Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell said too little was done to protect people in care homes but still doesn't think that keeping pubs open was the wrong thing to do as Sweden has its two highest single day infections within a week.

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The Scandinavian country is the only nation in Europe not to have imposed lockdowns — even though its death toll is actually worse than the USA, Iran and Germany per head of population.

Carehome deaths are thought to account for up to half of Sweden's 2,586 deaths, which Tegnell admitted appeared to have spread more rapidly in Swedish care homes than in some other countries, but said it was not clear why.

However, Tegnell, who previously believed the virus would be contained in Wuhan, is not backing down on his lockdown-free strategy – which Sweden believes is more effective in the long term.

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Tegnell said in January that there was "no need to worry" about the virus, arguing at the time that there was no reason to shut down travel from China, stating that the risk of the infection spreading to Sweden was "very low".

Asked about those predictions on Tuesday night, Tegnell said he was "far from alone in this assessment" based on the SARS and MERS outbreaks.

SARS resulted in around 8,000 cases around the world while MERS caused only around 2,500 infections.

Sweden’s government says its more relaxed approach is a better long-term strategy because people will accept the looser restrictions for longer.
But it is a move which has sparked a fierce debate in Sweden and among the wider scientific community with some medics warning "it will lead to catastrophe."

Sweden has been consistently late to react to the virus compared to other countries.

It only advised against non-essential travel to Northern Italy March 6, while most other governments were considering lockdowns.

As a result there has been an influx of new cases from Italy, many of them linked to those ski trips.

Statistics Sweden says the deaths are concentrated in the capital Stockholm.

During weeks 14-16 this year the number of deaths in the city have been more than twice as high as the corresponding weekly average from 2015–2019.

Tegnell, 64, said on Tuesday: "The virus was much more unpredictable than we initially thought. After all, developments in Italy became violent, even though Italy had taken drastic measures to begin with.

"We have to make an assessment based on where we stand. We can't try to look in a crystal ball and try to guess how it will be going forward."

There is a lot of public outrage over the situation with Sweden's elderly.

Swedes have now been banned from visiting care homes in one of the few restrictive measures that the government has imposed.

When asked for a response, Tegnell blamed "a lot of different players" for a failure to improve elderly care "before we got into the situation we are in today".

He has previously argued that a lockdown would hardly have prevented the thousands of care home deaths when the visit ban was already in place.

He pointed to countries like Britain that have suffered equally bad death rates despite imposing drastic lockdowns.

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However, some doctors and academics have raised concerns as Sweden piles up cases and deaths more quickly than its Scandinavian neighbours.

Sweden has recorded 2,586 coronavirus deaths compared to only 443 in Denmark, which has a similar geography and population.

Denmark has already sent children back to primary schools and re-opened some businesses including hair salons and driving schools.

Tegnell has previously said that Sweden may have passed the peak of the epidemic in mid-April and that Stockholm was already developing herd immunity.

Studies suggest that more than 20 per cent of Stockholm's population have already been infected with the virus.

However, the World Health Organisation has warned that it is unclear whether every virus patient subsequently develops immunity, or for how long.

There have been multiple cases of individuals surviving coronavirus and being infected again.

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