STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Sweden’s response to the spread of the new coronavirus was too slow and preparations to handle a pandemic insufficient, a commission investigating the country’s pandemic response said on Friday.
“Sweden’s handling of the pandemic has been marked by a slowness of response,” the commission said in preliminary findings published on its website.
“The initial disease prevention and control measures were insufficient to stop or even substantially limit the spread of the virus in the country.”
Sweden’s strategy, shunning lockdowns and measures such as face masks, made the country an outlier in the first year of the pandemic when many countries across Europe chose to implement tougher restrictions.
(Reporting by Niklas Pollard, editing by Anna Ringstrom)
