Sweden’s COVID 19 Response Isn’t Without Flaws- But It’s Demonization Is Unwarranted.
The year 2020 is not the first time that the Scandinavian nation of Sweden has become a topic of hot button debate among pundits in the United States.There has for years now been a back and forth between the left and the right in this country on the viability of the “Swedish model,” often grouped in with that of its neighbors in Norway and Denmark. This year has seen the definition of that model in the popular imagination take a drastic change as the world is upended by the COVID 19 pandemic.
This so-called Swedish model was born out of the need to compromise between American-style free market capitalism and the revolutionary Marxism that saw the Bolshevik regime take power in the Soviet Union in October 1917. Sweden saw its share of labor unrest and class struggle in the 1920s, leading to the Social Democratic Party taking power for the first time following the elections of 1932- against the backdrop of the Great Depression, when many in the West were fearing a new wave of Soviet-style revolution sweeping their countries.
There was, however, to be no Swedish Lenin or Trotsky. Far from overthrowing the bourgeoisie, the Swedish Social Democrats sought instead to reconcile the feuding classes of Swedish society. The reforms they introduced formed the basis for one of the most extensive welfare states in Europe, a model that would inspire much of the non-Soviet dominated areas of the continent, especially in the years following World War II.
During that period of history, the Scandinavian countries built an economy with an extensive welfare state, and even some state ownership of elements of the of the economy. The latter include major companies in key sectors such as Norway’s Equinor (formerly known as Statoil), or Sweden’s LKAB (iron ore mining company) and Iranford (railways). Norway also boasts the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund (which is where it reinvests much of the profits from Equinor), valued at over $1 trillion.
In recent years, the insurgent American left led by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has pointed to the likes of Norway, Sweden and Denmark as a model for their brand of “democratic socialism.” This has been especially deployed in response to conservative critics who accuse them of wanting to turn the United States into a version of Venezuela- an easy response to this is that Norway actually has its state sector making up a larger percentage of GDP than Venezuela does.
Conservatives have scoffed at this, believing this line to be an easy deflection meant to mask a hidden agenda of Soviet-izing America. Some decry these countries’ liberal immigration policies, decrying the presence of “no-go zones” in cities such as Malmo. “Sweden bashing” has become so memetic among the right that the term has its own Wikipedia entry. But ironically enough, political perspectives on Sweden have changed with the events of the 2020 COVID 19 pandemic and the atypical response that the Scandinavian nation took to the outbreak.
The response to the world’s most significant pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918 was uniform in many countries of the western world, especially in Europe. That response consisted of imposing lockdowns of varying severity, with the idea being to contain the spread of the virus by shutting down the movement of people between cities, regions and countries.
Nowhere was the “lockdown model” more extreme in Europe than in the case of Italy, an early hotspot of the pandemic. With fears of the health care system being overwhelmed due to a meteoric rise in cases, the nation embarked on an unprecedented clampdown of public life, or indeed life in general. Schools, stores and indeed anywhere besides grocery stores and pharmacies (deemed essential for people to get vital necessities) were shuttered. Punishment was meted out even to individuals who were found to be out and about on the street without “valid reason,” with penalties going up to three months in prison or a 206 euro fine.
It is without doubt that the Italian people showed incredible persistence and resilience under conditions that brought millions to what most would consider a psychological or even physical breaking point. Videos of Italians making music with instruments or even merely singing without accompaniment from their balconies went viral across the global internet, showing their perserverence in the face of adversity that could scarcely have been imagined even months before.
Similar scenes played out, to a lesser extent, across the major countries of Europe, such as France, Spain and Germany. In the case of France, it was not until May that restrictions were relaxed to the point of legallt allowing citizens to travel up to 100 kilometers from their own residence, or to host gatherings of 10 people or more. By the time these restrictions were eased, around 26,000 Frenchmen had died from the virus.
The time would come for Italians, too, to feel a measure of relief. Mid May saw the Italian lockdown begin to wind down its most draconian measures. People began to circulate out in the streets again, or even visit family, a semblance of life began to resume. Even Serie A, the Italian football league, was able to resume, and Juventus was able to be crowned the champion of the league for 2020, an event that might have seemed nigh impossible just weeks prior. The German Bundesliga and even the English Premier League were able to resume, and crown Bayern Munich and Liverpool, respectively, as champions.
The story of these countries was not the only way that the COVID 19 pandemic and its response played out in Europe, however. Sweden would take a decidedly different approach from its neighbors to the south. However, this is not to say that they ignored the spread of the virus or did not take any measures to contain the spread of the disease. The most notable measure of restriction was the ban on gatherings of fifty people or more, as well as the closing of high schools and colleges- but otherwise their approach was starkly different.
Grade schools were allowed to maintain open, with students attending in person. Office workers continued to make their commutes rather than making the shift to work from home that may become permanent for workers at some major American companies, and has become an indefinite state of affairs for most. Restaurants and even bars- one of the areas of greatest risk for transmission of the disease- were allowed to remain open, albeit with restrictions in place that the government was empowered to enforce by shutting down offenders.
In one of the supreme political ironies of our time, some conservatives in Western Europe and the United States hailed the Swedish approach, even though it was being overseen by a government of the Social Democratic Party (though by American standards the Swedish right would be well to the left of Bernie Sanders). Notable conservative commentator Ben Shapiro praised the Swedish approach on social media in the spring, as did publications such as the National Review. Meanwhile, progressives in the United States found themselves in the position of attacking the Swedish policy.
But neither the elected government nor the career civil servants who oversaw the Swedish pandemic response could be counted as being anything close to cut from their ideological cloth.
The architect of Sweden’s policy is in many, if not most ways, cut from the same cloth as the United States’ Anthony Fauci, not least in the way that the pandemic has elevated both from the status of obscure civil servant to a quasi-rock star status. Anders Tegnell has served as Sweden’s chief epidemiologist since 2013, with a long history of public service in the health sector both at home and internationally (he worked on vaccination programs with the WHO in Laos in the early 1990s, and worked to contain ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo). He also, as head of the Infectious Diseases department of the Swedish equivalent of the US CDC, oversaw the country’s response to the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009.
This is not the resume of a person prone to basing public health policy decisions on flights of fancy or conspiracy theories. The watchwords oft-repeated by Tegnell as well as Sweden’s Prime Minister Social Democratic Stefan Lofven, was that of “common sense.” Lofven owes his term in office to a compromise following a government formation deadlock due to no party receiving enough seats to form a government in Sweden’s most recent general election in 2018.
The rationale used to justify the Swedish policy is that locking down the general population would be unproductive in slowing the spread of the virus, would result in massive economic damage to the country, and that better results would be obtained through Sweden’s high trust society, one of the best in the world on that score according to global data, self-regulating and taking precautions on their own without heavy handed mandates from the state.
So has the Swedish model worked to fulfill its goals as stated by Tegnell, Lofven and other Swedish leaders and officials? On the front of economic damage, the answer seems to be “yes,” relatively speaking. In a report issued in August 2020, the Swedish national statistics office estimated that their nation’s economy had contracted by 6.8% in the second quarter of 2020. That number, while hardly cause for popping champagne corks, compares very favorable to the European Union as a whole (11.9%), France (13.8%), or Spain (18.5%).
It is easy to dismiss figures like this as just numbers on a spreadsheet when lives are at stake, but they are not meaningless as far as preserving human life is concerned. Much research has yet to be done on the human cost of the high unemployment (compounded by social isolation in lockdown-heavy countries) brought on by this pandemic-inspired recession, the worst since the 2008 financial crisis if not the Great Depression. But that human cost is certainly there- and if Sweden’s policy is preventing these “deaths of despair”, then that is a point in its favor on a public health score.
But what about preventing deaths due to the coronavirus itself? This is where critics of Sweden are eager to pounce, although not altogether without justification. They point to the Swedish case rate and death toll, which is indeed higher than that of its neighbors in Norway, Denmark, and Finland, who were more aggressive in imposing restrictions on their populations. It should be noted, however, that those countries have since significantly loosened the restrictions they had in place some months ago, with their numbers of both cases and deaths remaining among the lowest in Europe. Furthermore, the Swedish numbers being higher are not due to school and working age people moving around the country, but rather in large part deaths suffered among the country’s elderly.
According to statistics released by the Swedish Public Health Agency in June 2020, eighty nine percent of Sweden’s COVID 19 deaths have been among people aged seventy or older. This is on some levels an indictment in and of itself- there appear in particular to have been failures in granting care to older people in need of it who might have been saved from the virus with appropriate treatment issued in a more timely fashion. Tegnell himself admitted that flaws in the country’s approach were partly at fault for the death rate.
However, as regrettable and tragic as that is, one fails to see how that can be laid at the door of the lack of lockdown among the general population. Would closing Sweden’s grade schools, or shuttering more businesses by preventing people from coming in to work, have saved retirees or people in elder care from dying? The answer is an obvious no, if one is examining the situation honestly and rationally. The WHO found itself having to admit this, when early on it had lambasted Sweden, before later on officials admitted that it could be a “model if we wish to get back to a society where we don’t have lockdowns.”
Furthermore, even these statistics have trended in the right direction. Sweden still fares favorably compared to European nations that did impose lockdowns. Sweden’s death rate has fallen significantly since April 5, even more so than neighboring Denmark. And according to figures released by Johns Hopkins University, Sweden’s death rate per 100,000 is still better than countries like the UK, Spain, or Italy that did have lockdowns.
Sweden is, to be sure, much less densely populated than the aforementioned countries, so perhaps the comparison is out of order. Critics, such as the ones quoted in this article from Business Insider, warn not to be forgiving of Sweden’s mistakes due to the fall in death rate. But one can still be mindful of past shortcomings while acknowledging that statistically, the numbers would suggest that the early blind spot of the plan, with regards to elder care, is being addressed and the fall in death rate is the proof in the pudding. If Sweden’s experiment in COVID response were truly as “disastrous” as critics such as the UK newspaper The Independent allege, would the death rate still not be high (as it is in the United States), or at least only slightly decreasing
Another line of attack critics use against Sweden’s COVID 19 policy is to assert that it did not achieve its goal of giving the population herd immunity against the virus. However, this would be dishonestly setting up a straw man- as the Swedish health authorities never said that that was a major objective of the no lockdown policy in the first place, with Tegnell only saying that that was a “hope” of what might be achieve by the policy, albeit one that has admittedly not yet been realized.
Sweden might well have been uniquely well positioned to have accomplished what it has in the face of the COVID 19 pandemic. Outside of the major urban center of Stockholm it has low population density, and perhaps more importantly, it is the fabled “high trust society” where people have far more faith in their government, institutions, and in each other as a people.
The United States, which has been the world epicenter of the COVID 19 pandemic for some time now, could likely not have replicated the Swedish approach, at least not in its present state. Ironically, the polarized reaction to “the Swedish COVID model” is a reflection of this in many ways, with pundits on either side of the political spectrum quick to reflexively claim success or failure of the Swedes as a validation of their worldview, without appreciating the nuances of the situation. My conclusion is that the Swedish experiment was not a failure, despite its imperfections, but the fact is the United States could likely never have duplicated it- not in 2020, and perhaps not for a long time.
