Australian David Steadson, a former public health researcher now living in Sweden, told news.com.au the region where he lives is experiencing a disturbing rate of new infections.
"Sweden has now seen a doubling in cases in three weeks, hitting more than 1000 new cases in one day for the first time since June," he said.
"Hospitalisation and ICU numbers are also starting to increase."
He said infections in Uppsala, north of Stockholm, where he and his family live, have more than doubled
in the past two weeks, forcing authorities to introduce new restrictions.
"While most Swedes won't call it lockdown, the key take-away is, where possible, to avoid all contact with people outside your own family.
"[Authorities are] explicitly stating not to have social events and to work from home if at all possible."
Time magazine reports that Sweden's per-capita death rate as of last week was 58.6 per 100,000 people and that average daily cases rose by 173 per cent from early September to early October "with particularly dramatic increases in cities such as Stockholm and Uppsala".
The Washington Post reports that Sweden's cumulative death total from infections is 10 times higher than neighbouring Norway and Finland and five times higher than Denmark.
"Registered cases in Sweden are slightly above 106,300, compared with around 13,800 in Finland and 16,600 in Norway โ each with about half the population of Sweden," the Post reports.
And the UK Times reports that new cases each day have risen on average from 160 in September to almost 700 in October.
Steadson, who used to work for the University of Queensland, says the Swedish government is looking at changing the law โ "and if necessary the constitution" โ to make requirements "law" rather than expect the population to do the right thing voluntarily.
"They expect it will take months to do, so it's in anticipation of future crises and won't be ready until next summer," he said.
Sweden's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell is reportedly travelling to regions hit by Covid-19 to discuss their respective lockdown measures.
He told the public broadcaster: "If they don't seem to have an effectโฆ then of course we need to consider other ways to constrain these opportunities for transmission."
Tegnell, who has achieved a cult status in Sweden, has rarely swayed from his position.
He told New Statesman in April that "locking people up at home won't work in the longer term".
"Sooner or later, people are going to go out anyway," he said. "I want to make it clear, no, we did not lock down like many other countries, but we definitely had a virtual lockdown."
He said Swedes "changed their behaviour enormously" and did so without laws needing to be enforced as they are in other countries.
"We stopped travelling even more than our neighbouring countries. The airports had no flights anywhere, the trains were running at a few per cent of normal service, so there were enormous changes in society."
But Steadson, who caught Covid-19 in March and is still suffering from a range of symptoms, including difficulty breathing, said the goal for Sweden was to achieve "herd immunity", which, as a scientist, made no sense to him.
"Allowing a deadly virus to just spread in the hope of eventual 'herd immunity' made no sense to me scientifically, given our then limited knowledge, and it absolutely made no sense to me ethically," he told news.com.au this year.
"People would die unnecessarily and I was frankly disgusted with what I was hearing from the Swedish Public Health Authority."
Dr Nick Talley, editor-in-chief of the Medical Journal of Australia, agreed that Sweden got it wrong.
"The Swedish model has not been a success, at least to date," he said.
"One clear goal at least early on was to reach herd immunity โ but this was not achieved, not even close, and this was arguably predictable.
"There were restrictions put in place but the philosophy was voluntary rather than compulsory."
