Posted by Sweden has long been a favourite country to be used as a convenient foil by commentators on the left and right. I have always found the arguments used by both sides neither accurate or informed as the situation in Sweden is far from being as simple and black and white as most outside third party commentators seem to think. It is a country, like every other country, filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. That the Swedes have managed to build a modern and prosperous society is not in question. However, it is a country that is often cited as the model for a successful Social Democracy; the poster child of the so-called third way. The flip side of this is that it is a society that is also fairly restrictive, in my view, on personal liberties and individualism despite the carefully cultivated image of it being a very free and open society. I wrote about this dichotomy and discussed the warts on Sweden in my original article, Erfarenheter från Sverige (Experiences from Sweden). I also wrote about my disdain for the prestige and influence that the West and the media heap upon the Nobel Prize and the recipients of this awards in the separate article Ignoble Prize.
Sweden has been in the world spotlight again these past few month; this time as the main holdout that refused to issue lock down orders and kept most things open such as restaurants, schools and bars as the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged most of Europe. The funny thing is that Sweden’s unique way of handling the pandemic was lauded by those on the right while being panned by the left. This is a strange flip-flop as Sweden has long been the poster boy for starry-eyed socialists elsewhere in the world while being the target of vitriol by conservatives.
As I have written before, I have never been a fan of Sweden. I hated living and going to university there and could not wait to leave. I don’t like their model of society nor their overwhelmingly condescending smugness and overt racism that is only barely covered with a paper thin veneer of civility. Their model to fight the coronvirus pandemic fits in with their overall view of themselves, smug and arrogant. As The Globe and Mail put it in April, Why is Sweden staying open amid the coronavirus pandemic?
“In Sweden we are following the tradition that we have in Sweden and working very much with voluntary measures, very much with informing the public about the right things to do. That has worked reasonably well so far,” Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist and main architect of the policy, said in an interview from Stockholm.
Dr. Tegnell said most people are travelling less, working from home and adhering to social-distancing measures.
“We have so far not had very much of a spread [of the virus] into elderly homes and almost no spread into the hospitals, which is very important,” he said. He added that, so far, the hospital system has generally been able to cope with admissions, but some in Stockholm have faced difficulty. For now, though, he has no plans to change the overall approach.
“We know that [with] these kinds of voluntary measures that we put in place in Sweden, we can basically go on with them for months and years if necessary.” And even though the economy has slowed, “it has the potential to start moving as usual very, very quickly once these things are over.”
Historian Lars Tragardh said Sweden’s response to the pandemic is rooted in its unique social attitudes. “Sweden is a high-trust country in a way, which is highly unusual,” said Dr. Tragardh, a professor of history and civil society studies at Ersta Skondal University in Stockholm.
Surveys show that Swedes trust the government and each other to a degree rarely seen in other countries. An annual study of public attitudes by researchers at the University of Gothenburg found that almost 60 per cent of Swedes said they had a high degree of trust in people. That percentage has remained constant in every survey since 1996, and is about double the level in Britain and the United States. “There’s also trust the other way,” Dr. Tragardh said. “The government and state institutions, generally speaking, trust citizens to do the right thing.”
Swedish family structures also differ from those of other parts of Europe. Almost half of Swedish households consist of a single person, the highest proportion in Europe and well more than the European Union average of 30 per cent. There’s also no tradition of living with grandparents, and elderly people tend to live on their own or in state-supported homes. “Swedes are proverbially suffering anyway from some kind of tendency toward social distancing,” Dr. Tragardh said with a laugh. “So in that sense, culturally speaking, we are well equipped to handle a crisis of this sort.”
In other words, there are a billion arguments for Swedish exceptionalism. Sweden is sparsely populated and don’t have extended families (heck most kids are even born outside of wedlock, so emanciated is the state of marriage and family in the socialist paradise). Swedes are well educated and orderly so they can be counted on to follow distancing rules and keep each other safe (like when my university handlers warned me not to go to Gamla Stan – the old town – at night to avoid getting my head bashed in by skinheads). Sadly, Sweden is increasingly looking like they got it very wrong.
Marcus Carlsson, a mathematician at Lund University, has published YouTube videos arguing that there is no evidence of a “herd immunity” approach controlling a virus outbreak anywhere in the world. He described the government’s approach as “a mad experiment with 10 million people”. Tegnell and Löfven were “playing Russian roulette with the Swedish population,” Carlsson said. “At least if we’re going to do this as a people … lay the facts on the table so that we understand the reasons. The way I am feeling now is that we are being herded like a flock of sheep towards disaster.”
At the end of March, 2,300 doctors, scientists and academics signed an open letter to the government calling for stricter measures. “We think there is no scientific evidence for their strategy,” says Cecilia Söderberg-Nauclér, an expert in microbial pathogenesis who signed the letter. She says the government has been reluctant to share its data with scientists, leading her to believe that the government’s strategy is “not based on evidence.”
You can get a more detailed account of early criticism in this 9 April 2020 Time article, “Sweden’s Relaxed Approach to the Coronavirus Could Already Be Backfiring“.
But Sweden’s chief overconfidence manager… err… epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, has had to come out repeatedly to defend his stupidity despite mounting evidence to the contrary. On 3 June 2020, he finally admitted that “If we encountered the same disease, with what we know about it today, I think we would end up doing in between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world did,” Tegnell told public service radio station Sveriges Radio in an interview broadcast Wednesday. “Clearly there is room for improvement.” But Tegnell’s moment of contrition didn’t last long as he said in the public health agency’s daily briefing on Wednesday, that his comments had been overinterpreted. “It was as if the world had gone mad, and everything we had discussed was forgotten,” Tegnell said in a podcast with Swedish Radio on Wednesday. “The cases became too many and the political pressure got too strong. And then Sweden stood there rather alone.” Tegnell has also, in a near Trumpian way, now taken to lashing out at the World Health Organisation as reported by the BBC, “Sweden says WHO made ‘total mistake’ by including it in warning“.
According to WHO data, EU member state Sweden has seen 155 infections for every 100,000 inhabitants in the past 14 days, far higher than anywhere else in the organisation’s defined Europe region, other than Armenia. Regional Director Hans Henri Kluge said in a press conference on Thursday that in 11 countries, which included Sweden, “accelerated transmission has led to very significant resurgence that if left unchecked will push health systems to the brink once again”. The other countries and territories were: Moldova, North Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine, Kosovo, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Central Asian states of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
That is a list of countries that you would not normally lump Sweden in with but these are strange times. The problem is, as Bloomberg pointed out on 24 June 2020, Sweden now has one of the world’s highest COVID-19 mortality rates, with more deaths per 100,000 than the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University data. Polls suggest Swedes have started to lose faith in their country’s response to the pandemic.
Rather than spew out a bunch of numbers and statistics, I will just leave the readers with a simple map of Europe showing Covid-19 infections for week 24-25. For those of you who aren’t great with maps and geography, it is pretty simple to figure out which country is Sweden. And you can decide for yourself how successful the Swedish model has been.
And put into a global perspective. On 28 June 2020, Sweden stands in good company with those Covid-19 hotspots like the United States and Brazail.
