STOCKHOLM, June 16 (Xinhua) -- Elderly care homes in at least 234 out of Sweden's 290 municipalities have reported confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases, Swedish Radio reported on Tuesday.
Many municipalities believe the significant spread of the novel coronavirus in Swedish care homes was due to a high degree of asymptomatic infection among residents, a failure to follow hygiene routines at the facilities, and staff members bringing the infection into the care homes.
"We suspect that personnel with very diffuse symptoms or with no symptoms at all brought the infection to work so that we then had a spread both among staff members and among residents," Cissi Hedwall, a nurse in Hofors in central Sweden, told Swedish Radio, the country's public service broadcaster.
As of early June, around 5,000 care home residents had been confirmed infected with the novel coronavirus and around half of them have died, according to data from the National Board of Health and Welfare. Around half of those infected live in the Stockholm region.
On Monday, the government announced to extend the ban on outside visitors to care homes, which was introduced on April 1, till Aug. 31. However, Swedish Radio spoke to several nurses who suggested that the ban on visitors came too late and that more extensive testing of personnel and residents, in addition to better access to personal protective equipment at an early stage of the pandemic, may have helped prevent the spread of the virus.
Many municipalities have also tried to learn from experiences in Stockholm, the epicentre of the Swedish COVID-19 epidemic.
"If you compare our situation to Stockholm, we have been able to learn from what they did wrong there and that is a precondition for us being able to cope better in the whole of Skane. They've published a report that we've had access to so we have adopted what we thought was good and we've tipped others off, too," said Ann-Cathrine Ewald, a nurse in Kavlinge, a town in the southern Swedish region of Skane. Enditem
