A view of Drottninggatan- Queens Street in Stockholm, Sweden, Wednesday April 1, 2020. The coronavirus is not keeping people in Sweden at home even while citizens in many parts of the world are sheltering in place.
A Stockholm University professor has warned that half the population of Sweden may be infected by coronavirus in the month of April. Tom Britton also said that he would “bet his house” that between 250,000 and half a million are infected in the Nordic country of 10 million at the moment.
“This disease is so contagious that over half of Sweden's population will be infected before the end of April. After that, the spread of infection will not stop, but it will go slightly slower so that about two-thirds will be infected by the end of May,” Britton told Swedish national broadcaster SVT.
“If you go out in April, maybe one in ten people is contagious. This means that you only need to meet ten people for you to run a fairly high risk of getting infected. If you do the same thing in late May or June, however, you do not run the same risk at all,” Britton added.
Sweden currently has almost 5,000 COVID-19 cases including 239 deaths.
