Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said the antibodies figure was “a bit lower than we’d thought”, but added that it reflected the situation three weeks ago and he believed that by now “a little more than 20%” of Stockholm’s population had probably contracted the virus.
However, the public health agency had previously said it expected about 25% to have been infected by 1 May and Tom Britton, a maths professor who helped develop its forecasting model, said the figure from the study was surprising.
“It means either the calculations made by the agency and myself are quite wrong, which is possible, but if that’s the case it’s surprising they are so wrong,”
he told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. “Or more people have been infected than developed antibodies.”