Britain's Covid-19 lockdown was futile, says Swedish epidemiologist

The architect of Sweden's coronavirus strategy has claimed the UK's lockdown has been largely "futile" in containing the virus.

Johan Giesecke, a state epidemiologist who advises the World Health Organisation, said the UK's death toll suggested instating harsh social restrictions was not the best method of tackling the pandemic.

Sweden has so far refused to impose the type of lockdown seen in other European countries, keeping many schools, restaurants and businesses open.

The UK’s death toll is more than 10 times that of that in Sweden, where fewer than 3,000 people have been killed by Covid-19 to date.

Referring to the high coronavirus death toll across UK care homes, Prof Giesecke said: "A hard lockdown does not protect old and frail people living in care homes – a population the lockdown was designed to protect.

"Neither does it decrease mortality from Covid-19, which is evident when comparing the UK's experience with that of other European countries."

Britain's lockdown strategy "only pushes the severe cases into the future" and has not prevented them, Prof Gieseck argued, adding: "There is very little we can do to prevent this spread. A lockdown might delay severe cases for a while but, once restrictions are eased, cases will reappear."

He said most people infected with Covid-19 are healthy and young, and it is in this section of the population that the "real pandemic" is occurring.

Despite resisting strict lockdown measures, Sweden's Public Health Institute estimated that the country's 'R' number – the number of people each infected person passes the virus to – fell from 1.4 at the start of April to 0.85 at the end of the month.

Professor Giesecke has previously been critical of the pandemic modelling produced by the Imperial College London team led by Professor Neil Ferguson. 

He suggested Prof Ferguson's projected death tolls were too pessimistic and rejected suggestions that Sweden will see a mounting mortality rate, saying in a Swedish newspaper interview: "On the contrary, I think it will go down."

Clarification: An earlier version of this article said Imperial College researchers predicted that Sweden's approach would leave it with an R of above three, leading to 40,000 coronavirus deaths by May 1. Imperial researchers did not estimate death figures. Instead, Paul Franks, a professor of epidemiology at Lund University, took the Imperial model and made calculations on fatalities. This paragraph has been removed and we apologise for the earlier confusion.