Sweden has revealed that despite adopting more relaxed measures to control coronavirus, only 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed the antibodies needed to fight the disease by late April.
The figure, which Sweden's Public Health Authority confirmed to CNN, is roughly similar to other countries that have data and well below the 70-90% needed to create "herd immunity" in a population.
The study carried out by Sweden's Public Health Agency aims to determine the potential herd immunity in the population, based on 1,118 tests carried out in one week. It aims to carry out the same number of tests every seven days over an eight-week period. Results from other regions would be released later, a Public Health Authority spokesperson said.
Herd immunity is reached when the majority of a given population -- 70 to 90% -- becomes immune to an infectious disease, either because they have become infected and recovered, or through vaccination. When that happens, the disease is less likely to spread to people who aren't immune, because there just aren't enough infectious carriers to reach them.
According to Martin Kuba, an official Jihocesky region in the Czech Republic who spearheaded a randomly selected mass testing for coronavirus among the general public and frontline workers, the initial results showed that the proportion of people who have had the disease stood at "single digit percent" rather than "fraction of a percent".
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization Health Emergencies Program, said the concept of herd immunity was a "dangerous calculation." He said the strategy had "worked in some aspects ... because our health system has been able to cope. There has always been at least 20% of the intensive care beds empty and able to take care of Covid-19 patients."
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