Swedish maverick’s bare-faced bravado keeps enemy at bay
MFreddie Sayers asks may have been mandatory in English shops since only yesterday, and British airports for a couple of months, but what I saw as I arrived in Sweden this past week already felt oddly transgressive, almost indecent.
At no point on the journey does anyone tell you that you can remove your mask, so when we landed in Stockholm, passengers on the quarter-full SAS flight from Heathrow kept them on up the gangway and into the airport terminal.
Then you notice the customs officers aren’t wearing them as they check your passport, nor airport staff swooshing around on silent scooters, but you keep it on just in case. Only when you finally emerge from the baggage hall and into the row of waiting taxis do you realise: nobody is wearing one. Sweden is mask-free.
In central Stockholm, the restaurants and shops are busy, even if less busy than they might normally be; there’s a table service-only rule, so many bars have queues outside to avoid any overcrowding inside. The outside watering holes of Stureplan and along the waterfront at Strandvägen are positively booming.
There is nothing reckless or denialist about the atmosphere here; nor anything of the grim experiment gone wrong that much of the international media would have you believe about a country that did not impose a national lockdown.
People are behaving responsibly, socially distancing where possible, but determined to continue the serious business of living their lives. In the warm evening sunshine of Stockholm, I got a sense of a people for whom unencumbered enjoyment of their brief summer – those precious moments of beauty and levity and warmth on the skin – is not a “nice-tohave” to be surrendered on an uncertain cautionary principle. It is something closer to a human right.
I interviewed the architect of Sweden’s Covid-19 policy, Anders Tegnell, for Unherd’s Lockdowntv. It’s fair to say he’s feeling chipper – suntanned after his own summer break, and looking at a set of coronavirus figures that are going rapidly in the right direction. Case numbers, having first surged as they massively increased testing, are now falling dramatically; admissions to ICU are now so low that for two days last week, there were none at all (for the first time since early March); and deaths with Covid-19, despite being counted more stringently than almost anywhere in the world, are down to the lowest levels since the peak.
The fact remains that Sweden has had a much higher total mortality per capita than its Scandinavian neighbours (though still lower than the UK), but Dr Tegnell insists that was mainly the result of poor shielding of care homes, not the lack of lockdown. They have improved that, and are now seeing the results. Whatever they are doing now seems to be working – and that does not include wearing masks.
Dr Tegnell makes no secret of the fact he is baffled by other countries’ rush to mandate masks. “The evidence
‘A time when we have few admissions to hospital, and the total number of cases is rapidly falling, is not the time to introduce something else’
base for using masks in society is still very weak,” he tells me, despite many countries now enforcing them in different ways. “We haven’t seen any new evidence coming up, which is a little bit surprising, I can say.”
He believes that masks may be counter-productive as people then forget social distancing, and even go out when they are ill, increasing the spread of the disease. Most importantly, things are going perfectly well without them. “A time like now when we have extremely few admissions to hospitals, and the total number of cases is rapidly falling, is not the time to introduce something else.” All of which, of course, could be said of the UK as well.
As a half-swede, I’ve been paying anxious attention to their more laissez-faire response to Covid-19. It seems fair to grant Dr Tegnell his request of deferring full judgment until a year from now, once we know how other countries fare in the autumn and spring. But whatever the final outcome, there is something about the atmosphere of the discussion in Sweden that I wish we had a bit more of in the UK. Decisions are taken entirely by the health agency with almost no involvement from politicians, which lowers the temperature from the outset.
Dr Tegnell is a physician and technocrat with no voters to please or polls to fret about. The prime minister has been keeping a distinctly low profile. There is also a Swedish bloody-mindedness that in other scenarios can be maddening but in this context is a breath of fresh air. Swedes will stick to their plan, make decisions based on the evidence, and not bow to social media furores or international condemnation, whether from their Nordic neighbours or the New York Times (which recently dubbed Sweden “the world’s cautionary tale”). At a time of widespread insecurity and fingerpointing, it feels like an oasis of calm.
Most of all, there’s a clarity about aspects of life worth defending. In the midst of a global pandemic. Swedish children have not missed a single day of education; and they have protected the open society they cherish.
Perhaps a culture’s readiness to change on a sixpence to a “new normal” is inversely correlated to their affection for and confidence in the “old normal”. Swedes like their way of life, and are enviably reluctant to give it up.