appearing to ask whether a higher death rate among older people might be acceptable if it led to faster herd immunity.

Speculation about the views of Sweden’s leading public health officials was further fanned after it also emerged that Anders Tegnell, the architect of the country’s no-lockdown strategy, had deleted some of his emails.

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Outcry in Sweden after 12-year-old-girl killed by stray bullet

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Increase in police and tougher punishments promised after child dies following apparent gangland shooting near Stockholm

Swedish officials have promised more police and tougher punishments amid public outrage after a 12-year-old girl was killed by a stray bullet in an apparent gangland shooting at a petrol station car park south of Stockholm.

“I am aware no words are enough for those who have lost a child in this awful way, but I still want to we share your grief in these difficult times,” the home affairs minister, Mikael Damberg, told the national news agency TT.

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Swedish exceptionalism has been ended by coronavirus | Erik Augustin Palm

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It has taken a shocking Covid-19 death toll to dent the national self-image of moral superiority. But dented it has been

“Haverist” is a Swedish word meaning “shipwrecked person”. During the course of Sweden’s shambolic response to Covid-19, dissent – whether from epidemiologists or journalists – has often been met with this insult, which implies the critics are fighting a losing battle. It’s telling of the way Sweden has handled its failure.

Through a uniquely slack approach (seen by many as the largely debunked “herd immunity” approach, even if the government denies this), Sweden reached the highest Covid-19 deaths per capita in the world in May. It still circles around the top, with more than 5,200 deaths – five times as many as in Norway, Finland and Denmark combined. After months of a mainly one-sided debate, critical voices are mounting. Even Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, admits to fault. But this has not been enough to change his agency’s strategy, which a majority of Swedes still have confidence in – although that support has waned.

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Swedes rapidly losing trust in Covid-19 strategy, poll finds

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Political parties demand Sweden’s strategy be reviewed before next election in 2022

Swedes are losing trust in authorities’ handling of the coronavirus, as the man behind the country’s light-touch approach called lockdowns a form of madness and political parties demanded the Swedish strategy be reviewed before the next election in 2022.

An Ipsos survey this week for the Dagens Nyheter newspaper showed confidence in the country’s management of Covid-19 had fallen 11 points to 45% since April, with backing for the national public health agency down 12 points.

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‘Tipping point’: Greta Thunberg hails Black Lives Matter protests

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People are realising ‘we cannot keep looking away from these things’, says climate activist

Greta Thunberg has said the Black Lives Matter protests show society has reached a tipping point where injustice can no longer be ignored, but that she believes a “green recovery plan” from the coronavirus pandemic will not be enough to solve the climate crisis.

Reflecting on the protests that have swept the globe in recent weeks, the Swedish climate activist told the BBC: “It feels like we have passed some kind of social tipping point where people are starting to realise that we cannot keep looking away from these things. We cannot keep sweeping these things under the carpet, these injustices.

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Global report: Germany orders local Covid-19 lockdowns as Spain boosts tourism sector

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Spanish government injects £4bn while Sweden study casts doubt on herd immunity

More than 8,000 people have been quarantined in fresh outbreaks of Covid-19 in three areas of Germany, while the most comprehensive study yet on immunity in Sweden showed very few people had developed antibodies.

As governments across Europe continue to ease their restrictions, authorities in North Rhein Westphalia, the southern Berlin district of Neukölln and the central city of Göttingen imposed local lockdowns in an effort to halt the spread of the virus.

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Germany and France reopen borders as Europe emerges from lockdown

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Spain to reopen borders on 21 June but other countries are adopting more targeted approach

France and Germany became the latest European countries to reopen their borders as the continent emerges from its three-month Covid-19 lockdown.

Speaking on Sunday evening, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said the country’s Schengen borders would be open from Monday and its non-EU borders from 1 July.

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South Africa may hold the answer to who murdered Olof Palme

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The trail for the killer of the Swedish prime minister had gone cold until a diplomat picked up the 1986 case as a hobby

Dag Hammarskjöld brought me to Olof Palme. Two Swedish leaders, both supporting small nations on the world scene, both of whom refused to be controlled by global superpowers; both died a violent death. Were they also victims of the same forces?

For 11 years I investigated the mysterious aeroplane crash that killed the former UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld, a a project that became the subject of the documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld.

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Sweden to present findings on Olof Palme assassination

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Sources say South Africa handed over dossier on 1986 murder, but not everyone is hopeful mystery will be solved

The findings of an investigation into one of the world’s most infamous cold cases, the 1986 assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, will finally be made public in Stockholm on Wednesday.

Palme was shot in the back at close range on a Stockholm street while walking home from the cinema with his wife Lisbeth on a February evening. The gunman disappeared into a side street and the mystery has thwarted the Swedish police ever since, giving rise to an industry built around competing speculative theories.

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We should have done more, admits architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 strategy

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Anders Tegnell says there was ‘potential for improvement’ in country’s strategy to fight pandemic

Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and the architect of its light-touch approach to the coronavirus has acknowledged that the country has had too many deaths from Covid-19 and should have done more to curb the spread of the virus.

Anders Tegnell, who has previously criticised other countries’ strict lockdowns as not sustainable in the long run, told Swedish Radio on Wednesday that there was “quite obviously a potential for improvement in what we have done” in Sweden.

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Spotify podcast deal could make Joe Rogan world’s highest paid broadcaster

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Streaming service must convince podcast listeners to switch from their favourite app

Joe Rogan, the comedian, MMA commentator and podcaster, may seem an unlikely prospect for becoming the world’s highest paid broadcaster. But after signing an exclusive deal with Spotify, that is what he may have become, marking a new era for podcasting in the process.

To much of the world, Rogan’s name is most associated with the periodic furores that erupt from the marathon interviews around which his podcast is structured.

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Sweden ‘wrong’ not to shut down, says former state epidemiologist

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Scientist who oversaw the response to Sars says country has failed the vulnerable

The predecessor of Sweden’s state epidemiologist has broken her silence on the country’s controversial coronavirus strategy, saying she now believes the authorities should have put in place tougher restrictions in the early stages of the pandemic to bring the virus under control.

Annika Linde, who oversaw Sweden’s response to swine flu and Sars as state epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, had until now expressed support for her country’s approach under her successor, Anders Tegnell.

But she has now become the first member of the public health establishment to break ranks, saying she has changed her mind as a result of Sweden’s relatively high death toll compared with that of its neighbours, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.

“I think that we needed more time for preparedness. If we had shut down very early ... we would have been able, during that time, to make sure that we had what was necessary to protect the vulnerable,” Linde told the Observer.

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Sweden’s Covid-19 policy is a model for the right. It’s also a deadly folly | Nick Cohen

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The Swedes were the Brexiters’ poster nation, but now have Europe’s worst death rate

Covid-19 is nature’s way of making bad situations worse. From the moment it turned the world upside down, you could have predicted that the Chinese Communist party would have arrested whistleblowers and covered up the threat to humanity. It’s what it does best, after all.

You would not have needed mystical powers to divine that Viktor Orbán would have used a pandemic as an excuse to turn Hungary into the European Union’s first dictatorship. Nor did it take a modern Nostradamus to foresee that, if you put men who care nothing for competence, complexity, or the difference between truth and falsehood in power, you will live to regret it. Or in the case of tens of thousands who trusted Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, die needless deaths.

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Ibrahimovic statue set to move from Malmö’s stadium after vandalism

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  • Local council is looking for a new site in Swedish city
  • Statue targeted after Ibrahimovic bought stake in Hammarby

Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s statue is likely to be relocated from outside Malmö’s stadium to another site in the city after repeated acts of vandalism.

The statue was unveiled outside the Swedbank Stadium last October but has come under attack since Ibrahimovic, who began his career with Malmö FF, became a part-owner of Hammarby, a rival top-flight club based in Stockholm.

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Exiled Pakistani journalist found dead in Sweden

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Sajid Hussain, who wrote about human rights violations, went missing in March

A Pakistani journalist living in exile in Sweden and who had been missing since March has been found dead in a river.

Sajid Hussain, who was granted political asylum in Sweden in 2019 after fleeing Pakistan, had been missing since 2 March. He was last seen boarding a train to Uppsala, a city 35 miles (56km) north of Stockholm.

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Has Sweden’s coronavirus strategy played into the hands of nationalists? | Gina Gustavsson

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Talk of Swedish exceptionalism and wounded national pride has echoes of the forces unleashed in Britain by Brexit

Sweden has persisted with the strategy of coronavirus mitigation that the UK government eventually abandoned in March. The policy is widely supported by the public, even though the Swedish Covid-19 mortality rate is among the 10 highest in the world, at 240 per million population and steadily rising, and many of the nursing homes in Stockholm are now affected.

The typical explanation for this continued public support is that Swedes are trusting and unflappable. The country’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, the public face of the Swedish response to the pandemic, is after all a dry scientist-turned-bureaucrat, not some populist politician trying to whip up nationalist go-it-alone emotion.

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Swedish city to dump tonne of chicken manure in park to deter visitors

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Lund council hoping ‘stink’ keeps people away on Walpurgis Night

The university town of Lund in Sweden is to dump a tonne of chicken manure in its central park in a bid to deter up to 30,000 residents from gathering there for traditional celebrations to mark Walpurgis Night on Thursday.

“Lund could very well become an epicentre for the spread of the coronavirus on the last night in April, [so] I think it was a good initiative,” the chairman of the local council’s environment committee, Gustav Lundblad, told the Sydsvenskan newspaper.

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Per Olov Enquist, celebrated Swedish author, dies aged 85

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Much garlanded novelist, playwright, poet and Oscar-winning screenwriter hailed as ‘a giant among European writers’

Swedish author Per Olov Enquist, described as “a giant among European writers” by his publisher, has died at the age of 85.

The author’s family told Swedish media that he died on Saturday night after a long illness. The much-celebrated novelist, playwright and poet, known by his initials PO, was winner of the Nordic Council’s literary prize and the Swedish Academy’s Nordic prize. His historical novel The Visit of the Royal Physician – set in the adulterous, backstabbing world of the 18th-century Danish courts, where the mad king Christian VII’s queen, the English princess Caroline Mathilde, falls in love with the court physician – won him the August prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award after the Nobel. It also made him the only Swedish author to take the Independent foreign fiction prize, the precursor to the International Booker, in 2001.

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