The first cases of COVID-19 could have been brought to Sweden in December last year.
This opinion is shared by Anders Lindblom, an infectious disease specialist in the Dalarna region. He shared his thoughts with representatives of Svenska Dagbladet.
“Several people with lung and upper respiratory tract injuries who had contact with a person who returned from Wuhan went to the clinic in the Sverdlovsk region. At that time, the world did not know that the virus had started to spread in China, and it was not possible to conduct a test. Later, the patients were found to have antibodies to COVID-19, although they had no symptoms after December,” Lindblom said.
Chinese authorities reported the spread of a new coronavirus at the end of December 2019. The first case of the disease in Sweden was detected on January 31, and the large-scale dissemination of the virus among the population began in late February.
Before that, experts from the Swedish health Agency linked the spread of the virus primarily to the focus in Italy, as a large number of Swedish tourists visited the affected regions. Then the Agency’s analysis showed that the virus could have been introduced to Sweden earlier from countries were at that time there were not a large number of cases, for example, from the United States and Great Britain.
