Sweden shifts on no-lockdown strategy

Sweden's state epidemiologist has said that he is now willing to recommend lockdown measures such as school closures, and strict limits to the size of gatherings - so long as they are only imposed locally and for three weeks at a time. The Public Health Agency of Sweden's new approach to local restrictions, floated first at a press conference on Tuesday, marks its biggest strategic shift since it launched its no-lockdown strategy in March. "We are thinking of fairly short restrictions, to break the spread of infection requires perhaps two to three weeks at most," Anders Tegnell told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper in an interview published on Wednesday afternoon. "We are still developing the concept, so to say, but something like that." The country's new strategy comes after its infection level fell from being far-and-away the highest of any European Union country in mid-May to being one of the lowest in Europe today. The agency now hopes to keep rates low by rapidly tackling local outbreaks as they occur. "The restrictions could be extremely local. It could be about a single workplace or city district: wherever you see a spread and think that there are restrictions that might stop it," Dr Tegnell told the newspaper.

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