Sweden: A better coronavirus strategy?
“What if Sweden got it right?” said Tom Rogan in the Washington Examiner. “There’s a lesson for America” in Sweden’s “alternative approach” to the coronavirus, which has attracted intense global attention. Instead of imposing lockdowns, the Swedish government has emphasized personal responsibility. Gatherings of 50 or more people are forbidden, but restaurants, bars, elementary schools, parks, and workplaces have remained open, with distancing guidelines. Swedish officials argue their approach will be more sustainable over time than “inherently authoritarian” lockdowns. Swedish society has retained “some measure of normalcy,” while the calamity predicted by many has yet to materialize, with per capita death rates below those of Spain, Italy, and the U.K. Sweden’s “cautious pursuit of herd immunity” is one “we must consider copying.”
Sweden’s gambit has been “a deadly folly,” said Nick Cohen in The Guardian (U.K.). The emerging numbers offer a devastating rebuke to the Swedish cheerleading from the Right, showing that for the week between May 12 and 19, Sweden had the highest per capita death toll in Europe. And the costly strategy “does not even seem to have produced herd immunity.” Testing of Stockholm residents revealed that a mere 7.3 percent had developed Covid-19 antibodies by the end of April—about 60 percent short of when herd immunity would kick in. Meanwhile, there are few signs Sweden’s strategy “will spare it any economic pain,” said Charlie Duxbury in Politico.com. Sweden’s central bank is forecasting a contraction of between 7 and 10 percent this year, on par with the rest of Europe.
Still, Sweden’s approach may “make the pandemic easier to manage in the long run,” said
Josh Michaud in Foreign Affairs. Its citizens have changed behaviors “without heavy-handed threats from the government,” with cellphone data showing steep drops in trips to public spaces. It’s too soon to draw hard conclusions, said Lauren Leatherby and Allison McCann in The New York Times. Sweden has suffered far more deaths than its Scandinavian neighbors, but it is “still better off than many countries that enforced strict lockdowns,” and its hospitals were never overwhelmed. “It will be months, or even years,” before the results are clear. As Andrew Noymer, a demographer at the University of California at Irvine, says, “Sweden will be judged at the finish line.”