Sweden: No lockdownJury Still Out on Swedish Coronavirus Strategy
Over the past few weeks, a huge amount of energy has been spent trying to prove Sweden’s more lenient approach to the coronavirus a failure. Freddy Sayers writes in Unherd that liberal news outlets in the U.S. have commissioned opinion pieces from Right-wing Swedish commentators accusing the country of a pivot to national chauvinism; President Trump has talked about the Swedish “herd” approach and how “they are suffering very, very badly“; and Twitter is full of apocalyptic charts that are shared thousands of times and which seem to prove beyond doubt that the Swedes should have locked down better, and sooner. The truth is, the Swedish epidemic is far from the out of control disaster its critics would like to believe. A clearer way of looking at death numbers in Sweden and other countries, courtesy of the excellent Our World in Data, is the daily trend of deaths per million. Here you get a good sense of the trajectories. All of the countries listed, except Sweden, have full national lockdowns. And yet Sweden is roughly in the middle of the pack. This is quite remarkable in itself, when set against the dominant narrative that lockdowns are the only thing capable of ‘flattening’ these curves and preventing tragedies that are many times worse.
Over the past few weeks, a huge amount of energy has been spent trying to prove Sweden’s more lenient approach to the coronavirus a failure.
Freddy Sayers writes in Unherd that liberal news outlets in the U.S. have commissioned opinion pieces from Right-wing Swedish commentators accusing the country of a pivot to national chauvinism; President Trump has talked about the Swedish “herd” approach and how “they are suffering very, very badly“; and Twitter is full of apocalyptic charts that are shared thousands of times and which seem to prove beyond doubt that the Swedes should have locked down better, and sooner.
The truth is, the Swedish epidemic is far from the out of control disaster its critics would like to believe. A clearer way of looking at death numbers in Sweden and other countries, courtesy of the excellent Our World in Data, is the daily trend of deaths per million. Here you get a good sense of the trajectories. All of the countries listed, except Sweden, have full national lockdowns. And yet Sweden is roughly in the middle of the pack. This is quite remarkable in itself, when set against the dominant narrative that lockdowns are the only thing capable of ‘flattening’ these curves and preventing tragedies that are many times worse.
Sayer concludes:
That’s why it is important that some of the simplistic thinking surrounding this crisis needs to be challenged. If the only moral and virtuous policy is to minimize COVID deaths at all costs, as parts of the media imply with the endless game of ‘look how badly Britain is doing compared to X other country’, there can be no argument for releasing any part of the national shutdown at any point. The refrain at every point will be the same: why take a risk with people’s lives? And the government will find itself backed into a corner.
A better definition of success would surely be: which governments are getting the balance right between protecting their people as reasonably as possible against this new threat while not destroying too much of their country in the process? Death rates per million is not the only datapoint in this difficult equation; and right now, it is far too early to judge how successful Sweden, or the U.K., will be.
