Many countries have criticized the Swedish government’s lax lockdown, but the deadly mistakes of defunding elder care and decentralizing public health oversight were made before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Carl-Johan Karlsson writes in Foreign Policy that Sweden has become a global outlier in ignoring calls for coronavirus lockdowns, with the government’s public health agency issuing recommendations rather than mandating certain behaviors, what’s considered a “light-touch strategy.” Critics of the Swedish approach point to the fact that Sweden has a higher death rate relative to its Scandinavian strict-lockdown neighbors (Denmark, Norway, and Finland). But Karlsson notes that a closer look reveals a more complex reality: the overwhelming majority of Swedish COVID-19-related deaths occurred in senior citizens care centers, so some criticisms of the Swedish COVID-19 response may still be premature, and others should rather be directed at mistakes made long before the current health crisis—namely the decline of central government oversight and, especially, a decadelong neglect of Sweden’s elderly population.