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Sweden’s chief epidemiologist suggested keeping schools open in drive for herd immunity

Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell - TT News Agency/Jonas Ekstromer via REUTERS
Sweden's state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell - TT News Agency/Jonas Ekstromer via REUTERS

Sweden's state epidemiologist suggested to his Finnish counterpart that keeping schools open might spread the virus faster and speed up the path towards herd immunity, according to newly released emails.

The email, obtained by a Swedish journalist under freedom of information laws, appears to contradict Dr Tegnell's public assurances about school closures and Sweden's controversial low-restriction coronavirus strategy.

The release of Dr Tegnell's emails has caused a sensation in Sweden, highlighting the uncertainties and conflicts involved in the early days of Sweden's coronavirus response.

In an email sent on March 14th, three days before Sweden closed down upper secondary schools and universities, Anders Tegnell wrote to Mika Salminen, his Finnish counterpart, suggesting that allowing the disease to spread among children might be desirable.

"One point might speak for keeping schools open in order to reach herd immunity more quickly," Dr Tegnell wrote in the email.

Herd immunity requires 60 percent to 70 per cent of the population to have been infected or vaccinated to slow the rate of the disease spreading.

Mr Salminen replied that his agency had rejected the idea after considering that allowing a spread between children would also increase the rate of spread elsewhere in society.

"We have also considered that, but over time the children are still going to spread the infection."

"True," Dr Tegnell replies, "but probably mostly to each other because of the extremely age-stratified contact structure we have."

Dr Tegnell has consistently argued in public that as well as being generally asymptomatic, children do not spread coronavirus to any great degree, even to each other.

The email suggests that, at least in the first half of March, this was not something he was wholly convinced of, because if that were the case keeping schools open would have little impact on levels of immunity.

Four days later, Dr Tegnell said on Swedish state television that he didn't think children spread coronavirus.

"When we ask around in China we find that they haven't been able to see any spread from children," he said. "That doesn't mean children don't get the disease at all, but they don't seem to spread it."

When approached by Emanuel Karlsten, the journalist who obtained the emails, for comment, Dr Tegnell argued that he had been discussing possibilities not expectations in his email to Mr Salminen.

"My comments were about a possible effect, not an expected one, which was a part of the assessment of the suitability of the measure," he said. "Keeping schools open to achieve herd immunity was therefore never current [as a strategy]."

Other emails support this, indicating that at this early stage, Dr Tegnell had yet to fully decide on the role of children.

The day after his email to Mr Salminen, Dr Tegnell replied to his predecessor as state epidemiologist, Annika Linde, who had sent him an email arguing that children, who can be heavily affected by flu, appeared to be "symptom-free spreaders" of coronavirus.

"This can ease the build-up of at least temporary immunity in the population...," she wrote to him. "But nearly asymptomatic spreading also increases the risk of spreading to risk groups."

In his reply, Dr Tegnell questioned her argument. "The role of children in this epidemic is hard to understand, I think. Apparently they are not the motor of the epidemic as with influenza."

In July, The Public Health Agency of Sweden published a joint study with the Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare, which found a similar rate of coronavirus cases among children in Sweden, which kept schools open, as in Finland, which closed them.

This suggests that keeping schools open did not increase the spread among children.