The light-touch approach that made Sweden a pariah
For months, the debate has raged over whether Sweden was right to eschew a strict lockdown during the pandemic, said Darren McCaffrey on Euronews (Lyon). Now even the architect of the Swedish strategy, state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, has for the first time admitted to serious doubts. “If we were to encounter the same disease, with exactly what we know about it today, I think we would land midway between what Sweden did and what the rest of the world did,” he said. When asked if too many had died, he replied: “Yes, absolutely”, too many people had died. Previously, Tegnell had insisted that other countries should have followed Sweden – which kept bars and restaurants open and allowed children under 16 to go to school – while taking steps such as banning gatherings of more than 50 people in order to slow the virus’s spread, so that health services could cope. And though the approach was controversial abroad, it had, until recently, been largely accepted in Sweden. “But that consensus appears to have now broken.”
That’s because we’ve seen the results, said Thomas Gür in Göteborgs-Posten. The policy has taken a terrible toll. Despite its well-funded health system, Sweden’s mortality rate is among the highest in the world, with almost 5,000 deaths from a population of ten million.
That compares with just 593 deaths in Denmark (out of a population of six million), 239 in Norway (out of 5.4 million) and 324 in Finland (out of 5.5 million). The light-touch approach hasn’t even spared the economy, said Frederik Bombosch in Berliner Zeitung. Forecasts suggest Sweden’s output will shrink by about 7% this year (roughly in line with the rest of Europe). Any hopes that Sweden would achieve herd immunity look badly mistaken: by late April, only 7.3% of people in Stockholm had developed antibodies to fight the virus.
There are some positives, said Bloomberg (New York). In the absence of a vaccine, Sweden’s middle way could yet represent a model for a “new normal”, as societies learn to live with the virus; health services have never been overwhelmed. True, said Anna Dahlberg in Expressen (Stockholm), but the costs have been too high. Swedes are “pariahs” abroad, with our Nordic neighbours excluding us as they reopen borders. Far worse, we haven’t protected the elderly in care homes, whose residents account for about half of deaths. The failures of our strategy are now clear for all to see: any illusion that Sweden was “a bit smarter” than other nations has been well and truly shattered.