The chief epidemiologist of Sweden, Anders Tegnell, has decided to resign and move to another job. It was he who proposed not to introduce quarantine in Sweden, which made it absolutely unique on the European continent.
In March 2020, at the peak of the first wave of coronavirus, only two European countries did not impose quarantine restrictions. The first was led by an eccentric leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and that country is Belarus. Lukashenko then advised to fight the coronavirus with a tractor, vodka and a bathhouse. A more scientific approach to this issue was demonstrated by the chief epidemiologist of Sweden, Anders Tegnell, who suggested that closing restaurants, shops and schools would not have any significant effect, since it was too late to do so. And it is better to let the Swedes recover from the coronavirus than to hide them from infections and delay the inevitable.
The chief epidemiologist of Sweden has withstood a huge amount of critical comments from around the world. Experts referred to the fact that mortality rates with such a liberal approach in Sweden were indeed an order of magnitude higher than in neighboring Scandinavian countries, including Norway and Finland. However, the death rate in Sweden still turned out to be much lower than in countries that introduced the most stringent quarantines like the UK and the USA. Tegnell has repeatedly stated that he considers the untimely closure of nursing homes to be his fundamental mistake, since almost 85% of the victims of the first wave of coronavirus were just old people from these institutions. If quarantine had been introduced there, then such lethality could have been avoided.
Later, the Tegnell method was also resorted to in many other countries, where strict quarantines were already abandoned during the next waves. And now this epidemiologist has decided to step down from his post and join the World Health Organization as a consultant on vaccination. Now his new place of work is Geneva, where he will advise an organization that, with varying success, helps humanity fight the worst pandemic in recent history. (READ MORE)