90% of the dead in Sweden were over 70 and half of them lived in special housing. . . . Currently, 28% of care home workers in Sweden are foreigners, but in Stockholm, where the real dying has occurred, 55% of the care home workers are foreign immigrants.
In an interview, Johan Giesecke, Sweden's former Chief Epidemologist and Chief Scientist of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), let slip the formerly unspeakable.Â
Giesecke admitted that Sweden had failed to protect the elderly, and noted that, "many of the people working in nursing homes are from other countries, they're refugees or asylum seekers."
The epidemiologist then suggested that many of them might not understand Swedish and may not have been aware of what precautions they should be taking to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
He also noted that Sweden tended to have larger nursing homes than Norway. While he did not say so, in a larger facility, a staff member can potentially spread the virus around to far more residents.
Sweden has a higher death toll than Norway or Finland, but it also has a far higher immigrant population. Finlandâs much smaller immigrant population may be one reason why its pandemic never really got off the ground. Not only does Sweden have a larger immigrant population, but it has an especially sizable percentage of an immigrant population that appears most vulnerable to the virus.
In early April, some medical experts estimated that Somalis represented 40% of the coronavirus deaths in Stockholm and 18% of the death toll in Sweden. That may be because of Stockholmâs first 15 coronavirus deaths, 6 of those who died were Somalis. The Somalis have been followed by Iraqis, Syrians, and Afghans as being significantly overrepresented among the ranks of coronavirus cases.
Stockholmâs immigrant suburbs were some of the hardest hit by the pandemic. In Rinkeby-Kista, where almost the entire district is populated by immigrants, infection rates were twice as high as the rest of Stockholm. Rinkeby is home to Somalis, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Moroccans. The area has been a hub for violent Islamic riots, hateful mosques, and secret memberships in Islamic terrorist groups.
In early April, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health revealed that immigrants made up 1 in 5 cases of the virus and that 1 in 100 Somalis in Norway had tested positive for the virus. A week later, it was 1 in 4. Somalis made up 6% of confirmed cases. And in Helsinki, Finland, Somalis accounted for 17% of cases.
The coronavirus is a recent phenomenon and we donât have all the answers as to why some groups appear to be more vulnerable to it than others. Researchers have proposed varying explanations for Somali vulnerability from ethnic benign neutropenia, to low vitamin D levels, dense living conditions, intergenerational households, high rates of smoking, and poor language skills.
Itâs difficult to know whether any or all of these might be potentially relevant.
In an International Center for Violent Extremism survey, some Somalis blamed a refusal to take health warnings seriously. One respondent from Stockholm claimed that the community had been listening "to wrong information with extremist ideas from religion (sic) scholars".
âWhen it comes to immigrant communities, we have established good communication with them,â Tegnell had said.
But communications are not the same thing as compliance.
