Annika Linde, Swedish epidemiologist, admits the Nordic nation was "wrong" not to blockade against Covid-19.

Linde, an epidemiologist who led a campaign to respond to SARS and swine flu in Sweden from 2005 to 2013, believes that the country needs stricter restrictions from the beginning to control Covid-19.

"I think we needed more time to prepare. If Sweden blocked it from the beginning, we could have taken advantage of that time and prepared everything necessary to protect the elderly group,"

Linde initially supported the anti-nCoV strategy of her successor, epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, but has now changed her mind when seeing Swedish deaths higher than many neighboring countries such as Denmark, Norway and

Unlike many Nordic countries or around the world, Sweden chose to "soften" the epidemic based on people's self-awareness to pursue the "community immunity" goal.

"At first I thought that sooner or later, all people would get infected no matter what you did, so when Anders Tegnell said 'we will flatten the curve and protect the elderly,' I thought

However, Ms. Linde realized the mistake when many other countries proved it could significantly reduce the number of cases and control the pandemic through a blockade.

"The fact that we can protect the elderly is like a dream with very few real bases," the 72-year-old epidemiologist said.

Linde added that Sweden's failure was partly due to public health authorities' failure to apply previous experience in dealing with previous pandemics, such as Spanish or swine flu, to deal with nCoV.

Epidemiologist Tegnell on May 25 also admitted that the Covid-19 'community immunization' strategy did not produce the expected results in May.

"The current survey data is quite different, but Stockholm's community immunity rate is likely to be below 30%. As you know, calculating the immunity rate for nCoV is difficult," he said.