Swedish surge in Covid cases dashes hopes of herd immunity

New infections and hospital admissions have surged in Sweden as the country battles a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic that officials had hoped its light-touch, anti-lockdown approach would mitigate. “We consider the situation extremely serious,” the director of health and medical care services for Stockholm, Björn Eriksson, told the state broadcaster SVT this week. “We can expect noticeably more people needing hospital care over the coming weeks.” Swedish hospitals were treating 1,004 patients for Covid-19, SVT said, an increase of 60% over the previous week’s 627. Data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control suggests the rise in recent weeks may be Europe’s fastest.