"It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong," he said. "In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it's had such an impact."

The former state epidemiologist, Prof Emeritus Johan Giesecke, is in agreement with Mr Tegnell, stating recently in an article for the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet: "The lack of reliable knowledge explains why countries choose to do things differently: nobody knows what really works, and they choose measures either on the basis of shaky data or for political reasons.

"All models require that you enter numeric values for different parameters - values that we often miss and must estimate or guess."

Crucially, Mr Tegnell is releasing all the data on a daily basis so that it will soon become apparent how well Sweden is doing compared to elsewhere and give a stark indication of whether Imperial modelling is mirrored in real-world data.

Sweden is believed to be a couple of weeks behind Britain, having recorded around 6,000 cases and 333 deaths - 10 times fewer that the UK - but experts there are not expecting a big peak, or much more demand than usual.

Although the country has not explicitly said it is attempting to build herd immunity, it wants to slow the virus to a manageable pace.

Mr Tegnell has said it is inevitable the disease will sweep through a large proportion of the population, and allowing it to do so could prevent a surge in demand, which could cripple their health services.

The strategy is not without its critics, and some 2,000 scientists and researchers have signed an open letter criticising Sweden's Public Health Agency.

Sten Linnarsson, Professor in Molecular Systemic Biology at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute, has branded the plan "embarrassing", while others have called it a cynical ploy to reach herd immunity at the cost of thousands of lives.

But public health officials have one more trick up their sleeves to dampen down the fears over the virus. The country is also about to start releasing figures that show how many people died "from" coronavirus rather than died "with" coronavirus, as the British statistics show.

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, has told the UK Government's Science Technology and Health Committee that up to two thirds of deaths of people with coronavirus would probably have happened this year anyway.